YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past organization will host a variety of activities, lectures and programs to honor several key anniversaries of events in the civil rights movement and ensure young students know their significance.

“Our goals are (for the students) to develop knowledge of the (six) principles of nonviolence and incorporate them into their lives, learn about the three events, develop critical-thinking skills and work on research,” Penny Wells, the organization’s executive director, said Friday.

From Monday to June 28, Sojourn to the Past will host the second annual Freedom School for students in grades four to eight. Most of the offerings will be at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St., downtown.

Freedom School is a continuation of last year’s set of programs and activities that recognized the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project in which hundreds of mostly northern middle- to upper-class college-aged men and women traveled to Mississippi primarily to register blacks to vote in the Jim Crow South and help establish 45 to 50 Freedom Schools throughout the state that offered for black people classes, free clinics and opportunities to register to vote. Beforehand, the northerners had received training in nonviolence techniques at the Western Women’s College in Oxford, on the campus of Miami University.

Freedom School also will recognize and honor the 70th anniversaries of the killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till on Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi; the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December 1955; and the 60th anniversary of when Alabama state troopers attacked about 600 peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, a day infamously known as “Bloody Sunday.”

After the bus boycott ended in January 1957 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional, many of the riders received training in nonviolence techniques; specifically, they were coached on ways to handle the victory gracefully and with dignity, and refrain from being boastful, pride-filled or spiteful, Wells said. She added that they also followed the example of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who headed the Montgomery Improvement Association at that time and who stressed the importance of being nonviolent in words and actions.

Here is a list of key Freedom School events at the Tyler History Center:

•Monday, 950 a.m. — Miah Pierce, a social worker and Sojourn to the Past member, will conduct a presentation on self-esteem.

•Monday, 11:20 a.m. — Jackie Mercer, a Youngstown State University English professor, will speak on Emmett Till. Students also will be introduced to research writing and topics to explore.

•Tuesday, 9:20 a.m. — Participants will discuss the principles of nonviolence, and a video of the bus boycott will be shown. Additional research on nonviolence, along with poetry and a dance performance, also will take place.

•Wednesday, 9:20 a.m. — Video of Bloody Sunday, followed by art and poetry on nonviolence.

•Wednesday, 10 a.m. — A “musical suitcase” in which Traci Manning, the Mahoning Valley Historical Society’s education curator, will play music from the 1960s.

•Wednesday, 11:15 a.m. — A virtual presentation from Keith LaMar, who will talk about the importance of nonviolence. LaMar, who many feel was wrongfully convicted of murder, remains on Ohio’s Death Row. Accompanying him will be Amy Gordiejew, a Chaney High School special education teacher who has taken up LaMar’s cause.

•Thursday, 10:15 a.m. — Team building efforts will be followed by poetry and artwork.

•Friday, 10:15 a.m. — Participants will walk from the Tyler History Center to the Youngstown Historical Center for Industry & Labor, 151 W. Wood St., where they will hear from local historian Vincent Shivers. He will discuss the history of the steel industry in the Mahoning Valley.

•Saturday, 11 a.m. — Participants will meet at Waterworth Memorial Park, Pavilion 8, 700 Sunset Blvd., Salem, to begin a walking tour, which will include Hope Cemetery, before ending at the new statue of President Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Plaza, 713 E. State St.