Civil-rights activist receives Booker award

By WILLIAM K. ALCORN

alcorn@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

It takes courage to be nonviolent in a culture that is steeped in violence, said Minnijean Brown-Trickey, the national honoree who received the Simeon Booker Award for Courage on Tuesday at the DeYor Performing Arts Center.

The local award recipient was the James and Coralie Centofanti Charitable Fund.

The theme of the Ohio Nonviolence Week event, moderated by Dr. Tiffany

Anderson, formerly a professor at Youngstown State University and now back in her home state of Texas, was “Courageous Philanthropy.”

Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, praised the citizens of Youngstown, particularly its young people, who marched Sunday in the city’s eighth annual Nonviolence Parade and Rally to kick off Ohio Nonviolence Week.

The Little Rock Nine was a group of black high-school students who challenged racial segregation in public schools of Little Rock, Ark., in 1957.

Simeon S. Booker Jr., who grew up in Youngstown, was an award-winning journalist and author who provided pioneering coverage of racial injustice and the civil-rights struggle for readers of Jet and Ebony magazines and was The Washington Post’s first black reporter. Booker died last year at age 99.

“One of the best things about this event is the coupling of nonviolence and courage. It takes courage to be nonviolent, even to talk about nonviolence,” Brown-Trickey said.

“I tell young people they can be angry and still be nonviolent – and to transfer that anger into action,” she said.

Brown-Trickey said the teenagers of the Little Rock Nine were so scared that they were shaking.

“The crowd threatened our lives and said we would not come back to the school. But we came back. We came back, and the president [Dwight D. Eisenhower] had to act. If you want something, you have to go back to force them to act,” she said.

Brown-Trickey, who is deeply involved in Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, also praised the Youngstown City Schools students who created Ohio Nonviolence Week.

“You keep me going. Thanks for that,” she said.

Dave Centofanti of Canfield, son of James and Coralie; Mark Graham, chairman of the Centofanti distribution committee; and Joe Mosca, a member of the foundation board, talked about how the James and Coralie Centofanti Foundation works differently from some other foundations.

“Upon Jim’s passing, the foundation was significantly funded. The beauty of the distribution committee is that it can look at the entire Mahoning Valley and its many needs,” said Graham, executive vice president of Farmer’s Bank.

Among the projects funded are the Veterans Resource Center at YSU and the Kent State University nursing program.

The distribution committee takes great pleasure in some of the smaller grants, he said.

“I’m real big on second

chances. I’m always stunned when people don’t give someone a break,” said Mosca, interim provost at YSU.

An example is the foundation’s “last dollar” scholarship given to deserving students in health and human services majors in the James and Coralie Centofanti Center for Health and Welfare for Vulnerable Populations at YSU who have run out of money and need help completing college, Mosca said.