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YOUNGSTOWN -- If you happen to be in Marc Ellis’ classroom, you not only have ample opportunities to read and learn about key civil rights pioneers, you have the honor of moving two steps further: You get to see and meet the historical figures.
“She has been an indispensable cornerstone to my classroom,” Ellis, a Volney Rogers Elementary School third-grade teacher, said.
He was referring to Penny Wells, the Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past organization’s executive director, who has been the catalyst for civil rights icons from the 1950s and 1960s such as Minnijean Brown Trickey, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland and the late Joann Bland of Selma, Alabama, to visit his classes and connect with his students to bolster their knowledge of, and appreciation for, that history.
Brown Trickey was one of nine blacks who in September 1957 integrated the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; Mulholland was among the thousands of Freedom Riders who were arrested in 1961 and sent to Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta; and Bland was a U.S. Army veteran who was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, a day infamously known as “Bloody Sunday” in which Alabama state troopers and other law-enforcement members attacked 600 peaceful marchers.
For his work in molding, guiding, enlightening and educating his young students -- and helping them to more deeply believe in themselves -- Ellis was the local Simeon Booker Award for Courage recipient during a ceremony Tuesday evening at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St., downtown.
The 90-minute gathering that Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past hosted was part of Nonviolence Week in Ohio. More than 100 students, elected officials, community activists and others attended.
The national recipient was attorney Fred D. Gray, 95, of Tuskegee, Alabama, whose clients have included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, who was arrested in April 1955 at age 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger. Her activism predated Parks’ famous Dec. 1, 1955, arrest by about eight months.
Gray, however, was unable to travel to the Mahoning Valley because of health concerns, so David Fleer, the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center’s executive director, accepted the award on Gray’s behalf.
The award was named for Booker, who attended then-Youngstown College before transferring to Virginia Union in Richmond. Booker, who wrote the 2013 book, “Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement,” is perhaps best known for having covered the Aug. 28, 1955, lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, becoming the Washington Post’s first black reporter and writing for Jet magazine. Booker often posed as an itinerant country preacher and donned overalls while traveling the backroads in the South at night, with assistance, to avoid being detected by white racists and to steer clear of potential danger.
The award is distributed to individuals and entities who have displayed unusual courage and tenacity, similar in many respects to that of Booker, in speaking against societal wrongs and nonviolently fighting for fairness and justice while leaving a positive impact on their communities and country, despite the possibility of facing negative consequences.
Past recipients include Mulholland, civil rights icon John Lewis, Denise DeBartolo York, the James and Coralie Centofanti Charitable Foundation and Dr. Virginia “Dee” Banks. Last year’s local recipients were the Rev. Gary and Cindy Koerth, who run Glenwood Grounds Cafe on the South Side.
“These young people are our leaders,” Ellis said Tuesday about his students, adding that they reinforce why he feels his work is invaluable.
FRED GRAY
“One by one, he took on cases and destroyed segregation in Alabama, He was destined for greatness because he knew one person could make a difference,” Mahoning County Prosecutor Lynn A. Maro said about Gray, and before introducing Fleer to accept the award.
Maro added that her passion and respect for Gray dates back to at least her law school days, and that he laid the groundwork to build the foundation for civil rights work during the turbulent and often dangerous Jim Crow era in the South. He also was a pioneer and trailblazer, she continued.
In her remarks, Maro also read from Micah 6:8, which says in essence that God has told his people what is right and what he demands, that justice is done and mercy is one’s first concern, and to humbly obey God.
After graduating in 1948 from Nashville Christian Institute in Tennessee, Gray attended Alabama State (now Alabama State University), but because of the Jim Crow segregation laws across the South, he was unable to perform graduate work, so the state of Alabama paid him to leave the state, said Fleer, who works for Gray. As a result, Gray, who also was a preacher and Alabama state legislator, moved to the Cleveland area and attended the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, from which he earned a juris doctor degree in 1954.
In addition, he made “a secret pledge” to return to Alabama “to destroy everything segregation that he could find,” Fleer said, noting that Gray passed the Ohio and Alabama bar exams.
Also, Gray moved back to his native state in September 1954 during the same week that King arrived to begin his ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Fleer added.
A significant part of Gray’s long track record in the legal profession was having successfully argued four cases before the U.S. Supreme Court before he was 30, Fleer noted.
Among them were Broder v. Gayle (1956), a landmark civil rights case that rendered racially segregated public bus systems illegal, and Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), in which the high court ruled unanimously that redrawing municipal boundaries around Tuskegee to disenfranchise black voters violated the 15th Amendment.
In the 1960 case, black voters sued in federal court for a declaratory judgment, contending that the state Legislature unfairly altered the city’s shape from a square to an irregular 28-sided figure to eliminate nearly all of the city’s 400 registered black voters from the rolls without doing so for any whites.
In his remarks Tuesday, Fleer also noted that Gray befriended King soon after the latter was chosen to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which many of the city’s black pastors and community leaders established Dec. 5, 1955, to guide the bus boycott. While King was on the front lines adding momentum to the movement, Gray worked behind the scenes on legal matters, Fleer noted.
In addition, he reminded the audience that courage is not an abstract virtue, but that it has a face. To that end, he read a quote that Lewis said about two weeks before his death in July 2020: “Keep working, keep pushing and set the record straight, and do it in a nonviolent manner until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Gray, to whom President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022, also won a $10 million settlement for the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male survivors.
From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted the 40-year study that was supposed to observe the natural history of the untreated disease. As part of the study, however, the researchers neither obtained participants’ informed consent nor offered treatment, even when it was easily available.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology, then announced an investment to create what became The National Center for Bioethics in Research and Healthcare at Tuskegee University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website states.
Also during the program, a video was shown of Wells conducting an interview with Gray. In one portion, she asked the 70-year lawyer if he occasionally became discouraged by what he witnessed and for his continual work to correct injustices over his decades-long career, to which Gray replied that he often was too busy for such lamentations, and that he harbored no animosity toward those he was opposing.
“All of us have the power to make a difference,” Wells said at Tuesday’s awards ceremony.
She added that age doesn’t matter in the struggle for justice and fairness, and that everyone carries the ability to speak against what is wrong and stand for what is right.