“Gun violence is not a series of isolated incidents,” says Oliver Hicks ’22, one of Smithey’s students. “It’s a systemic problem of pandemic-level proportions.” Read more about this critical research and work in community activism in Elizabeth’s Slocum’s story “Partners in Peacebuilding” on pg. 20.

The stories of this winter Bulletin highlight the responsibilities of citizenship, and of Swatties who heed the call to change seemingly intractable mechanisms and problems with a precise vision of what is just. In “The Long Path Home” and “A Way Out,” we meet Swarthmoreans advocating for those who are displaced and in search of better, safer lives.

Learn how their own personal experiences helped shape the meaning of this urgent work. Envisioning a more peaceful society in 1693, Pennsylvania Quaker William Penn wrote, “A good end cannot sanctify evil means, nor must we ever do evil. … Force may subdue, but Love gains.” We hope this issue shares with you the gains.

For the past three decades, my work has been focused on understanding violence, particularly gun violence. As a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay, my intention has been first to act — to do something that works — and then beyond that help people who do not already care or understand why they should.

HOT TYPE: New releases by Swarthmoreans

Joseph Horowitz ’70

Dvorák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Norton

Of a family searching for answers or justice. Of a community rallying for resources in response to senseless shootings. Of a loved one lost to gun violence.

Those stories often go unheard in the greater narrative of gun violence. As mass shootings and other high-profile crimes dominate headlines, community violence tends to get pushed aside as an unfortunate reality of American life.

A Swarthmore project is trying to alter that narrative. Launched this fall, the Delaware County Homicide Database (delcohomicides.swarthmore.edu) is an online dashboard and interactive map that tracks all violent deaths in Pennsylvania’s fifth-most-populous county, the vast majority of which are firearm-related. Created by students under the guidance of Professor of Peace & Conflict Studies and Sociology Lee Smithey, the database aims to assist in the prevention of gun violence while painting a fuller picture of the effects of firearms.

Skateboarding coach Mame Fremah Bonsu ’14 fell in love with the sport thanks in no small part to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game franchise. Before videos were readily available online, devotees swapped VHS tapes of their favorite riders; Bonsu, a native of Lewiston, Maine, didn’t have access to these videos but immersed herself in skateboarding via her Nintendo GameCube.

Fast-forward to last June, when Bonsu was working at Substance Skatepark in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she lives, and happened to meet ­— and then skate with — the legendary Tony Hawk.

uring Steven Larín ’97’s childhood, El Salvador filled the news headlines. Civil war. Fight to stop communism. What he heard watching the news, however, differed from the talk at home.

“There are people at the other end of those stories,” Larín’s parents reminded him. “Families trying to just live their lives.”

As the family gathered around the dinner table during the 1980s, they spoke of friends who’d disappeared or been killed. Today, the human stories are the focus of Larín’s lifelong work with immigrants and refugees. Larín is deputy director of Nationalities Service Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit celebrating its 100th anniversary. As an attorney specializing in asylum cases and immigrant youth, he has worked directly with immigrant families for 20 years.

As a girl, she fell in love with slide rules and regretted when they were replaced by calculators. She sat in on her brother’s math tutoring lessons. Their mother, a certified substitute teacher, bought textbooks for home study and gave her children reading assignments.

“Mom made it perfectly clear to my older brother, Paul, and me that all of our schooling was in preparation to go to college,” says Alexander, a pioneering Black lawyer in eastern Oklahoma. “She had definitive ideas about the education of her children. In retrospect, Paul and I have realized that we were sent to school, but we were also home-schooled.”

hough he has had his share of high-risk endeavors, David Thoenen ’68 never expected to be involved in dangerous evacuation efforts from Afghanistan.

Thoenen, a mountaineering and climbing enthusiast who retired from a 35-year career at IBM, signed up in 2017 to volunteer for Ascend. The nonprofit organization offers a mountaineering program designed to build leadership skills for Afghan girls and women ages 15 to 24.

“All sorts of great things were happening in line with the objectives of the program, and we were expanding and bringing in more young women,” says Thoenen, who now serves as chair of Ascend’s board. But in May 2021, the Taliban started to scoop up Afghanistan province by province, and by mid-August they had arrived in Kabul. On Aug. 31, the U.S. completed withdrawal of its troops, ending a 20-year war in Afghanistan.

During the painting’s showing in London’s Royal Academy, the name it is now known by became popular. Anachronistic, in that the bride is shown dressed in white — a custom not followed until the mid-1800s — the painting nonetheless conveys the deep meaning and simplicity of a wedding in the manner of Friends. Set in the Friends Meetinghouse at Jordans, Buckinghamshire, the marriage represented did not actually take place. The models were relatives and friends of the artist, himself a Quaker, and included his brother-in-law as the groom and his wife as the woman with the bowed head sitting behind the bride, along with other “weighty” Friends.