Tour guide to history

Twenty years ago, Julian Bond’s smooth voice narrated “Eyes on the Prize,” an acclaimed public TV series about the civil rights movement. Now that voice will be narrating a tour of places where the prize was won.

Bond, a history professor at the University of Virginia, will be back in Atlanta to lead a weeklong bus tour that will start on Feb. 28 with Martin Luther King Jr. shrines and move on to black history sites in Alabama: Tuskegee, Montgomery, Gee’s Bend, Selma, Birmingham. At most stops, movement veterans will speak to the group.

“Julian created the program, and he’s there every step of the way,” says Joan Gore, director of adult education programs for the university.

Bond, a former Georgia legislator, became a civil rights leader as a student at Morehouse College in the early 1960s. For the past decade, he has been chairman of the NAACP. The tour, he says in an e-mail, was inspired by another Virginia-sponsored trip called “Jefferson in Paris.”

Participants visited Jefferson locales, ate “fabulous” French food and enjoyed Parisian culture, Bond notes. “I immediately thought about Alabama. Doesn’t everyone?”

The civil rights excursion is limited to one busload of 50 people. In its first two years, lawyers, teachers, students and several families signed up. The cost starts at $2,600 a person. For more information: 1-800-346-3882. www.virginia.edu/travelandlearn/