‘Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round’
Teaneck fest hosts filmmaker and her painstaking reconstruction of an overlooked protest
Ilana Trachtman grew up in Rockville, Maryland, in the 1970s. Her house was about 20 minutes from the national park that’s built on the grounds of what was the Glen Echo Amusement Park.
“At that time, and to some degree still, but to a lesser extent, the infrastructure of the amusement park was still there,” she said. “The tracks of the roller coaster were still there, and the old shooting gallery and bumper-car pavilion. The carousel is actually still running.”
The park is in Glen Echo, Maryland, a suburb of Washington. Ms. Trachtman’s family used to go to the D.C. Folk Festival on the grounds, and as a child, she took acting classes there. “It had become an arts space,” she said. “And it was really evocative of an earlier time, of a wholesome era when going to the mom-and-pop owned amusement park was a day out.” A well-preserved photo archive from the amusement park shows pictures of sailors hoisting their girlfriends in the air in front of the carousel. “It was really a beloved place for my family. We went there often. As teenagers we’d skip school there.”
In 2009, when she was looking for a place to get married, Ms. Trachtman brought her then-fiancé to the park because she thought it would make a pretty wedding venue. They ran into Sam Swersky, a park ranger who happened to be Jewish. “I’m not sure how we got on the topic, but he told us the story of Glen Echo Amusement Park’s integration,” Ms. Trachtman said.
On June 30, 1960, five Black students from Howard University sat on the segregated park’s carousel and were arrested. People who lived in the neighborhood, and in Bannockburn, a nearby housing development with a significant number of secular Jewish residents, joined Black students on a picket line outside the park. The protests were held daily until the park closed for the season in September. On March 14, 1961, before the amusement park reopened for the 1961 season, the park’s owners announced that it would integrate and be open to patrons of all races.
Ms. Trachtman was “dumbfounded,” she said. “I mean, really, I would say ashamed as well. Because I had always loved this park, and I looked at pictures of this park my whole life, and I’d never noticed that everybody in the pictures was white. That was a revelation.
“When I was growing up, to a certain extent the park was touted as wholesome. And if you met anybody who was alive in the 1960s or before and was white, they had incredible memories of Glen Echo Park. I had a neighbor whose grandparents got engaged on the Ferris wheel. It just sort of held that kind of a space in D.C. – Maryland suburb history. If you were white.”
She started to see that it was a completely different story if you were Black.
Learning about “who it was that integrated the park was also fascinating because my family was Jewish, my father was a labor organizer, and the people in Bannockburn were sort of very familiar types,” she said. “So I just sort of became obsessed, and then the story was richer and richer the more I researched.”
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” the film Ms. Trachtman produced and directed that tells the story of the desegregation of Glen Echo Amusement Park, and of the friendships that were formed along the way, will be screened at the Teaneck International Film Festival on Sunday, November 10. (See below.) The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ms. Trachtman.
As someone who has been producing nonfiction films for 30 years, Ms. Trachtman knew as soon as she heard the story that she wanted to make a documentary about it. She started working on the project In earnest a decade ago.
The title of the film comes from a 1942 Langston Hughes poem called “Merry-Go-Round,” she said. “It’s a child saying to a hypothetical carousel owner
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 documentary, which follows some of the Black students and the white local residents who were involved in the protests, took 10 years to complete.
“It was a really hard movie to make,” Ms. Trachtman said. “This is by far my hardest film.”
The research was labor-intensive. “Because this is an event that was never historically marked as significant the way like, say, the March on Washington was, you can’t go to an archive and type in Glen Echo Park protest and have the relevant information come up,” she said. “You really have to look by dates.
“Also, these were the days when radio recordings and television footage was just taped over unless it was something like the Kennedy assassination, so none of this material was really saved. It just wasn’t preserved. So I was always looking for needles in haystacks.
“Just doing the research, starting with the characters, locating the people, many of whom spread far and wide,” took a lot of time. “And the women of course changed their names. And people weren’t collecting oral histories of this story the way they would of something like the Montgomery bus boycott.”
In 2005, Mr. Swersky, the park ranger, organized a reunion of some of the key players. “He had located a fair number of people who still lived in the area, so I had a bit of a head start,” Ms. Trachtman said. Of course, that was four years before Ms. Trachtman met Mr. Swersky, and almost 10 years before she started working on the film, “so unfortunately many of them had passed away or moved, but I did have that as a starting point.” She “scoured newspaper accounts and worked with alumni offices” to find others. And some of the people she met connected her with others who had been involved.
“Editing also took a really long time because it’s such a complicated story,” she added. “It’s sort of deceptively complicated. Choosing who would be the main story tellers, what to leave in about them, what to leave out. It is really important to know a little bit about their backstory to understand why they were motivated to be on the picket line when the vast majority of people weren’t.”
