The Ira and Mary Zepp Center for Nonviolence and Peace Education is inviting alumni, students, and community members on its January Civil Rights Tour, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around!: Retracing the American Civil Rights Movement." Husband wife team Pamela Zappardino '71 and University of Rhode Island Psychology Professor Charles Collyer lead the tour, now in its sixth year. College credit is available for McDaniel students (considered an independent study in conjunction with the January Term).

The tour changes each year, and although the specifics have not been pinned down for this January's trip, participants will meet in Nashville and travel through two states by bus.

"We go on a bus because it's the way a lot of civil-rights workers traveled and how the freedom riders rode. You get a sense of what it must be like as a mixed group traveling the South. There are times when people look at you a bit weird," said Zappardino.

Participants spend time with people who were on the front lines in the fight for civil rights, such as Bernard Lafayette, Jr. He was a leader of the Nashville student movement in 1960, an organizer of the Voting Rights movement in 1965, and a member of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s staff. Lafayette provides personal insight during the tour and shows participants how the struggle has evolved.

Zappardino said, "Often people ask, ‘Why do you do a civil rights tour? Aren't we done with all that?' and I say, ‘No, we're not.' It's one thing to read about it, and even to have watched it on TV or lived through it in Maryland, but when you talk to people there, it's really incredible."

She likens the experience to a pilgrimage, "A pilgrimage is a place you go and you never return to who you are because you've changed."

Alumni Gary and Mary Honeman '77, who attended the tour in January wrote, "The activists of the civil rights era were models of African American and Caucasian peoples who stood courageously side by side in the face of psychological and physical violence … It was a privilege to be in their presence, to learn from them, and to honor their history."

The cost of this year's trip is about $495. That covers three nights lodging, ground transportation for the duration of the trip, four breakfasts, museum admissions, material and honoraria for those who work and talk with the group. The Ira and Mary Zepp Center for Nonviolence and Peace Education offers grants to those interested in taking the Civil Rights Tour but in need of some assistance with costs.

For more information, e-mail Pamela Zappardino at paxwarthog@aol.com.