Eight students and three faculty members are traveling together to several historical civil rights sights in Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama for a TCU Civil Rights Bus Tour, which is a history class offered this month.

Professor Max Krochmal, the professor of the class, said these historic landmarks were chosen because they “are the places where it is easiest to see the impact of ordinary people of the civil rights movement on the ground and especially the role of college students and other young people.”

Krochmal also said the course focuses on the “student wing” of the civil rights movement by learning about college-aged students and their impact on social change. He hopes students will learn from this and “leave the class empowered to think of themselves as change agents.”

“I think when you learn about it, it is easy to read in a book and imagine what it is going to look like but when you are actually there, feeling what they could of felt and seeing what they were actually seeing, it definitely changes how you intake the information,” said Maddie Kincaid, a junior social work major participating in the bus tour.

“We have learned so much about the true history of the civil rights movement so it is going to be exciting to live in it,” senior political science major Kortnie Maxoutopoulis said.

The tour has been previously offered at TCU as a co-curricular experience rather than a class field trip. The tour is now apart of the May semester course HIST 40873: The Civil Rights Movement in America.

“By combining the tour with the class, that means the students will get a lot more out of the experience part,” Krochmal said. “They will be a lot more prepared, they will have a better understanding of what they are seeing, and they will be able to apply what they are learning to their own lives better.”

The class is centered around “the history of the modern African American civil rights movement and uses it as a vehicle to explore the theory and practice of group-centered leadership development,” according to the course description on the class’ syllabus.

The group will arrive back on campus May 24. Updates about the class’ progress can be followed on Twitter by searching #tcucrbt.