‘Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round’
By • September 5, 2024 0 352
By Dina Gold
“I really wanted to ride on the carousel. Why couldn’t we have fun like everybody else?” said Tina Clarke in Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round the newly-released documentary about the history of desegregation at Glen Echo Amusement Park in Maryland, on the edge of the District of Columbia.
It was 1960. Tina Clarke is an African American and the park was strictly segregated.
“When we learn about the Civil Rights Movement in school, we learn about the giants: Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Diane Nash,” said Award-winning director Ilana Trachtman, who grew up in Rockville. “We don’t learn about the thousands of ‘ordinary’ citizens who took part in their own neighborhoods, across the country. In leaving these people out of history, we deny ourselves accessible heroes, who show us that we all have the potential to create social change.”
Photo courtesy of Amy Bookbinder.
Her groundbreaking film reveals the almost unknown civil rights battle to desegregate the amusement park, a full three years before the world-famous march on Washington.
“Washington D.C., the capital of America, a country that stands for justice, equality…” said Hank Thomas. “And here it is, right outside of this capital, you’ve got this great hypocrisy.”
Letters to newspaper editors at the time expressed sentiments such as:
The vast majority of white people feel it would really be totally wrong morally, for young white girls to be bumping hips in a swimming pool with teenage Negro boys.
A group of Howard University students formed an organization called the Nonviolent Action Group, and in June 1960, five of them entered Glen Echo and sat down on the whites-only carousel and at the counter of the park’s restaurant. When they were arrested, it made the headlines – and history.
“We were some bold people. I knew there was something better for me,” says Dion Tyrone Diamond, at the time a student at Howard and one of the founding members of the group.
Photo Credit Washington Star Collection.
Out of this turmoil, an unexpected alliance emerged on the picket lines. While the press, racists, congressmen and onlookers converged on the site, they were met by local civil servants, labor organizers and young families from Maryland’s Bannockburn community. The majority of these supporters were Jewish. Helene Wilson was one of them: “the Holocaust radicalized me. The fight for civil rights is as much my fight as it is theirs,” she said.
Ten of the 1961 Freedom Riders emerged from this newly established coalition of civil rights activists who stood up against the park owners, the American Nazi Party and Jim Crow. The surviving protesters speak poignantly of how their youthful activism transformed their lives forever.
Expressing his deep gratitude for those who stood side by side with the African Americans discriminated against by the wider society, Thomas said: “American Jews were our best allies in the civil rights movement.”
Yael Luttwak, artistic director of JxJ – the Washington Jewish Film and Music Festivals and year-round film and music program – at the EDCJCC said, “We are thrilled and honored to have the exclusive opportunity to show this documentary as a limited theatrical run. Ilana’s important film is a lesser-known piece of history that she brings to life and is critical to our commitment to host cross-cultural conversations. We are uniquely positioned to be able to screen the film night after night and to host post-screening conversations with leaders from the Black and Jewish communities.”
Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round will be screened at the EDCJCC from Sept 15-19.
Tickets can be purchased here.
