This sculpture, above, in Birmingham, Ala.’s Kelly Ingram Park, depicts a police dog attacking a demonstrator during a civil rights protest in the city in May 1963 that drew national attention. Below is Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, the target of a Ku Klux Klan bombing on Sep. 15, 1963 that killed four black girls.

Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., this summer, Glen Sagueiro got a visceral feel for the courage the civil rights movement demanded.

It was there, on March 7, 1965, that a group of about 600 demonstrators marched into a thicket of police officers who attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas in a galvanizing event known as “Bloody Sunday.”

“They know they’re going to take a beating and they just keep marching,” said Saguerio, an eighth-grade teacher at Edward R. Martin Middle School in East Providence.

That moment on the bridge was one of dozens of highlights for a group of 16 history teachers from East Providence, Cranston and Cumberland who took a civil rights tour of the South in late June.

And with school set to begin in the coming days or weeks, those teachers are preparing to bring their experiences into the classroom with pictures, PowerPoint presentations and the music of a movement.

The trip, organized by the Rhode Island Historical Society, was the final leg of a three-summer exploration of American revolutions.

In the summer of 2006, teachers from the three Rhode Island communities visited Philadelphia to study the Revolutionary War.

Last year, instructors took a bus to Lowell, Mass., to get a feel for the Industrial Revolution, touring the city’s historic mills and canals.

And in June, teachers visited Birmingham, Ala., Montgomery, Ala., Selma and New Orleans in an attempt to build a grass-roots understanding of the civil rights movement –– and the history leading up to it.

The three-year program, funded by a roughly $600,000 federal grant focused on the teaching of American history, also included lectures by college professors and a requirement that participants create lesson plans based on their experiences.

And for the teachers who participated in the civil rights tour, those experiences are still vivid.

Edward S. Inman III, an eighth-grade American history teacher at Western Hills Middle School in Cranston — and a former Rhode Island secretary of state — said he was particularly taken with an exhibit simulating the slave experience at The Slavery and Civil War Museum, in Selma.

Teachers were “captured” in Africa, shipped to the United States, sorted and assigned work.

“That was fairly intense,” Inman said, noting that some participants found the exercise difficult and “demeaning.”

Steven Casavant, a history teacher at Cumberland High School, said he was struck by the tales of aging veterans of the Children’s March, a demonstration by black Birmingham schoolchildren May 2, 1963, that drew national attention.

Casavant said those stories, and the trip as a whole, transported him from the life of a 21st-century New Englander.

“It opens your eyes to … how different your world is from a world not too far removed,” he said.

It was not so long ago, he said, that demonstrators were dying for the right to vote.

The seven-day tour, which also included a group of about 20 Connecticut teachers, began in Birmingham.

The teachers toured the 16th Street Baptist Church, which was the target of a Ku Klux Klan bombing on Sep. 15, 1963 that killed four black girls.

In Montgomery, the group stopped by the Southern Poverty Law Center and learned about the group’s continuing fight against hate crimes.

And in New Orleans, teachers visited a school coping with post-Katrina realities and took in traditional Mardi Gras performances.

The New Orleans stop, said C. Morgan Grefe, director of the Newell D. Goff Center for Education and Public Programs with the Rhode Island Historical Society, was designed to provide a glimpse into the civil rights challenges still confronting the country.

And for Chris Ougheltree, a history and sociology teacher at Cranston High School East, the sight of the still-ravaged city provided some insight into a problem that has been gnawing at him since the last school year.

He said he has felt a “disconnect” with some of his minority students. He said he could not quite understand their deep distrust of authority –– of police and government.

Walking through civil rights history, seeing the problems that still persist, gave him a bit more perspective.

“It’s the personal experience,” Ougheltree said.

But he said he was still not sure what to make of it all –– still not sure how it would play out in his classroom.

The teacher, two months after his trip, is still learning.

dscharfe@projo.com