How did she make those editorial decisions? “I have to give a great deal of credit to my editor, Sandra Christie, who is African American,” Ms. Trachtman said. “We each brought our own background and sympathies to the project.”
Ms. Trachtman used a number of criteria in selecting who to profile. It was important that they were “in fact representative of the picket line,” she said. “So somebody who was a real aberration wouldn’t necessarily be a main subject in the film, because they would not be telling the story of many other people behind them.
“And they of course had to be alive and in a position, healthwise, to tell their story. They also had to be more or less a relatable narrator. And I needed to have some kind of photographic evidence that connected them to the picket line, because otherwise the audience doesn’t really believe you. So I had to be able to see people in those moments.” And finding “all the images to support the stories” was time consuming.
There were also budgetary constraints. “There was one person who I really would have loved to include as a feature character. She had met her husband on the picket line. But he was an academic, and obviously a civil rights sympathizer, and essentially was blackballed, and so in order for him to work as an academic they had to move to New Zealand. She still lives there, and I just didn’t have the budget to film her in New Zealand.”
Ms. Trachtman, who grew up in a Reform Jewish community, was not surprised when she discovered the Black–Jewish connection in the story. “I grew up in this house with my father as a Jewish labor organizer who had always been involved in civil rights, so that didn’t surprise me at all,” she said. There were plenty of whites who were not Jewish who joined the protests, she added, “and that’s why this is not a Black-Jewish story exclusively by any means. But Bannockburn was disproportionally Jewish, and a disproportionate number of the white people on the picket line were Jewish.”
What she hoped to accomplish by making the film “snowballed over time,” Ms. Trachtman said. “I just kept picking up new goals.
“At the outset, I think initially I just wanted to understand the story really well because it was part of the landscape of my childhood, and I felt like I was ignorant about what had happened there. It was like a desire to do an archaeological excavation and then share that history; it seemed like important civil rights history and nobody knew it. And I mean, literally nobody knew it. If you weren’t alive in that time period and in the D.C. area, you didn’t know.”
Ms. Trachtman worked with advisers who are civil rights historians, and they had never heard of this protest. “So it became like a mission to restore this lost history.”
She was also really moved by “the activism of young people in a way that was so much more intentional and labor-intensive than those of us who consider ourselves activists today,” she said. “You can sign an internet petition and you’ve done a lot, but these people were out every single day for 10 weeks in the middle of a hot summer. The degree of commitment was astonishing to me, and inspiring, and I really wanted to understand that and shine a light on that kind of heroism.
“Also, I feel like the way that we teach the civil rights movement does not center on the regular people, but the vast majority of the fuel in the movement were people who never went to the bridge at Selma, but acted locally in their own swimming pools, or integrating their own schools or lunch counters. And if we don’t learn about those people, then we miss this incredible opportunity to be inspired by accessible heroes.”
Ms. Trachtman feels this is especially true when it comes to the Jewish-Black collaboration. “If you went to Hebrew school, you’ve undoubtedly seen the iconic photograph of Heschel and Martin Luther King on the bridge,” she said, referring to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “But they’re giants. We don’t discover that there were friendships between ordinary people, and that’s just such a missed opportunity. So part of my goal is to bring the film into schools as an additional way to teach the civil rights movement, as another part of really important civil rights history, which is the role of regular people, and also the model that they offer of just getting to know each other on the level of individuals.
“We talk about Black-Jewish relations with these big brush strokes, but in fact, in this case, these really lovely Black-Jewish relationships developed because people just spent time with each other.”
Delving into the story also highlighted for Ms. Trachtman that, “much like the way that we as Jews feel an urgent need to record all of the Holocaust stories before they’re gone, at this point we’re really in danger of losing civil rights stories,” she said. “Most of the main characters in the film could not tell their story today. So how many other stories have we lost? If people who were 18 years old in 1960 are barely able to be interviewed, what about all the rest of them? So I do feel honored and lucky that I was able to talk to these people when I did.”
Glen Echo Amusement Park closed in 1968, seven years after it was integrated. Ms. Trachtman believes that integration was a factor, but does not think it was the only one. “If you look at records across the country of small amusement parks, at the end of the 1960s, they were all closing,” she said. “It was just the way that recreation changed in America. Disney World opened, and Six Flags opened, and so it was very hard to compete with these much more elaborate amusement parks with extreme rides.”
The park was also served by a trolley that stopped running in January 1960, Ms. Trachtman continued. “The park is in suburban Maryland, it’s over the D.C. line, and you had to be able to get there. So if you were living in D.C., you couldn’t come by trolley anymore, and people didn’t always have cars, so it was a combination of that as well.”
And airfare became much less expensive, so people started to travel more, she added. “I think just American recreation changed and that had a lot to do with it as well. But there probably were people who stayed away. I think there probably were people who didn’t want to swim with people of color.”
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” premiered at the Maryland Film Festival in May and is now on the film festival circuit. Ms. