Trending
YOUNGSTOWN – In 1959, legendary jazz and blues singer Dinah Washington popularized the hit song, “What a Difference a Day Makes.”
In a day, Steve Schultz articulated what a difference a hyphen makes.
“Nonviolence with a hyphen means without violence; nonviolence without a hyphen means what you are going to do about the violence and injustice we see,” Schultz, assistant director of the Millbrae, California-based Sojourn to the Past program, said. “Nonviolence (not hyphenated) is about action, not inaction.”
Schultz, who was in the Mahoning Valley from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in local Nonviolence Week events and activities, articulated that perspective, which was a main theme that coursed through a two-hour roundtable conversation Saturday afternoon at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Youngstown, 1105 Elm St., on the North Side.
The gathering also concluded Nonviolence Week in Ohio, which began Oct. 4 with the 16th annual Nonviolence Parade and Rally through downtown and at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheater.
To put it another way, the hyphenated form of nonviolence is merely a negative peace, or an absence of tension, but does not result in true peace, Schultz and the other 15 participants agreed.
To underscore that point, he quoted Kaza Haga, a nonviolence educator who founded the East Point Peace Academy in Oakland, California: “Often, we think of peace as calm and quiet. We conjure up images of watching the sunset on a tropical beach, meditating in the forest by a creek, incense and scented candles. That can be problematic as thinking that nonviolence is about not being violent.
“I guarantee you that the moment after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, things were really quiet. So, did we create peace? … It is easier in the short term to sweep issues under the rug and settle for a cheap yet ultimately unsustainable negative peace. … This is what allows us to justify going to war to create peace. If we kill the terrorists, we’ll have peace. If we lock up all the protesters, then our streets will be quiet and peaceful. It justifies mass incarceration.”
On the flip side, working to create a positive peace may bring added tension and the risk of unfavorable consequences, but it goes to the nonviolent heart of trying to actively dismantle injustices and wrongs, Schultz and others said.
He noted that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the late civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis were arrested more than 70 times combined and charged with disturbing the peace.
“When we use nonviolence to confront violence and injustice, we are not disturbing the peace; we are disturbing complacency. We are disturbing the normalization of violence. We are disturbing negative peace,” Schultz quoted Haga as saying.
Echoing that philosophical approach was Penny Wells, the Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past organization’s executive director, who cited a sermon King delivered March 18, 1956, at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, titled “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious.”
In an excerpt, King told his congregants “Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force – war, tensions, confusion – but it is the presence of some positive force – justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God.”
King went on to say that he neither wanted nor accepted any type of peace that embodies second-class citizenship and treatment, remaining silent in response to injustices, complacently adjusting to the status quo and a willingness to be “exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated.”
Wells also read a more recent example that tied the concepts of nonviolence and a positive peace with community-building efforts in the aftermath of tragedy. Specifically, she alluded to the Dec. 13, 2025, shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in which two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, were killed and nine others injured. The close-knit Providence community quickly rallied around the students and provided them with emotional support and other essential needs.
On Saturday, Wells read aloud a passage from Brown University President Christina H. Paxson, in which she said in part, “Resilience isn’t just the ability to bounce back; it is the refusal to let go of each other. You sustained each other through dark times, yes, but you also reached for the light.
“You practiced the hardest kind of citizenship there is: the kind that stays at the table when the conversation is painful, and the kind that holds a friend’s hand when the world feels dark.
“The world needs people who know that community isn’t something you find, but something you build – sometimes with tired hands and broken hearts. It needs people who have seen the worst of a December afternoon and responded with the best of human kindness.”
In addition, Wells is a Brown University graduate who earned a bachelor’s degree in American civilization.
As vital as the philosophy of nonviolence is toward correcting societal wrongs and substituting justice for injustice, it also has to be in one’s psychological and emotional makeup, the Rev. J.P. Robles, pastor of Sacred Commons Church, explained. Along those lines, it’s important to figure out how to work on spreading nonviolence within the Mahoning Valley and in oneself “so it can radiate outward,” he said.
No particular religion or text can lay sole claim to the notion of desiring the same goodness for others as for oneself, Robles added.
Another problem is that some media outlets cover catastrophic and tragic events, then move quickly to commercials and other events. Over time, this dynamic has the effect of desensitizing many people to violence, he noted, adding that true peace is in part the presence of justice. not merely the absence of tension.
At the beginning of Saturday’s discussion, Wells had the participants write down what they thought the idea of peace looks, smells, sounds and tastes like. One person said that peace also means ensuring people’s needs are met.
On a broader level, peace also means realizing that everyone is interconnected and caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, Robles paraphrased King as saying.
Those gathered also were asked to write down the first word that came to mind when they think of the concept of nonviolence.