Last week’s gun protests were powerfully effective. Older students should take notes.

Fla., massacre, has put new facts on the ground. Where those facts will take us depends on what they do next and who follows the students’ lead.

This week’s March for Our Lives in Washington will amplify the call.

School walkouts were with us long before the age of instantaneous clicking. High school students took to the streets in the 1960s to demand reforms. But the current walkouts are in one crucial way precedent-making. In the 1960s, the initiative came from adults who had been campaigning against segregation for years: ministers and civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congress of Racial Equality.

This week, the students took the initiative. They were the leaders.

In the 1960s, there were young leaders aplenty in anti-racist and anti-war movements, but the leaders of those movements were college and university students. I know, because I was in the thick of it, with Students for a Democratic Society. Enthusiastic high schoolers did join in, but they were ¬troops more than officers.

The most celebrated, and probably the most effective, wave of schoolchildren’s protest came on May 2, 1963, when more than 1,000 teenagers trained in nonviolent action poured out of high schools in and around segregationist Birmingham, Ala., which the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the most segregated city in the country.”

Dr. King’s followers had been protesting segregation for weeks but had run short of adult volunteers. King himself, at first hesitant to involve the young, was persuaded to try. The students would walk downtown, hoping to talk with the mayor about segregation. Hundreds were arrested. Set free, they turned out the next day, too.

Hundreds more teenagers turned out, too, and this time, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor ordered his police to turn high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on the demonstrators. This was bad for public relations. The images of assault on innocent victims circumnavigated the world and fueled still more civil rights activity, which culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting