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GREENSBORO — Anna Nutter shook her head and sighed as the tour guide at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum explained that the double-sided drink machine in front of them had two sides for a reason.

The nickel side was once for whites, and the 10-cent side was for blacks.

“I was thinking how ridiculous it was — and can you imagine how much money was spent to keep the water separate, to keep the Coke separate, to keep the people separate?” said Nutter, a student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

She was among 40 college students visiting the museum Monday while retracing the bus route of the Freedom Riders. The group also includes Collis Crews, an N.C. A&T student.

The original Riders traveled the South in 1961, testing federal laws banning segregation.

“These are intelligent young people, but it’s sometimes hard to imagine,” said Robert Singleton, an original Freedom Rider traveling with the student group. Singleton’s photo is on the museum’s wall of police mug shots of people arrested during civil rights demonstrations across the South.

He and his wife, Helen, were arrested in a whites-only waiting room in Jackson, Miss., and served more than a month in jail.

“It’s mind-boggling what they had to do for the privileges we have and take for granted,” said LeRoy Ford, a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The original Riders — more than 400 Americans, both black and white — found deeply entrenched pro-segregation sentiment that led to beatings, arrests and intimidation. It even led to the firebombing of one of the buses carrying the group.

The bus was occupied at the time. Violence was not uncommon as black people fought for their rights.

“I can never fully experience the pain and humiliation they went through,” Nutter said. “But this is better than a classroom.”

The student tour includes stops in Jackson, and the one in Greensboro, where the launch of the sit-in movement quickly spread through the South.

The students tracing the Riders’ steps say they want to use the civil rights movement as a model for battling contemporary issues — and for Doaa Dorgham, an N.C. State student and a Muslim, that’s prejudice against Islam.

“It is up to our generation to fix the problem,” Dorgham said.

The tour is in its first few days, but the museum’s open-casket photos of the lynching of black teenager Emmett Till have already given the students pause.

“No history book would ever give you such detail,” said May Mgbolu, a political science major from the University of Arizona, as she neared the lunch counter exhibit. “Being able to almost touch the lunch counter is an amazing experience. This is history in the present.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com