A half-century after the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott inspired the modern civil rights movement, ethnic studies associate professor Ralph Crowder hoped that touring monuments of the struggle would move UC Riverside students as well.

"The vast majority of students here have never been to the Deep South," Crowder said. "I wanted to expose them to a different geographical background and see the places they were reading about."

(left to right) Tim Aguilar, a senior liberal studies/history major; his son, Tim Jr., age 12, and the professor, Ralph Crowder. Both Aguilars participated in the trip.

Tim Aguilar, a senior liberal studies/history major, said he was familiar with details of the civil rights movement because of readings and lectures in Crowder's class, Ethnic Studies 112/History 135: The Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1970.

But he did not expect the moving accounts of people who lived through that traumatic period.

"We realized we were able to talk to a generation of people who won't be here in a few years," Aguilar said. "That feeling is nothing you can read in a book or see in a film."

Students paid about $400 each for airfare and lodging, plus food. The Center for Ideas and Society awarded a $700 grant to cover printing costs for an 80-page book of readings assembled for the trip and rental of a van.

Students toured a number of sites that figure prominently in the civil rights movement, among them: the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was an assistant pastor in Atlanta; the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery; the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, and the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma.

Crowder said the trip also illustrated the on-going struggle to recognize the role of average people in effecting societal changes and how events a half-century ago inspired similar movements among Native Americans, Chicano nationalists and feminists.

"A number of people don't realize how hard people had to struggle for what we take for granted - desegregation, integration into public facilities, simply riding in the front of the bus, voting and participating in municipal government," he said.

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum made a powerful impression on Aguilar's 12-year-old son, who accompanied his father on the field trip. The museum honors the African American seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in 1955 sparked a 382-day boycott.

"I was amazed to see how they treated black people at that time," said Tim Jr.

For his father, attending a lively Sunday service at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was especially moving.

"It filled your heart with joy and hope," Aguilar said.