Click here for a rundown of Nonviolence Week events locally.

At first glance, results from the recently released 2025 FBI Uniform Crime Report that herald a slight decline in violent crime across America in 2024 may elicit optimism that America is finally turning the corner on its epidemic of repugnant brutality and bloodshed. However, a deeper dive intothat and other data reveals that violence in all of its many vile forms continues to careen out of control.

Despite the 4% decline in violent crimes last year, levels of violence continue to outpace pre-pandemic levels, with a violent crime occurring every 25 seconds in the nation, the FBI reports.

Politically motivated violence, most vividlly illustrated by the recent assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus, has become increasingly commonplace. Threats, harassment and violence against public officials, particularly women and minorities, intensified by 10% in 2024 compared with 2023

Last weekend’s disturbing killings at a church in Michigan and at a nightclub in North Carolina are but two of the 325 mass shootings reported in the U.S. this year as of Sept. 29 by the Gun Violence Archive.

And in the realm of domestic violence, the FBI’s 2025 report documents a 3% increase in victimization in that category this year. More than 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have encountered rape, physical abuse of stalking by a partner, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.

Sadly, many of us have become numb to such news and to disturbing trends of increasing incivility in our culture.

Others, however, refuse to accept heightened violence – often triggered by prejudice, sexism and racism – as the new normal in this country. Prime among them is a stalwart group of resilient and idealistic Youngstown young people and its burgeoning army of allied adults and community groups.

Beginning Sunday and continuing through next week, they are coalescing, standing up and being counted as the Buckeye State observes Ohio Nonviolence Week. Their movement and their message merit communitywide and statewide support and participation.

Nonviolence Week, observed each year during the first full week of October, traces its roots to the Youngstown City School District, where a model American history program evolved and grew under the expert direction of Penny Wells.

Participants in her local Sojourn to the Past program make a weeklong trek each spring in some of the battlegrounds of the modern American civil-rights struggle in the South. In Selma, in Montgomery, in Birmingham, in Jackson and elsewhere, they learn the historic details of some of this nation’s most evil displays of violence and racist hatred.

But they also learn how principles of peace and nonviolence from the likes of Mahatma (“Great Soul”) Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overpowered the atrocities and inspired positive and enduring progress.

When the students return to Youngstown, they use those lessons to effect visible change in their community. Nonviolence Week represents the crowning and most visible achievement of that campaign. It underscores the value of peace, tolerance and understanding.

Twelve years ago, the students of Sojourn successfully lobbied the state Legislature to make it an official statewide observance. Their work is now cemented in Ohio law. The observance has only matured and grown in scope, impact and respect every year since.

This year’s Nonviolence Week is chock full of educational and engaging events. They begin at 3 p.m. Sunday with the 15th annual Nonviolence Parade from First Presbyterian Church on Wick Avenue to the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre downtown for a peaceful rally and program.

Throughout the week, living legends from the golden age of the American civil-rights movement are taking part in lectures and presentations in the city. Among them are Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School in the Arkansas capital in 1957 amid tension, violence and raw hatred. She will be featured at the rally and at 5 p.m. Monday at the “Mingle With Minni” event at Flambeau’s restaurant on Market Street.

The annual Simeon Booker Award for Courage ceremony is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Tyler History Center, at which the Rev. Gary Koerth and his wife, Cindy Koerth, will be recognized as local honorees for opening Glenwood Grounds Cafe to help revitalize and stabilize the Glenwood Avenue corridor. The 2025 national honoree will be Jo Ann Bland of Selma, Alabama, a longtime voting and civil rights activist, U.S. Army veteran and advocate for justice. She co-founded the National Voting Rights Museum.

For a full rundown of events all week, click the link with this story at vindy.com or tribtoday.com.

Clearly, the breadth and depth of the message of nonviolence can never be echoed too loudly or too forcefully. It is particularly uplifting that Youngstown – once best known as a hotbed of mob violence, contract killings, race riots and gang-banging street wars – now can gain positive attention as the birthplace and hub of a statewide movement predicated on peace and nonviolence.That group, coupled with a host of organized anti-violence initiatives by police and community groups, can at least share partial credit for the noteworthy decline of violent crime in Youngstown. It is most noticeable in the tumbling homicide rate. As of Oct. 1, the city had recorded nine homicides, compared with 17 during the first nine months of 2024, a nearly 50% reduction.

Continuing that success, however, can only be as strong as the size and passion of the corps of foot soldiers committed tononviolence from throughout the Mahoning Valley. That’s why we encourage residents to attend Sunday’s parade and rally as a first step toward publicly embracing the praiseworthy principles of nonviolence and tolerance this coming week – and every week.