Fifty years ago last night, four first-year students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College decided to head into Greensboro the following day and ask to be served at the lunch counter of the city’s Woolworth’s store. Fifty years ago this afternoon, they did just that.

The four students weren’t served that day, but they stayed seated at the counter until the store closed, and by the next day — with a little help from the A&T student government president — they had rounded up two dozen students to join their protest. In days sit-ins were spreading across North Carolina, and within weeks they were happening all over the South. Before long it was a movement — the first student movement of the 1960s.

The sixties began fifty years ago today. And it was four undergraduate students at an obscure Ag and Tech college who did it.