YOUNGSTOWN — The Rev. Gary Koerth recalled the day he was helping to clean trash from a South Side neighborhood and came upon a dead groundhog.

The animal emitted more than a foul odor, however. It also was the first step in what he feels was a life-changing calling.

“God was basically saying, ‘Why aren’t you going?’ I knew I was supposed to go; I felt God was using me to make a difference. God spoke to my heart that day,” he said.

The difference Koerth and his wife, Cindy Koerth, made took time, but they are convinced God instructed them to be contributors to the neighborhood’s betterment — something that germinated in January 2022 when they opened Glenwood Grounds Cafe at 2906 Glenwood Ave., on the South Side.

For the couple’s contributions and service to the community, they were the local recipients of the Simeon Booker Award for Courage, and were honored during a one-hour ceremony Tuesday evening at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St., downtown.

The national award winner was Jo Ann Bland of Selma, Alabama, a longtime civil rights and social justice activist.

The gathering and reception also are part of Nonviolence Week, which kicked off Sunday with the 15th annual Nonviolence Parade and Rally through downtown Youngstown. Hosting the series of events that continue through Saturday is Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past.

Glenwood Grounds also serves as the outreach center for Hope for Renewal’s worshipping community. The Koerths strive to create an environment in which “our tables are open to everyone, of all backgrounds and lifestyles. The cafe is known for its peaceful atmosphere, as a place where everyone is dignified and honored, and we choose to face life with a ‘worry about it together’ attitude,” Hope for Renewal’s website states.Koerth, a 28-year minister, and his wife initially found the long-abandoned building in deplorable condition after they took ownership Aug. 1, 2017, Gary Koerth recalled. For a while, the couple underwent challenges in bringing the structure back to life before opening the cafe, but God’s voice and direction continued to guide them along the way, they said.

Bland, 72, a U.S. Army veteran who co-founded the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute in Selma and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Staten Island in New York, became an activist as a child. By age 11, she had racked up 13 arrests for her activism and spent time with up to 20 others in jail cells meant to hold two people — and under deplorable conditions — she told an audience of about 100 elected officials, community activists and others Tuesday.

Bland also vividly remembered having been on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, a day infamously known as “Bloody Sunday” after Alabama state troopers and local police — some on horseback — attacked an estimated 600 peaceful marchers, including civil rights icons Hosea Williams and John Lewis, who led the marchers. Bland’s 14-year-old sister, Linda, received injuries that required 35 stitches, she said

The first sign of trouble Bland remembered hearing on the bridge was what she initially thought were gunshots, but turned out to be the firing of a particularly noxious type of tear gas that creates poisonous smoke and impairs one’s vision and breathing while disorienting those who breathe it, she said.

As a child, Bland lived in the George Washington Carver Homes and accompanied her grandmother to meetings led by Samuel and Amelia Boynton, who founded the Dallas County Voters League in 1932 after realizing that change was possible for blacks if they had the power of the vote. The sessions were “boring” at first, and even though the Jim Crow segregation laws angered the young Bland and made her want to strike back at anyone who attacked her, the seeds for nonviolent activism were being planted in her, Bland said.

Solidifying her desire to adopt the philosophy of nonviolence was peering through the windows of Carter’s Drug Store on U.S. Route 80 in Selma, with her grandmother nearby, and seeing white girls at the lunch counter enjoying their milkshakes and camaraderie while realizing that because of her skin color, she was forbidden from being able to engage in such merriment.

“She said, ‘When we get our freedom one day, you can do that too,'” Bland added.

In late 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he founded in 1957, came to Selma after having been invited to help with voter-registration efforts. His presence added a new dimension to the fight for equity and blacks’ access to the ballot box largely because King “brought the three ‘M’s:’ money, motivation and the media,” Bland said.

Bland also has held onto fond memories of having met the iconic civil and human rights leader.

“The one thing I remember, he was always eager to talk to us young people. And when the elders would try to keep us away, he said, ‘No, let them come, let them come,'” Bland told National Public Radio in late 2022. “He would ask you about your day and you wanted to tell him every detail.

“He always had a peppermint, a Starlight peppermint. And he would always give you that peppermint. To this day, I love peppermints.”

On March 17, 1965, federal Judge Frank M. Johnson granted permission for the 54-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march to proceed four days later, which meant in part that the same police officers who had attacked the civil rights foot soldiers weeks earlier were tasked with protecting them. For her part, Bland walked the first 10 miles, but her sister, Linda, became the youngest person to complete the entire march, Jo Ann Bland said Tuesday.

For decades, Bland has spearheaded tours of her native Selma, much of which looks the same as it did in the 1960s. Her journeys always include a nondescript slab of concrete on a playground outside of Brown Chapel AME Church, where the famous 1965 march along Highway 80 through three counties for voting rights originated.

Bland often has her participants pick up and keep stones or small rocks and use them as connections to the history that unfolded at the site. Her hope always is that people realize they have a part to play in the continuing fight for social justice, equality and equity. To that end, Bland likes to use a jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for pointing out that if a single piece is missing, the picture of what social justice should look like is incomplete.

“If we make the same mistakes from the past, we’re not moving forward,” she said.

Penny Wells, Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past’s executive director, and Bland met 19 years ago when Wells took six area high school students on a Sojourn to the Past immersive American history journey to civil rights sites in the South. The young people were exposed to much of that period of history in part because of Bland’s firsthand experiences.

“I realized we were standing with someone of greatness,” Wells said, adding, “She has a heart of gold.”

The Simeon Booker Award for Courage, in its 10th year, is named in honor of Booker, who attended Youngstown State University, then transferred to Virginia Union University in Richmond, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He became the Washington Post’s first full-time black reporter before writing for Jet magazine, at which he covered the Aug. 28, 1955, killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, both of whom were acquitted of murdering and kidnapping Till in the famous and tragic case that many historians and others contend galvanized the civil rights movement.

Beyond that, Booker became known for his coverage of the larger movement that included the 1961 Freedom Rides through the South, as well as when nine black students in September 1957 integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. To avoid confrontations with white southern racists, Booker often carried a Bible and posed as a country preacher.

Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the nine black students, attended Tuesday’s awards ceremony.