MEMPHIS, TENN. • They sat outside the Lorraine Motel, looking up at Room 306. The 20 sixth-graders from The Wilson School in Clayton were told by their guide it was on the balcony outside that room where Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot.

As the rain began to fall, a few of the children began to squirm. But most were caught up listening to King's "I See the Promised Land" speech booming from a portable stereo their guide brought along for the visit.

"I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man," King said, the recording echoing off the nearby building from where the shooter fired. "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

The words are haunting. It has been nearly 44 years since King gave that speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. It would be his last. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead.

The guide for last week's trip, Jeff Steinberg, executive director of Sojourn to the Past, wanted the children to feel King's presence, to wring the most out of their visit.

As the now famous speech ended with King talking about his trip to the mountaintop, the children sat, stone silent, the rain dotting their faces.

Steinberg turned to the large tombstone-like plaque behind him, which includes the dates of King's birth and death along with a quote from the Book of Genesis: "Behold here cometh the dreamer. ... Let us slay him. ... And we shall see what will become of his dreams."

This is a time for reflection, Steinberg told the children. Take as much time as you want. A common way to pay respects to King is to bring your index and middle fingers to your lips, then gently place those fingers on the plaque, he said.

Ten seconds passed. Then 20. It would be close to a minute before Matthew Gelfman, 11, slowly stood and walked to the plaque, doing what Steinberg suggested.

"It was respectful, and I wanted to be a leader on this," Matthew later explained.

The Lorraine Motel, now a part of the National Civil Rights Museum, was one of two major stops on a three-day civil rights bus trip for the sixth-graders. Sojourn to the Past, a nonprofit group, offers trips to schools across the country. Typically, it is designed for high school students and covers five Southern states in 10 days. Wilson School leaders asked Steinberg whether he would consider creating a shorter trip for younger students.

Head of School Thad Falkner came back impressed and said there already is talk of expanding the trip next year to include a stop in Selma, Ala.

"This trip is so relevant to understanding history, and they can make it personal, be vested in something," Falkner said of his students. "They can make decisions on how important this is in their life, our school and our community. That abstract thinking is well-timed at the sixth-grade level."

THE LITTLE ROCK NINE

As Steinberg explains it, the trips are designed to experience history while inspiring the future. Or as Alison Gill, 11, put it: "We need to take this trip so we can see our progress and not fall back into our old ways."

The other stop was Little Rock, Ark., where students walked into Central High School, something nine black students were not allowed to do in 1957 despite a Supreme Court ruling desegregating schools.

At Central High, the Wilson students met Elizabeth Eckford, who will forever be known as one of the Little Rock Nine. Photos of Eckford appeared around the globe as a 15-year-old black girl walking through an angry crowd of whites outside the high school.

"The press was in front of me and protesters behind me," Eckford said to the students as she sat in a folding chair on the stage of the high school's large auditorium.

When she tried to enter the school, 'soldiers crossed rifles to bar me," Eckford told the students.

Eckford, now 70, has told her story more times than she can count but is still a bit uneasy doing so. The pain is still there. With each speaking engagement, she requests a box of tissues be placed nearby. During her talk with the students, she wiped her eyes a few times. She considers retelling the story part of her continued healing.

Not everyone is comfortable standing up to those who are bullies, she said. But anyone can offer a smile or words of encouragement to those being harassed.

"You can help somebody live another day," Eckford said. "It's not an exaggeration."

Eckford has suffered from depression and continues to struggle with flashbacks from the verbal and physical abuse she received nearly 55 years ago.

Unlike Eckford, Minnijean Brown-Trickey, another of the Little Rock Nine, is gregarious and comfortable speaking to a crowd. She wears the title of activist proudly and is not shy about offering her opinion. But tears well up when the students get a chance to tell her what she means to them: Brave. Courageous. A hero. An ordinary woman who did an extraordinary thing.

Brown-Trickey spent most of the trip with the Wilson students, including a bus ride to Little Rock from Memphis. Outside the Arkansas state Capitol are statues of the Little Rock Nine.

"Aren't they cool?" Brown-Trickey says with a childlike giddiness. "I drive by every once in a while and go, 'Oh, my God!'"

She gets a kick out of seeing children interlocking their arms with those of the statues. A hard rain prevented the Wilson students from getting off the bus for a closer look, so they took photos from inside.

Brown said she was misled growing up, thinking enemies were people far, far away.

"In my time, they told us our enemies were the Soviet Union," Brown-Trickey said. "I always believed that if there was an enemy, it certainly wouldn't be in my hometown."

'AN HONOR'

Meeting people whose stories are mentioned in history books impressed the students. Hearing the Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles speak was no exception.

The day before the students visited the Lorraine Motel, Kyles spoke with them in a conference room at their hotel. He was on the balcony with King the night the civil rights leader was shot.

The students said getting to hug the man who held King until the ambulance arrived was an experience they would never forget.

"It was pretty amazing, an honor to meet all these people," said Thomas Miller Jr., 12. "The takeaway message is hold on to your dreams and help others accomplish their dreams and not put them down."

Some parents accompanied their children on the trip, including Thomas Miller Sr. He and his son visited the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis before the trip to study Dred Scott. Going to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis put the Scott case in context as part of the greater civil rights movement, said Miller, 47. And it helped better explain the nuances of racism, he said.

"When I was growing up, it was much more outward," Miller said. "Today, it's still out there, alive and well, but not as easy to spot. Especially as a young person."

Britt Booker, 48, said the trip was invaluable for him to share with his son.

"It's something unique to us that we'll have for the rest of our lives," said Booker, who often pulled his son aside to point out exhibits in the museum. "For me, it was a good experience to share my knowledge about the history of this country. It's been really neat for him to lean on me as his source of information."

Nicholas Booker, 12, basically agreed with his dad.

"If he wasn't there, I might have been tempted to goof around and stuff," Nicholas said.

The trip for Sineta Roker, 32, was an often emotional one. Several times, tears streamed down her face. One of the more moving moments for her came while standing outside the Lorraine Motel while listening to the King speech. Her son, Oliver Hamilton III, 12, clutched her arm.

"Oliver looked over and said, 'Mom, why are you crying? Did you know him?'" Roker recalled. "He'll get it. Someday, he'll get it."

How much the children ultimately took from the trip is hard to gauge. All were asked to keep a journal. Some wrote pages a day. Others a few lines. Some of the students were effusive, like Elizabeth Cohen.

"That's where one of the greatest men in history died," said Elizabeth, 11, a few minutes after going through the museum, which includes a peek into Room 306 of the motel, re-created to look exactly as it did on April 4, 1968. Others such as Oliver were more reserved and hesitant to share experiences.

At an all-school assembly on Friday morning, each of the students read reports on what they learned on their journey to a time when rights to vote, ride a bus or go to school were off-limits to blacks.

Josephine Moten, 12, was most struck by her visit to Central High in Little Rock. She recounted her walk up the stairs to the school's entrance, thinking about the black students who tried to do the same thing more than five decades ago.

"This was where history was made," Josephine said. "Wow!"

In his presentation Friday, Christopher Swanson, 11, said he struggled to understand why the man with a national holiday now named after him was arrested more than 30 times during his fight for equality.

"He was just trying to make a difference in the world."