Interview'It's a lost story'

Film charts lasting impact of rollercoaster Black-Jewish protest of segregated park

Documentary film ‘Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,’ screening Jan. 29 at the NY Jewish Film Festival, shows how a 1960 neighborhood demonstration in Maryland shifted civil rights

Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.

Civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins and A. Phillip Randolph during a protest at Maryland's Glen Echo Park in 1960. (Courtesy/George Meany Library)
Civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins and A. Phillip Randolph during a protest at Maryland's Glen Echo Park in 1960. (Courtesy/George Meany Library)

NEW YORK — Growing up in suburban Maryland, film director Ilana Trachtman was transfixed by the remains of a disused amusement park near her home. The Glen Echo Amusement Park had roller coaster tracks, popcorn advertisements and a bumper car pavilion, with signs bearing 1920s-style Art Deco fonts and color schemes. Trachtman loved to imagine revelers seeking thrills at the park in its heyday, and older neighbors described their “sweet memories” at the site, she said.

Years later, Trachtman found out about a darker chapter in the park’s history — that Black people had been barred from the site. She realized the photos she had been “looking at longingly” only showed white people.

“I just hadn’t thought about it,” Trachtman said in an interview. “If all those people were white, that meant that there were entire communities of people who were not allowed to come in.”

Trachtman also learned of the effort to integrate the park in an early protest that brought together local Jews and Black university students in the first community-organized interracial civil rights demonstration. That demonstration also sparked the first post-war public protest by the American Nazi Party. Trachtman became obsessed with the story, spending 10 years producing an 89-minute documentary on the protest.

That film, “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” was released earlier this year and will be one of the featured films at the New York Jewish Film Festival later this month.

The festival, a collaboration between the Jewish Museum and the nonprofit Film at Lincoln Center, will be held at Lincoln Center in Manhattan from January 15-29. The 34th iteration of the festival will show close to two dozen feature films, documentaries and shorts. The opening film, “Midas Man,” is a biopic about Brian Epstein, the Jewish manager of the Beatles in the 1960s. The centerpiece film, “Of Dogs and Men,” is about a teenage girl searching for her dog in a kibbutz in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities. “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” is the festival’s closing film and will be shown twice on January 29.

The festival’s director, Aviva Weintraub, highlighted the film, particularly its archival footage, as a message to today’s audience that captures the civil rights era.

“Between the visuals and the music and the interviews, it’s very evocative of that time,” Weintraub said in an interview. “It’s about enlightening people to the history that it covers, but I would say it’s also a very hopeful movie, which is important right now.”

During the protest in the summer of 1960, five Black Howard University students were arrested for sitting on the park’s carousel, drawing support from a nearby, mainly Jewish community. The two groups picketed outside the park throughout the summer. The protest drew press headlines, attention from Congress, and a legal dispute that reached the Supreme Court.

Many of the white supporters were second-generation Jews who had moved to the Washington, DC, area to work for the New Deal. They encountered antisemitic housing legislation when they arrived in the area and set up a progressive, mostly Jewish community called Bannockburn in 1946. The war and the fact that many residents had relatives who died in the Holocaust were a heavy influence.

A sit-in protest at the Glen Echo Park in Maryland in 1960. (Courtesy)

Helene Wilson, one of the Jewish activists, says in the film that she had befriended the first Black girl at her school in upstate New York due to antisemitic discrimination in Europe.

“Jewish children were shunned, weren’t allowed to go to regular schools,” Wilson says. “The Second World War radicalized me, and what happened to people who did not have power.”

“They had a sense of what discrimination felt like,” Trachtman said.

In response to the protest, George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, launched the group’s first public protest since the war, marching across the street from the civil rights demonstrators. The film shows white counter-protesters holding signs saying “The head of the NAACP is a Jew” and wearing swastika armbands.

Tractman tracked down surviving protesters and their relatives for the film, which centers on a handful of the surviving activists. Most of the interviewees had never spoken publicly about the protest. The filmmakers also pored through archival footage, unearthing some clips that had never been screened publicly.

“You are now trespassing. Can I ask your race?” a white security guard asks a Black man in an archival clip at the opening of the film.

“My race? I belong to the human race,” he responds. “You’re telling me because my skin is black, I cannot come into your park?”

The jarring exchange is contrasted with jingles used in advertisements for the park and footage showing white attendees enjoying the park’s roller coaster, pool and fortune teller “fun house.”

