Musicians from around the world will perform a free concert, focusing on human rights, and will draw an audience at the local college next week.

The concert, Rock for Human Rights, will feature music by Morganton, N.C. native Wil Seabrook and Alexio Kawara, a native of Harare, Zimbabwe. The 40-minute concert, which will be held on Sept. 18 at noon outside of Building 5 of Beaufort County Community College, is part of a national tour to promote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to a BCCC press release. The group will also be performing a full concert at the Turnage Theater on Sept. 20 at 8 p.m. Tickets can be bought for $25 per person.

BCCC Foundation Director Judy Jennette said the concert will be held outside Building 5 due to the landscape being a sort of natural amphitheater. In the event of bad weather, the concert, which will include refreshments, will be moved inside Building 10. The free event is part of the college’s fall fling event to welcome students back to campus and give them a break, as well as to host a social gathering on campus, promoting the public to visit the campus, Jennette said.

“Last year, we brought in four speakers for the community to hear, and they were fairly well-attended, but we wanted to expand it and do something a little different so we thought this was a good opportunity,” Jennette said. “We want to expand, and we want the community to take more advantage of what we have to offer here.”

Seabrook, who currently lives in Los Angeles, said he became interested in human rights after being asked by a friend to write a song to accompany a human rights campaign on the Internet. Seabrook founded Rock for Human Rights in 2011 and tapped Kawara to join him with the intent to bring human rights awareness to diverse audiences using the power of music, visual media and social networking, he said in the release.

“I really fell in love with that message,” Seabrook said in a press release. “I looked for a simple way to share information about human rights.”

The Rock for Human Rights concert will perform really accessible music, which is best characterized as rock/pop. This is the band’s first national tour, with its purpose being to talk to people and raise a level of awareness about human rights, Seabrook said.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Dec. 1948, was the result of the experience of World War II, the release said. With the end of that war and the creation of the United Nations, the international community vowed never to allow atrocities like those of that conflict to happen again. World leaders decided to complement the U.N. Charter with a road map to guarantee the rights of every individual everywhere. The document they considered, which would later become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was taken up at the first session of the General Assembly in 1946. The declaration guarantees “30 basic human rights for everybody on the plant that almost nobody knows about,” Seabrook said in the release. “The end goal (of Rock for Human Rights) is a worldwide movement with million of people aware of their human rights.”

For more information about the concert, contact Foundation Director Judy Jennette at 252-940-6326 or visit rockforhumanrights.org.