Correspondent photo / Sean Barron ... Penny Wells, who runs the Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past organization, stands next to a sign about the upcoming annual Nonviolence Parade and Rally in Youngstown. Wells also is a retired teacher and longtime civil rights activist.

BOARDMAN — From a young age, everything was set for Penny Wells to be part of the civil rights movement, and she readily joined the table.

“It’s a leadership-development, life-changing history immersion journey to civil rights sites in the South to meet the leaders and foot soldiers of the movement,” Wells, who grew up and graduated from high school in Dallas, said about Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, an organization she started about 16 years ago.

The leaders she referred to include the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, along with Minnijean Brown Trickey and Elizabeth Eckford, two black students who in September 1957 integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and paid a high price for their courage. Lewis met and shared his messages of nonviolence to Sojourn to the Past groups until 2019 and before his death in 2020 at age 80.

Perhaps the first items on the table were the strong beliefs of Wells’ mother and father, both of whom she described as “liberal parents in a very conservative community” who accepted all people, regardless of race or other differences. Her mother and father’s views and perspectives were pivotal in Wells’ decision to attend Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, a move that also fulfilled their desire for their daughter to see other parts of the U.S., she remembered.

While at Brown, the value of social justice already was embedded then awakened in Wells, so she wasted no time organizing a voter registration trip during spring break in 1966 to Choctaw County, Alabama.

Performing that kind of work in the thick of the segregated Jim Crow South also was fraught with danger.

Wells recalled one night being in the last of three vehicles in a row with a few Brown students and the black driver, a Methodist minister who led the university’s Christian Education Association. After leaving a church, state troopers pulled over their car for supposedly tailgating, then removed just the driver.

“They took us to the home of a justice of the peace,” she recalled. “They took the driver in and left us in the car. They told him to pay the fine or go to jail, so he paid the fine.”

While at Brown, Wells also served as a secretary in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Providence branch. SCLC was a major civil rights organization Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. started in 1957.

A short time later, she participated in a summer student exchange program that Brown University had developed in partnership with Toogaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi.

“Toogaloo was a safe haven for civil rights workers there,” Wells said.

In early June 1966, Wells and many others took part in the James Meredith March Against Fear, which he organized to help blacks overcome rampant fear as they tried to register to vote. Four years earlier, Meredith, who was a U.S. Air Force veteran, was the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Wells also remembered having brought her driver’s license and enough money to make a phone call in the event she was arrested for participating in the march. During the event, she was among those who marched with King, though the two never met.

“When you’re young, you feel invincible … and that you’re doing the right thing,” Wells said, adding that her father was worried about her safety.

Also in 1966, Wells applied for the AmeriCorps Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) anti-poverty program and ended up in rural West Union, W.Va., with an estimated population of 1,200.

She worked with a struggling family with children who had been removed from the home and a father who was abusive. In February 1967, the man lunged at his wife with a butcher knife “and I instinctively stepped between them,” Wells remembered.

As a result, the mother and children, who later had been returned, fled, and the man pushed Wells against a space heater, after which she fled outside before a neighbor told the man to leave her alone, she recalled. An injury to her left hand from the incident required 50 stitches.

From there, Wells moved to Williamson, W.Va., in the heart of the coal mining belt, where she spent about two years working with local Appalachian volunteers to protest strip mining in the region, as well as to get free lunches in the area’s public schools.

While in the town, she lived in public housing, and met her husband, Bill Wells, who was an all-star basketball player, and his family.

Also on the table of her civil rights activities was being part of the June 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., that King had planned before his assassination that April to dramatize the plight of those of all races who live in poverty and seek economic justice for them. She spent several days in a school and was part of an effort “trying to unify all people who were poor,” she said.

After King’s death, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy led the campaign, and thousands of poor people set up a shantytown of tents called “Resurrection City” that continued for about six weeks. Largely because of the loss of King, the effort achieved only marginal success, many historians say.

In 1969, the couple relocated to Youngstown, where Wells began her teaching career at Princeton Junior High School as a history teacher until 1994, at which time she continued teaching at Volney Rogers Junior High before retiring in 2007.

A year earlier, Wells had attended a teacher’s conference in Orlando, Florida, where she met Jeff Steinberg, a former advanced-placement history teacher from the San Francisco Bay area who, several years before, had launched the Sojourn to the Past program to take high school students to key civil rights sites in the South. The local Sojourn to the Past organization is not directly tied to its California counterpart and has its own autonomy, Wells stressed.

Steinberg’s teaching style and message left such an impact on Wells that she asked him to come to Youngstown to address her students.

“After hearing Jeff Steinberg talk, and talk specifically about Elizabeth Eckford and share how harmful, hurtful and hateful language can be, I decided I wanted him to come to Volney and talk to my seventh- and eighth-graders about language,” she remembered.

Soon after launching Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, Wells took six students on the first journey who represented all of the city’s high schools. Each year, she requires them while on the journey to develop what she calls action plans, based on lessons from the civil rights movement, that entail working to better themselves as well as their schools and communities.

To that end, local Sojourn students have spearheaded voter registration drives, protested the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, written and presented a workshop that explores the origins of racism in the U.S. and worked to have a bench installed in Glenwood Community Park to remember and honor those whose lives were taken by violence.

They also petitioned the Youngstown City School District Board of Education, city council, Youngstown State University trustees and Mahoning County commissioners to pass resolutions to declare the first week in October as Nonviolence Week. In July 2013, a group of them traveled to Columbus, where Gov. John Kasich signed legislation making that time period Nonviolence Week statewide.

The 13th annual Nonviolence Parade and Rally will begin at 3 p.m. Oct. 1 near Wick Avenue and Wood Street in downtown Youngstown. The event also kicks off a week of related activities, including the Simeon Booker Award for Courage.

This year’s national award recipient is Sarah Collins Rudolph, whose sister Addie Mae Collins, was one of four girls killed in the Sept. 15, 1963, church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and who was severely injured in the attack. The local awardee is Sister Ann McManamon, who served as the Dorothy Day House of Hospitality’s coordinator.

After nearly six decades of civil rights work, Wells has no intention of applying the brakes.

“I just love what I do and feel this is what God called me to do, so I’ll keep doing this as long as I’m able,” she said.

Wells listed John Lewis and her late mother, Danna Whorton, as her two biggest role models.