Director Ilana Trachtman’s sophisticated documentary, “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” is an intimate look at an early, historically significant civil rights event. The film, playing at the M.V. Film Center the week of Feb. 14 through 20, uses incisive interviews, never-before-seen archival footage, and stop-motion animation to reveal the biracial 1960 protest to integrate Glen Echo Amusement Park, the premier recreation destination of Washington, D.C., since the turn of the century.
The film’s title poignantly refers to a 1942 poem, “Merry-Go-Round,” by Langston Hughes:
Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can’t sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There’s a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we’re put in the back —
But there ain’t no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where’s the horse
For a kid that’s black?
The merry-go-round features prominently in footage of many happy white children and adults enjoying the Glen Echo Amusement Park. But a mere 38 seconds into the film, even before the credits roll, we witness a white security guard stopping a Black man, saying, “You’re trespassing. Can I ask your race?” “My race?” he responds, “I belong to the human race.” We later learn the man is Laurence Henry, a leader in the protest.
Trachtman will return to the scene later, but first backtracks, laying the groundwork for how the eventual protest would unfold, starting with the student civil rights protests in the South. The first was the Feb. 1, 1960, sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter by students from A&T College, which, in turn, inspired a group of students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., to take action. They formed the Nonviolent Action Group, aware of the poignancy of their acronym — NAG.
One member, Courtland Cox, recalls, “When I think about NAG, we were some bold people. We wanted you to get out of the way of blocking us because if we are going to advance, we need to knock the barriers down.” NAG’s first action was a lunch counter sit-in in Arlington, Va., where angry white protesters dropped lit cigarettes into their pockets and burned the seat of their pants. But once successful, NAG turned its sights on integrating Glen Echo.
We learn that white liberal residents of the Bannockburn community in Bethesda, Md., would soon get involved as well. The community was founded in the 1940s on utopian principles, and was primarily composed of Jews dedicated to activism. Bannockburn residents joined the Nonviolent Action Group in daily picketing that started on June 30, 1960, after five Black students were arrested for riding the carousel.
The coming together of the two contingents, along with people from nearby Black neighborhoods, was not seamless. Some Howard University students initially felt uneasy around the Bannockburn contingent. Tina Clarke, from the neighboring Black Poolesville neighborhood, states, “We weren’t that interested in integrating with anyone. We just wanted what was equal.”
Through engaging interviews, Trachtman reveals the complexity of the biracial picketing that unfolded over the summer, with protesters facing 90° heat, threats of violence, and a nasty counterprotest organized by George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.
As time went on, the protest brought union members from the national labor movement, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell and A. Philip Randolph, and other national leaders to the picket line. A surprising twist led to Glen Echo’s eventual decision to integrate. Ten 1961 Freedom Riders emerged from the protest efforts, including Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture). Hearing some of those riders’ recalling the subsequent civil rights movement reveals the sobering price many young activists had to pay.
As the film draws to a close, we hear many involved in the Glen Echo protests reflect on the powerful and hopeful lessons they learned, leaving us to admire how they put their bodies on the line for what they believed in.
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” screens at the M.V. Film Center during the week of Feb. 14 through 20.
