Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round Examines Civil Rights History at Glen Echo Amusement Park

The new documentary Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round takes its title from Langston Hughes ‘ 1942 poem about the absurdities of segregation. “On the bus we’re put in the back,” he writes, “But there ain’t no back/ To a merry-go-round!” In the film, the carousel in question was (and is today) a main attraction at the Glen Echo Amusement Park circa 1960. Like numerous recreational facilities across the country at the time, Glen Echo didn’t admit Black people.

Ain’t No Back takes a deep dive into the efforts to desegregate the local amusement park 65 years ago. Philadelphia-based director Ilana Trachtman ‘s informative feature, which premiered at the Maryland Film Festival in May, starts the film by contrasting the gaiety of archival footage of the park with the somber recollections of Black children excluded from enjoying it.

In this early and overlooked chapter of the Civil Rights Movement, an unexpected coalition developed in the summer of 1960 between a group of Howard University students and the White Jewish residents of Bannockburn, Maryland, to protest Glen Echo’s exclusionary practices. The Howard students were coming off victories from sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Arlington. Glen Echo became their next high-profile target.

When members of the group showed up to protest, they were met by denizens of Bannockburn, a planned community composed largely of Jews and labor union members, who had independently been boycotting the park and pressuring local authorities to desegregate it. Motivated by their experiences with antisemitism, Bannockburn residents brought well-honed union organizing tactics to the picket line. Members of the Black communities neighboring Glen Echo who weren’t allowed into the park also joined the fight.

For the protestors, a long summer of bonding across racial lines and peaceful picketing ensued. But they also endured American Nazi Party counterprotests and serial arrests (which were challenged in a Supreme Court case), and were occasionally beaten up by a local troublemaker. The protest efforts eventually involved Congress, the NAACP, and then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The following spring, Glen Echo’s owners opened the park to Black people, though they never said publicly what led them to desegregate.

Interviews with a number of the Black and White protestors (now senior citizens) form the narrative backbone of Ain’t No Back. Interviews with Hank Thomas and Dion Diamond from the Howard University group and Esther Delaplaine and Helene Wilson Ageloff, stalwarts of the Bannockburn brigade, are combined with extensive archival photos and film footage (such as vintage 8mm home movies found in an organizer’s basement)-that are a highlight of the documentary. Trachtman, who has worked on previous projects dealing with race and the Jewish faith and whose late father was a Jewish labor organizer, is attentive to the dynamics among (and within) these groups of unlikely allies.

Detailing the players, the lead-up to the protests, and the unfolding of the summer’s events requires Ain’t No Back to cover a lot of ground. Trachtman and editors Sandra Christie and Ann Collins lean on chapter dividers to help divide blocks of information (“The Students,” “The Leadership Challenge”). Animated sequences in different styles are used to dramatize some scenes that lack visuals, like when the protestors reminisce about their childhoods. Actors Mandy Patinkin, Black Panther’s Dominique Thorne, and D.C. native Jeffrey Wright, among others, stand in as narrators to bring contemporaneous newspaper quotes and protest documents to life. The result is a nuanced but dense exposition that doesn’t quite meld into a stylistically cohesive whole.

Ain’t No Back makes an effective case for recognizing the Glen Echo protests as an exemplar of Black-Jewish allyship and one in the long line of small but impactful actions that made up the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Interracial protests against local segregation practices spread across the country throughout the rest of the decade; Glen Echo was one of the first. For many locals, the 1960 park protests launched lifelong activism in social justice movements (Black Power Movement leader Stokely Carmichael ‘s first picket line was at Glen Echo).

While the storytelling of Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round gets slightly bogged down by its impulse to instruct, the lessons derived from the Glen Echo protests surely merit repeating decades later. “When you get together,” 100-year-old Delaplaine reminds us, “you have power.”

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (documentary, 89 minutes) screens Sept. 15 through 19 at the Edlavitch DC JCC. . $16.

Originally published at https://washingtoncitypaper.com on September 9, 2024.