STEPPING OUT FOR NONVIOLENCE
By Sean Barron
YOUNGSTOWN
Eleven-year-old Isaiah Short’s reason for participating in a large parade and rally parallels the core message organizers hope people will take home and spread.
“I want the drama to stop in the community,” Isaiah said, referring to violence in Youngstown and surrounding areas. “I hope people will stop the violence in the [streets] and in the city.”
Isaiah, a member of Richard Brown Memorial United Church on the North Side, was among the estimated 450 people of all ages who took part in Sunday’s fifth annual Nonviolence Parade and Rally at the Covelli Centre downtown.
Key sponsors of the gathering, which kicked off Nonviolence Week locally and throughout Ohio, were Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, the city of Youngstown, the Martin Luther King Jr. Planning Committee, Youngstown State University’s Office of Student Diversity, the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence organization and the Youngstown City School District.
The main purpose of the rally and Nonviolence Week is to encourage people to take a week to focus on acting nonviolently and thinking before they act, noted Penny Wells, Sojourn to the Past’s director. Doing so can set the stage for them to change their thinking and behavior in positive ways, she said.
Jabrael Walker, a Youngstown Early College senior, was master of ceremonies.
Emily Dunn, 13, a Struthers Middle School eighth-grader and Richard Brown Church member, said she hopes to spread the idea around her school of using nonviolence to solve problems and conflicts.
“I hope it will get the world back to where it’s supposed to be,” said Emily, who is part of her school’s anti-drug-abuse program. “I’ll [also] tell my best friends to spread nonviolence.”
One person who has spent decades trying to get such a message out is Minnijean Brown-Trickey, a civil-rights and social activist who also was one of nine black students to have desegregated the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in September 1957.
“Stop being so docile, so scared, so fearful of what you need to do,” she advised her audience.
Standing up to injustices while acting nonviolently is crucial in this country largely because “we’re inundated with war and mass killings,” Brown-Trickey continued. More people should be proactive in disrupting the status quo in which violence is condoned or accepted, she added.
“I’m 74, and I expect to disrupt a few more things in my life,” Brown-Trickey said before reading aloud the six principles of nonviolence that Martin Luther King Jr. espoused.
Shirlene Hill, mother of the late Jamail E. Johnson, said God’s love and others’ support have been pivotal in helping her cope with the loss of her 25-year-old son, who was shot to death Feb. 6, 2011, while trying to protect students at a house party near YSU.
“I’ll never stop demonstrating the love he showed,” she said, fighting back tears. “He did not die in vain, but rather, his life demonstrates the sacrificial love God has for us.”
Hill added that she has forgiven those convicted in the killing and refuses to succumb to bitterness, anger and hatred. On the other hand, Hill said, she does not want to see anyone else go through the pain and heartache she has endured.
“Stop the violence, stop the pain and stop the madness!” she pleaded.
Julian Jones, president of YSU’s Student Diversity Council, called for an end to rampant gun violence, saying that his organization and Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past stand in solidarity with students at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., where a gunman opened fire Thursday, killing nine.
Janae Ward, a Chaney High School graduate who took the 10-day, five-state Sojourn to the Past trip through the Deep South, reminded attendees that violence and police brutality extend beyond high-profile cases such as those in Cleveland, Baltimore, New York City and Ferguson, Mo.
Most police officers nobly serve their communities, but people must be savvier in electing their police chiefs and judges while realizing that violence will not solve their problems, she said.
Also making remarks was Councilwoman Annie Gillam, D-1st.
Preceding the rally was a parade that began at Wood Street and Wick Avenue.
The event also featured poetry readings, a discussion about domestic violence, results of an art contest and a dance rendition to the popular John Legend and Common song “Glory,” from the movie “Selma.”
In addition, some attendees posted the names of loved ones who lost their lives to violence.
Other participants were the East High School marching band and ROTC, the Boys & Girls Club of Youngstown drummers and students from YSU, Youngstown City Schools and Austintown Fitch High School.
Delivering the closing prayer for world peace was the Rev. James Webb II of Norfolk Va., an activist who marched in Selma, Ala., in 1965 during the height of the American civil-rights movement.