On the outskirts of Washington, D.C., in Glen Echo, Maryland, in what is today a national park and arts and cultural center, there once stood an amusement park. In 1960, a protest against the park’s Whites-only policy joined together for the first time Black civil rights activists with an organized White and predominantly Jewish community, transforming the Civil Rights Movement.
This historic demonstration of interracial cooperation is captured in the acclaimed documentary Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, making its Philadelphia debut on Tuesday, February 6, at a screening hosted by The Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Ilana Trachtman, a Philly resident, will be on hand for a live talkback and audience Q&A.
Trachtman has been producing and directing award-winning documentary films and television for more than 25 years. She helms the production company Ruby Pictures, based here in Philadelphia, where she’s resided for 15 years. As a filmmaker, Trachtman says she is “driven to spark a compelling recognition of the subject’s humanity, so that viewer finds the subject irresistibly familiar.”
“I can’t imagine making a film about someone or something that I didn’t love,” she says. “And so naturally, I’m drawn to the good stories. I’m drawn to the things that lift people up, the hidden humanity is what calls me, and the stories that people don’t know, that you haven’t seen before.”
Trachtman grew up 20 minutes from Glen Echo and spent time as a kid in the remains of the amusement park: the bumper car pavilion, shooting gallery covered in pigeon droppings, and roller coaster tracks leading to nowhere. The carousel still ran for visitors, and an art colony operated there, which Trachtman attended.
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“I was nostalgic for this time. I completely idolized wholesome Washington, D.C. And I looked at all those pictures — and they’re beautiful pictures — all over the place, the photographs of old-time Glen Echo, and I’ve been looking at them my entire childhood, and I never noticed that everyone in those pictures was White,” says Trachtman. “There was a lot of shame associated with that, that I had idealized this place that was actually the source of pain for a lot of people.”
Upon returning to the site as an adult in search of a potential wedding venue, she met a ranger who was interested in the history of the park. She learned not only that it had been segregated but also the story of the organizers who spearheaded the protests.
“Because my father was a Jewish labor organizer who had been interested in civil rights, I just wanted to know those people because they seemed really familiar,” Trachtman says. “And the more I looked into it, the more shocking, significant firsts I found that happened there. And so then it was just clear it needed to be a film.”
“No one knew at the time that they were making history.”
Bannockburn, located across the street from the Echo Glen amusement park, is a community founded in 1946 primarily by Jews who moved from other major cities to Washington, D.C. for New Deal jobs. When they discovered the area rife with housing covenants that restricted selling to Jewish people, they took matters into their own hands by collectively purchasing a golf course and building their own cooperative, including a nursery school, swimming pool, clubhouse, and babysitting service.
“They turned it into a utopian vision of a neighborhood,” says Trachtman. “They had really interesting philosophies. And by the time the neighborhood was completely built and settled, there were definitely plenty of people who were not Jewish, but they were all like-minded. You didn’t move into that neighborhood unless you, first of all, were comfortable living among Jews, and second of all, were ready to be part of this experiment.”
In February of 1960, Black college students began their sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, leading to the desegregation of the store. At Howard University and other HBCU campuses, students began organizing around this nonviolent protest model that was working. By June, after successes at Arlington, Virginia lunch counters, Glen Echo Amusement Park, with its newspaper ads and radio jingle inviting everyone to come down and enjoy the rides, easily accessible to all via the trolley from D.C. — except the Black community — became the next target.
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For the residents of Bannockburn, who Trachtman says ran an unofficial boycott of the segregated park for several years, this was an opportunity. Many in the community were labor leaders and had a solid background in organizing. “It was like, Well, this is the evil in our backyard” Trachtman says. “And we’re people who are committed to social justice. We’re committed to political action. And here it is. It’s right in front of us.”
This was the first interracial civil rights protest in United States history. It attracted a lot of press, the attention of Congress, and Nazis, who came to counterprotest the Black activists and their mostly Jewish White allies to defend the continued segregation of an amusement park … also owned by Jews. But the park gave up the fight and desegregated in spring 1961. The arrests of five Black Howard University students who dared ride the carousel became a Supreme Court case, Griffin v. Maryland, which overturned their convictions and determined that the park had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The successful joint effort strengthened the movement, resulting in union organizers mentoring student activists and inspiring 10 of the Freedom Riders the following year. And yet, teachers, textbooks, and media covering the Civil Rights Movement rarely mention Echo Park among its seminal events like Selma and the Montgomery bus boycott.
“Handfuls of people knew about it, and my advisors, who were civil rights academics, they had never heard of this,” says Trachtman. “So many other things happened on top of it and in terms of the way news is told, no one knew at the time that they were making history, so it was never earmarked that way.”
One notable subject in the film is Philadelphia native Reverend Laurance Henry, who in 1960 was a 25-year-old divinity student at Howard University. He was a leader of the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) at the Echo Park protest, was arrested several times while demonstrating for civil rights, and returned to Philly in the 1970s to found Christ Community Baptist Church in what was once a synagogue. He died suddenly in 1978.
“The Civil Rights Movement was literally moved by thousands of people who acted locally and were essentially regular people.” — Ilana Trachtman
Making Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round
It took 10 years to complete the film. There was research, locating archival footage and period publications, identifying and tracking down key players, community members, and observers who were still living, filming, editing, and, of course, raising the funding to get it all done as an independent production.
There’s no narrator, no experts providing analysis or adding insight as the story unfolds. The voices of those who have passed away but whose statements were needed to tell the story are supplied by actors, including Peter Gallagher and Mandy Patinkin. The color palette, fonts, and music are authentic to 1960 to make the viewer feel like they’ve been transported to this point in history.
The world premiere was May 5 at the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, and it has gone on to win several awards: the Audience Award at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at the D.C. Black Film Festival, and the Women In Film Award at the St. Louis International Film Festival.
“I really want people to understand that the Civil Rights Movement was not just Martin Luther King and Birmingham and Montgomery, John Lewis, Diane Nash — but that the Civil Rights Movement was literally moved by thousands of people who acted locally and were essentially regular people,” Trachtman says of what she hopes audiences glean from the documentary. “I did not understand that it was a movement of ordinary citizens who just stood up, and I really want that notion to become part of the way we teach and understand the Civil Rights Movement — and actually, all movements — and I think we’re doing a disservice to history and also to our own possibility by only learning about the giants.”
If you need another excuse to absolutely not miss this screening, an important theme of the events portrayed in the doc, besides the outcome, is that in people working together and getting to know each other, “little sparks” were sent throughout the Civil Rights Movement.
“I always think about the fact that in 1960, it was illegal in Maryland for a Black child and a White child to be in a swimming pool together, but on this picket line, by virtue of the fact that people were walking together for hours on end, conversations happened where people got to know each other, people got to recognize each other, people got to see each other’s humanity, and understand who who the other was,” says Trachtman
“Those conversations I feel are virtually impossible today, even though it’s perfectly legal for us to all swim together, and so I’m really intrigued, and want to spread the message of getting to know each other. I actually think that social change will come from individual relationships, as opposed to being told that we all have to get along.”
To that end, the film is meant to be — and best — experienced as part of an audience, where it becomes a shared text.
Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round screening at The Weitzman, February 6, 6:30pm cash bar, 7:30pm screening followed by a live talkback and audience Q&A with director Ilana Trachtman. $20 for GA, $15 for members. Register here. 101 S. Independence Mall East.
You have another opportunity to catch the film at PhilaMOCA on February 26. Get tickets for that event here.
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