The Rev. Roderick Thomas was struggling to find a topic for the return of Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church’s community-wide Black History Month program following a two-year hiatus.

Over the decade before the break in 2023 and 2024, while the church attempted a film project, the event had used such media as dance, music and poetry, typically with community participation, to explore and spotlight the people, places and events integral to the Black experience in the United States.

However, Thomas finally stopped close to home for the focus of the production that’s set for 6:30 p.m. Feb. 24 at the historic church at 408 N. Ninth St. in Gadsden.

It’s a drama called “The Three Boys from Gadsden, Alabama,” the story of three teenagers from the city who hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to take part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

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One of those young men was Robert Frank Thomas — the Rev. Thomas’ father. The others were Robert Avery and James Smith.

“This is telling their story,” the Rev. Thomas said, adding that the roughly 90-minute drama will tell “how they got to Washington, D.C., what they did when they were there and the reason for going. It’s going to be good.”

The trio — Thomas was 18 (and instigated the trip, Avery said in a 2013 Times retrospective), Smith 16 and Avery 15 at the time — left for Washington on Aug. 18, 1963. They walked up U.S. Highway 11, where a few months earlier William Lewis Moore, a white postal worker walking to protest segregation, had been killed in a crime that has never been solved.

They caught a Greyhound bus on the way, which dropped them off in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They walked the roughly 30 miles to Cleveland, Tennessee, then caught rides the rest of the way.

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“They didn’t have any money … so they had to come up with a way to get there,” the Rev. Thomas said. “which is something that some young people would do. I call them ‘crazy but courageous.’ It’s crazy when you think about an 18-year-old, a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old hitchhiking to Washington, D.C., but to make it is courageous.”

He said their reason for going, for taking the risk, was they “wanted to be part of change.”

After arriving in Washington with 35 cents between them, they connected with civil rights leaders who found accommodations for them and hired them to make signs and buttons and stuff envelopes leading up to the march.

They carried signs to the Washington Monument on Aug. 28, 1963, the day of the march that drew a quarter of a million participants, and were present for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s immortal “I Have a Dream” speech. Organizers later provided them bus tickets home.

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“I was contemplating on what to do for this year,” the Rev. Thomas said, “because it seemed like we’d been doing this for so long that we’d used up all the Black history ideas that might be good plays. But this is a great opportunity for us right now.”

Robert Frank Thomas died in 2004 and Smith died in 2022. (Smith’s son, Steve, currently serves on the Gadsden City Council.)

Avery, a longtime Gadsden City Council member, remains active in community affairs.

Doors open at 6 p.m. and there is no admission charge for the program, but seating is first come, first served.