Four at a time, Clearwater High students sat at a lunch counter with their eyes closed that simulated the ones that activists throughout the south sat in an effort to integrate businesses. Through headphones, the students heard racist taunts and aggressive language. Once the demonstration was over, the students, with a sense of disbelief, pondered if they could have weathered such insults without retaliation.

The lunch counter simulation was at the Center for Civil and Human Rights Museum in Atlanta, Ga. and it was part of the first day of a four-day Civil Rights Tour that 24 Clearwater High students, known as CHS Freedom Ambassadors, participated.  From March 15-18, CHS Freedom Ambassadors visited Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., Memphis, Tenn. and Washington, D.C. The trip was the culmination of a project-based, personalized learning opportunity that included an in-depth tour of sites with historical significance for the Civil Rights Movement.

This was the fourth year for the tour. The Freedom Ambassadors researched and participated in experiences that connected them to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. They also met key stakeholders, active participants and spectators of these important events.

While in Atlanta, the ambassadors toured Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King attended as a child and co-pastored with his father. They visited the Reflecting Pool that surrounds the tombs of Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King. They also had a conversation with Ernie Suggs, a civil rights and politics reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

After a bus ride to Birmingham, Al., the ambassadors visited Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where four girls were killed as a result of a bomb during the Civil Rights Movement. There, the ambassadors discussed the bombing and held a moment of silence in the exact location where the bomb detonated.

The evening ended at Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham where the church’s current Pastor Thomas L. Wilder Jr. detailed the role that the church and former pastor,  Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, played in the Civil Rights Movement. Bethel Baptist Church complex is on the National Register of Historic Places and was declared a National Historic Landmark on April 5, 2005.