Students travel into civil rights' rich history - USATODAY.com: MONTGOMERY, Ala. — More than 90 California high school students are crying and hugging their way this week through the hard, bloody years of the civil rights movement.
When it's over, they will have talked to Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other voter rights demonstrators were bludgeoned by state troopers in 1965.
They will have heard Chris McNair tell of losing his daughter, Denise, in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.
They will have listened to members of the Vernon Dahmer family discuss the agony of losing a husband and father — killed by Ku Klux Klan members in 1966 after he announced that black voters could pay their poll tax at his store.
They will have stood at the site at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in 1968.
Before it ends Saturday, they will have seen and heard and felt all of that and much more, on stops in Atlanta, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Hattiesburg, Miss.; Jackson, Miss; Little Rock and Memphis.
There are 93 of them — a diverse group — and they are on a 10-day journey called Sojourn to the Past. The mission: connect the pain of history with a hope for the future.
