Sometime in March of 1960, a Howard University student named Hank Thomas tried to buy a movie ticket in Hyattsville.

That small action launched his history-making involvement in the civil rights movement, which we commemorate today on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

At the time, Thomas was 18, and he and other students at the historically Black college in Washington, D.C., were transfixed by the news of the Greensboro sit-ins that sought to desegregate a lunch counter in North Carolina.

While there was racial segregation in D.C. at the time, Thomas felt that there were better targets for similar sit-ins in the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, where segregation was more enforced.

One weekend in March, Thomas and his fellow “weekend warriors” from Howard came up to the Hyattsville Theatre, an 800-seat movie theater at 5612 Baltimore Ave. in what is now the Arts District, an Art Moderne building from the 1930s.

“We went there to buy tickets, prearranging we wouldn’t move out of the way for other people to buy tickets,” he recalled years later. “That’s when I was arrested. That was the beginning.”

The following year, Thomas became one of the first 13 Freedom Riders, a group of Black and White civil rights activists who rode buses through the South, attempting to use “Whites-only” lunch counters and bathrooms.

In one stop in Alabama, Thomas’ Greyhound bus was fire-bombed and he was hit on the head with a baseball bat during an attack by an angry mob.

Thomas, who was arrested 22 times at civil rights protests, went on to become one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He served as a medic in Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart, and became a successful businessman later in life.

Sit-ins and other protests against segregation continued at Prince George’s County businesses through 1962, much later than in some other D.C. suburbs. You can read a first-person account of a typical protest at a local bowling alley here.

The Hyattsville Theatre closed and was torn down in 1965.