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.

Libertarian, entertainer and entrepreneur, Reginald Jones offers a talk titled Betrayal: Sold Out by the Civil Rights Movement at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, in Room 204, Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Bates College Republicans, the event is open to the public at no cost.

“Mr. Jones’ talk will focus on the struggle for civil rights and how the African-American community has been mistreated by public officials over the years,” said Michael O’Gorman, a Bates first-year student and second vice president of the Bates Republicans.

Jones is a singer and hip-hop entrepreneur. As a young man in the South Bronx, Jones worked with rap artist Grand Master Flash, one of the pioneers of the hip hop movement. Jones parlayed that experience into a job at MCA/Universal Records, and in 1990 formed his own entertainment company, The Reggitainment Group, which managed music acts.

In 1994, Jones made the leap to public speaking and politics when he joined Project 21, an African-American leadership group. In 1995, he got his first talk-radio job on WTTM in Trenton, New Jersey. Since then, he has hosted the Grassroots Liv” show on National Empowerment Television, spoken on dozens of college campuses and manned the microphone on the Radio America Network’s Generation Now.

Jones occasionally performs as a backup singer for George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and volunteers for Afri-Male, a New Jersey mentoring group for young black males. Throughout all his endeavors, Jones has offered a simple message of empowerment for the black community: “Capitalism.”

“That’s the word that I want to hear from now on,” he says. “Talk to me about free enterprise. Racism did not destroy our neighborhoods. Government did it.”

Valerie Smith, director of Princeton University’s program in African American studies and a member of the Bates College Class of 1975, gives a lecture titled Memory and the United States Civil Rights Movement at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 9, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Avenue. The public is invited to attend the talk, sponsored by the Multicultural Center, free of charge.

Smith, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and professor of English at Princeton, is a specialist in African American literature and culture, with particular interests in black feminist theory and film studies. She is the author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (Routledge, 1998) and Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1987). She also edited African-American Writers (Scribners, 1991), New Essays on Song of Solomon (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (Rutgers University Press, 1997).

Smith taught at Princeton from 1980 to 1989, then joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she chaired UCLA’s interdepartmental program in African American studies from 1997 to 2001 and co-directed cultural studies in the African Diaspora Project from 1996 to 1999. She returned to Princeton in 2001 and became director of the African American Studies program in 2002.

The performance presents a cross-section of the early 1950s beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll in the context of the struggles, triumphs and disappointments of the civil rights movement. “As African Americans, we have felt the necessity to inform children and adults, both black and white, of our heritage, majesty, struggles and accomplishments. Knowing that theater and the media are tremendous vehicles for influencing minds, we felt we could positively capitalize on this by teaching, building self-esteem and transferring ‘history’ through story-telling theater,” say Ardie Stuart Brown and Patricia Stuart Robinson of the Stuart Sisters.

Brown and Robinson are sisters who grew up in West Philadelphia in a neighborhood called Down the Way. As educators and artists, they have performed throughout the United States and Canada, featuring their Learning Through the Arts programs at festivals, museums, colleges and churches. In 1980, the two founded The Spring School of the Arts, a nonprofit organization offering specialized classes in music, dance, drama and visual art.

Bond, chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C., and professor of history at the University of Virginia, will deliver an address on social justice. Bates President Donald W. Harward also will speak during the convocation ceremony that marks the 144th anniversary of Bates’ founding on April 5, 1855.

While a student at Morehouse College in 1960, Bond was a founder of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, the Atlanta University Center student civil-rights organization that directed three years of nonviolent anti segregation protests that achieved integration of Atlanta’s movie theaters, lunch counters and parks. He was arrested for sitting-in at the then segregated cafeteria at Atlanta City Hall.

Elected in 1965 to the Georgia House of Representatives, Bond was prevented from taking his seat by members who objected to his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was re-elected to his own vacant seat, but once again unseated by House objectors. Bond was seated only after a third election and a unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the Georgia House had violated his constitutional rights.

Bond was co-chairman of the Georgia Loyal National Delegation to the 1968 Democratic Convention. The Loyalists, an insurgent group, were successful in unseating Georgia’s hand-picked, regular Democratic delegates, and Bond was nominated for vice-president of the United States. He was the first African American to be so honored by a major political party, but he declined the nomination because he was too young to serve.

In the Georgia Senate, Bond became the first black chairman of the Fulton County Delegation, the largest and most diverse delegation in the upper house, and chairman of the Consumer Affairs Committee. During his legislative tenure, he was sponsor or co-sponsor of more than 60 bills that became law. He also was president and founder of the Southern Elections Fund, an early political action committee that aided in the election of rural Southern black candidates.

Bond serves on advisory boards of the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Corporation for Maintaining Editorial Diversity in America, the Nicaragua/Honduras Education Project, the National Federation for Neighborhood Diversity and the Southern Africa Media Center among other endeavors to promote civil rights and economic justice.

Bond is the author of Black Candidates — Southern Experiences (Voter Education Project, Southern Regional Council, 1969) and a collection of essays, titled A Time To Speak, A Time To Act (Simon and Schuster, 1972). His poems and articles have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Atlanta Constitution and Life magazine.

Bond’s teaching experience includes being a Pappas Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor at Drexel University, Harvard University and Williams College.

Commissioned by Portland Performing Arts Inc., the celebrated jazz bassist McBride has composed an extended work for jazz ensemble and gospel choir to evoke the Civil Rights movement through settings of a suite of poems and Old Testament passages. The premiere performance makes its first stop in Lewiston as it tours throughout New England during the month of November.

“This kind of project, supported through the arts, helps to maintain the cultures that have become a vital part of our American heritage,” said Joanna Lee, director of the Office of Affirmative Action.

Since the release of his first two recordings Gettin’ To It and Number Two Express, McBrde has received critical acclaim, toppping Down Beat’s “bassist most deserving of recognition” poll and Jazz Time’s readers poll. Time magazine heralded him as “the most promising and versatile bassist since Charles Mingus,” and his live performances have received equally lavish praise. “He already sounds like no other bassist of his generation,” the Chicago Tribune said. McBride has appeared on more than 100 recordings, playing with Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea.

McBride was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center to compose “Blues in Alphabet City,” a full-scale work performed by Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, with McBride as a special guest. In addition to his solo recordings, McBride has recorded a trio record Fingerpainting: The Music of Herbie Hancock with trumpeter Nicholas McBride and guitarist Mark Whitfield. Most recently, he has released A Family Affair with producer George Duke. A member of yet another trio Superbass with Ray Brown and John Clayton, McBride also teaches at the Berkelee College of Music.

Choir and congregation members of two Portland churches, the Green Memorial AME Zion Church and Williams Temple Church of God in Christ Church, comprise The Maine Mass Gospel Choir. The two groups, along with members of Portland’s African Fellowship International, first gathered together in 1996 under “Sounds of Blackness” music director Gary Hines as part of the House Island Project of Portland Performing Arts. Hines continued to work with the choir in annual residencies until this year, when J.J. Steele assumed the position of musical director. Organist Fred Steele will accompany the choir for the tour. In addition to regular church services, the inter-generational and interdenominational Maine Mass Gospel Choir has appeared in concert with Grammy-award winners Sounds of Blackness and the acclaimed South African singer and choir director Thuli Dumaiude, among others.

The performance is funded in part by a grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest National Jazz Network, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies and the National Endowment for the Arts. The performance also is made possible through a commission from Portland Performing Arts Inc., Portland, Maine; and Bates College, including the affirmative action and Dean of Students’ office as well as the American cultural and African American studies programs.