Civil Rights Tour Takes Students Over a Bridge Into Nation's Past

By John Gehring

Selma, Ala.

Melinda Beira squints through the glare of a red-hot Alabama sun as she walks over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Thirty-five years ago, the African-American teenager would have risked blows from police batons if she had tried to cross this stretch of road spanning the Alabama River, where civil rights marchers on their way to Montgomery were beaten by state troopers in an incident now known as "Bloody Sunday."

"I owe these people my life," Ms. Beira, 16, says of the marchers. "It is my job to carry their torch."

Ms. Beira was one of 15 students from throughout Massachusetts who participated in an 18-day tour of the South this summer organized by the Massachusetts...