Rutha Mae Harris, a founding member of The Freedom Singers, sings songs associated with the civil rights movement during the performance. In the panel presentation Leaving College for Good, which follows Perdew and Harris, students who have taken a break from Bates to do good works will discuss their projects and what it means for them to serve.

The event is open to the public at no cost. Sponsored by the Multifaith Chaplaincy, it is the 2010 Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture at Bates. For more information, call 207-786-8272.

After leaving Harvard, Perdew joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and worked in the committee’s southwest Georgia office. Eventually he, along with three other young men, was detained in Americus, Ga., and charged under the state’s 1871 Anti-Treason Act, created to suppress black resistance to white rule.

Because this crime was punishable by execution, the men were not offered bail and remained in jail for nearly four months awaiting trial. The case was eventually dismissed, and the men became known as “The Americus Four.” Perdew created Education of a Harvard Guy in 2005 with the help of playwright Curtis L. Williams.

The Freedom Singers formed in 1962 in Albany, Ga. They traveled across the country to raise money for SNCC and inform audiences about the grassroots organizing campaigns taking shape across the South.

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the Bates class of 1940, established the lectureship.

The creator of the popular “PostSecret” Web site offers a lecture titled “The Most Trusted Stranger in America.” A book signing follows.

A limited number of tickets will be available for the public from Thursday, March 5, until noon March 9 or when they run out. Tickets are $11 and are nonrefundable. Buy tickets atwww.batestickets.com; bring the ID that you use for the purchase and pick them up at the “will-call” station. A sign-language interpreter will be available. Call 207-786-8272 to reserve a seat near the interpreter.

The event is sponsored by the college’s Multifaith Chaplaincy and several co-sponsors, including the departments of psychology and sociology, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the College Lectures Committee and a number of student organizations.

Inspired by a dream in a Parisian hotel room, Warren created the PostSecret community art project in 2005. He invited people around the globe to mail him a secret on one side of a postcard, and each week, he posted 10 secrets on the Web site.

What began as an art project became a mass phenomenon. To date, Warren has posted thousands of pieces of art from people across the world, and claims to have received more than 200,000. PostSecret, a USA Today reporter wrote in 2006, is “where thousands of Americans go to anonymously post their deepest secrets, and where millions of Americans go to read them.”

Warren has appeared on the  “Today Show,”  “Good Morning America,”  “20/20,” CNN, MSNBC, NPR and Fox News. The Web site hosts more than 3 million visitors every month, and won Weblog of the Year in the 2007 Bloggie Awards.

“I’m just a typical suburban husband,” Warren told USA Today. “I’m an accidental artist. It’s been quite a journey, quite an adventure.”

Today, Warren receives 1,000 secrets each week at his home address (13345 Copper Ridge Road, Germantown, MD 20874), and he reads every one. Every Sunday night he posts 20 cards on his blog.

“I think it’s natural to want to hide from the parts of our life that we find confusing or painful, but if we do they’ll haunt us forever,” Warren said in a lecture at DePauw University in November 2007.

Warren has created four books (all published by William Morrow) from the postcards he has received: PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives (2005), My Secret (2006), The Secret Lives of Men and Women (2007) and A Lifetime of Secrets (2007) which reached No. 7 on the New York Times Best Seller List. One of his own secrets is included in each book.

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture commemorates Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and created the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews, of the Bates class of 1940, established the lectureship.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, writer, professor of geography and director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, will give a presentation titled The Prison Industrial Complex After 25 Years at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The public is invited to attend the 2007 Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture, sponsored by the chaplain’s office, free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

A founding member of Critical Resistance, an important national anti-prison organization in the United States, Gilmore is active in the Prison Moratorium Project and California Prison Focus. Her new book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Occupation in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), analyzes the economic and political changes that led to California’s prison-building boom. She examines the emergence of movements working to dismantle what she calls the prison industrial complex, highlighting the ways community-based activism has been successful in bridging urban-rural, racial and other divides to achieve victories against the growing prison system.

Gilmore received her doctorate from Rutgers University. A widely published author, her interests include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, politics and culture, California, North America and the African Diaspora. Gilmore says, “I became a geographer to engage with questions of how we make the world and ourselves, and to study how everyday people do so with the dream of justice, equality, and beauty for all.”

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews ’40, established the lectureship.