The footage is complemented by motion graphics and music that reflect the 1960s aesthetic. There is no narrator; actors including Jeffrey Wright, Mandy Patinkin and Peter Gallagher provide voiceovers to read materials such as press headlines.

The film’s title is derived from the Langston Hughes poem “Merry-Go-Round.” In the poem, a child seeks to alight on the ride, but is confused by laws saying he must sit on the back of the bus, but that there “ain’t no back to a merry-go-round.”

Black and white children at a July 4, 1960 protest against the Glen Echo Park. (Courtesy/Amy Bookbinder)

The story is not one of clear-cut heroism. The owners of the park and targets of the protest were two Jewish brothers, Samuel and Abram Baker, making the struggle personal for Jewish activists, and also meaning Nazis were protesting on the side of the Jewish owners. Some Black community members opposed the Black students, viewing them as presumptuous outsiders focused on park discrimination instead of more pressing issues like employment and housing.

The protest had a lasting impact on the civil rights movement. Ten of those involved became Freedom Riders the following year, and some became leaders in the movement, including Stokely Carmichael.

Despite its significance, the event faded from history, likely due to the fact that the protest activities stayed local, and because it came early, before the established timeline of the civil rights movement, Trachtman said, calling the protest “a lost story.”

“The stories that became famous were the ones that made national news — Montgomery Bus Boycott, Birmingham, Selma,” she said. “The history that we tell is the history that was canonized, and the other stories get left behind.”

Filmmaker Ilana Trachtman. (Courtesy/Lauren Harel)

Trachtman believes the story has “real significance for civil rights history” and is an important supplement to the big stories and personalities in the movement’s history, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and for Jews, civil rights pioneer Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The stories of thousands of unknown activists are mostly forgotten.

“If you don’t learn that, then you don’t have an entry point to see yourself,” Trachtman said, adding that, for the characters in her film, “That’s a person that you say, ‘Oh, I could be like that. I can play a part on history’s stage. I can do something to stand up against injustice.'”

The story also provides a counterpoint to polarization in the US today, she said. While today’s US is divided, in the 1960s, the walls were higher, but the Black and white protesters were able to forge lifelong bonds through their activism. The Black protesters were leery of the white activists at the start, but the two sides got to know each other through conversations on the picket lines, forming their first interracial friendships and later attending dance parties at each others’ houses.

“To me, that’s the lesson. That’s something that we can learn from. It’s not about legislation. It’s about individuals who march together,” Trachtman said.

The US political landscape has shifted in the decade it took Trachtman to create the film. When she started production, Barack Obama was president, she noted. The years since have seen the first Trump presidency, the George Floyd protest movement, and the October 7, 2023, onslaught on Israel that scrambled some Black-Jewish relationships and reinforced others.

Political tensions surfaced as the film debuted. Trachtman had concerns about whether a film by a Jewish woman would be embraced by Black audiences, a small minority of whom were hesitant about attending screenings in Jewish spaces due to the fraught political moment.

Some Jews were also reluctant, saying, “Here’s a story about us supporting them, and where are they now?” Trachtman explained. Other Jews saw the film as “congratulating ourselves, but what are we doing for the Black community today?” she said.

Despite the misgivings, once people see the film, the response is overwhelmingly positive, she said, adding that the movie has served as a gathering point between the two communities. The film came out in May and has been on the festival circuit since, and has won awards at both Black and Jewish events.

Festival director Weintraub, a film aficionado, added that the Lincoln Center screenings gave audiences “an opportunity for a communal experience.”

“I just enjoy having the experience of being in a dark movie theater when you know that people around you are seeing the same film. And I think it’s a very powerful thing,” she said.

Trachtman is a conservative Jew who has family in Israel and visits each summer. She has examined Jewish issues before — her breakthrough film, “Praying with Lior,” released in 2008, tracks a Jewish boy with Down syndrome studying for his bar mitzvah.

Her Jewish identity informs her work because being “kind of an outsider and an insider in America fuels my desire to be a witness,” she said, adding that the films’ social agenda is her way of contributing to tikkun olam, Hebrew for repairing the world.

“Everybody has something that they can do, whether it’s writing or giving money or building houses, whatever it is. Telling stories and connecting people to each other is what I can do,” she said.

The park integrated ahead of the 1961 summer season. It closed in 1968 and reopened several years later as an arts and culture center that welcomed the filmmakers. The merry-go-round is still in operation.

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