YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio - The message of peace and perseverance filled the Tyler History Center Tuesday night, as the Mahoning Valley marked the 10th annual Simeon Booker Award for Courage — part of this year’s Ohio Nonviolence Week, which runs October 5 through October 11.

The award honors the late Simeon Booker, a Youngstown native and pioneering journalist whose Civil Rights reporting exposed injustice and helped unite a national movement for equality.

This year’s national recipient, JoAnne Bland, is a lifelong activist from Selma, Alabama, who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. At just 11 years old, she witnessed and survived “Bloody Sunday” — one of the most violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era.

“We see so much violence ev

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