BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Derrick Locke was upfront about his visit to the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Ala., where the Kentucky football team will play in the BBVA Compass Bowl later in the week.In all honesty, Locke didn’t want to go. At first he felt like it was just a mandatory team field trip, an obligation for being in a bowl in Birmingham, more so than it was a privilege. And then he saw the old buses of Birmingham that were segregated, walked the same streets as Martin Luther King Jr., looked at pictures and murals of the 1950s and ’60s, and relived the differences in rights for whites and blacks just decades ago. Locke, his teammates and coaches got a firsthand look at the civil and human rights struggles past generations battled through, fought for and even died for.”It’s a wakeup call,” Locke said. “I’m glad coach made us go through that. I wasn’t really feeling it at first, but when I got there, I really wanted to read and learn about everything our people went through. It’s eye opening.”After Tuesday’s practice, the team visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a learning center and museum that traces the journey that African-Americans made from the founding of Birmingham in the 1870s through today. The BCRI has special emphasis on the turbulent decades of the 1950s and ’60s, when the struggle for civil rights was at its peak.For sophomore quarterback Morgan Newton and the Wildcats, it was a “flashback” opportunity to be able to understand everything their parents and grandparents lived through.”It humbles you,” Newton said. “It lets you know where we’ve come in the last few years even though we haven’t really been a part of. It was a great experience. It makes all the history lessons you had back in elementary school and middle school come to life. It gives you a different viewpoint. It’s the type of things our parents tell us about that we don’t really understand. I still don’t know if I completely understand everything that happened, but it puts things in perspective for sure.”Locke said it made him appreciate how good the players have it now. To be able to play in a bowl game, regardless of its prestige, is an honor.”It made you think about a lot of things,” Locke said. “They got through a lot of stuff and now we’re complaining about simple stuff. It made me think, if we had the mind frame of how they were back in the day, our lives would be easy.”The primary objective in the trip to Birmingham is to win a bowl game and improve to 7-6 on the season, but the game is only half the story. “This is a business for us, there’s no doubt about it,” head coach Joker Phillips said. “Our goal is to have a winning season, which would be our fifth straight. That’s one of our goals. But you’ve also got to have some fun or they won’t want to come back to another bowl. When it’s time for business, we’re down to it. But then when it’s time for free time, we want the guys to have fun also.”In addition to the player development, the national exposure and the extra game a bowl provides, the bowl game is also about the experience the players have together as team, Newton said. “Football is kind of the excuse to come down here and learn so much more and experience so much more,” Newton said. “The Civil Rights Institute was one of those things that came along with a bowl game that we really didn’t expect, but it’s going to make us better people, and I think that’s the objective of bowl games.”If the Kentucky players get nothing out of the trip other than the bowl, the visit to the Civil Rights Institute was evidence enough of the importance of bowl games.”All this color stuff, we play at Kentucky, black and white people together as one,” Locke said. “We don’t see color. We see blue and white. We’re a team. If everybody could be like that, the world would be a better place.”