On August 29, 1961, thirty-two men and twenty women from the United States--all in their mid-twenties--boarded a chartered Pan American World Airways turboprop bound for Accra, Ghana, from Washington's National Airport.

Two days earlier, they had arrived in Washington from the University of California at Berkeley, where they had just completed two months of training in educational pedagogy and African studies. Arriving in Ghana on August 30, they stepped off the plane and sang the Ghanaian national anthem to the waiting crowd in Twi, one of the local languages.

This musical gesture of friendship underscored the goals of the organization that ...