Dr. Ira Gilbert Zepp, a social activist and influential professor of religious studies at what is now McDaniel College who had inspired generations of students to devote their lives to civil rights, peace and social justice, died of congestive heart failure Saturday at his Westminster home. He was 79.
"Ira will be deeply missed and long remembered by everyone in our college family," McDaniel President Joan Develin Coley said Monday in a statement.
"Ira was a gifted and devoted teacher, a true humanitarian who gave unselfishly of himself to make this world a better place for all," Dr. Coley said. "His legacy of peace and love and justice will surely live on."
Dr. Zepp, the son of tenant farmers, was born and raised in Madonna. After graduating from Bel Air High School, he earned a bachelor's degree in 1952 from what was then Western Maryland College.
He was a magna cum laude graduate of Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J., and earned his doctorate in 1971 from St. Mary's Seminary and University in Roland Park.
An ordained Methodist minister, Dr. Zepp pastored churches in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland before joining the McDaniel faculty in 1963 as dean of the chapel.
Dr. Zepp conducted classes on such taboo subjects at the time as human sexuality, death and racism. His serious scholarship on a wide range of subjects from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X and the culture and religion of Islam earned him packed classrooms, a devoted following and numerous plaudits.
It was a tenet of Dr. Zepp's that questions unite while answers divide and that the purpose of becoming educated and acquiring knowledge is for it to be used for the common good of all mankind.
One of Dr. Zepp's favorite sayings was: "To know and not to act is not to know."
Dr. Zepp had served on the committee that helped desegregate many restaurants in Westminster, and his civil rights work sometimes took him off campus.
In 1965, he participated in the historic march on Selma, Ala., with Dr. King and other civil rights demonstrators.
However, not everyone in Dr. Zepp's Westminster neighborhood at the time shared his and his wife's civil rights advocacy.
"By virtue of taking stands you will have some people who are on the other side. I've made enemies, but I never think of them as enemies," he said in an interview with The Hill, the McDaniel alumni magazine. "I will love the hell out of them, or better yet, heaven into them."
