To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

CHARLOTTE -- A dozen students will trace a 2,200-mile path of southern Civil Rights. It's a project that makes the not-so-distant past, a reality for the 12 to 17-year-olds.

"If you really think about it it's not that long ago, so you can kind of picture what it might have felt like," said eighth grader Beau Devaul. He attended the tour last year and will return this year as a mentor. "When you really see it and you really feel you actually get the sense of what they went through."

"Students think that history is something ancient, something to be memorized, sometimes something to be forgotten," said Dr. Michael Thompson, a Pfeiffer University history professor who organized the tour. "But now, they know it's something to be applied, lessons to be applied to their own lives."

The experience started Thursday night, when former Mayor Harvey Gantt, Sarah Stephenson and Julius Chambers talked to the group about their own experiences in Charlotte.

"To be able to talk directly to the individuals who made the history and to know that very important parts of that happened right here," said Thompson.

The students will visit seven cities in three states, but they aren't overlooking North Carolina's role in the change of America.

"In Greensboro, they had the lunch counter sit in so that's a big part, that's a big part of the civil rights cause that started lunch counter sit ins all over the country," Devaul said.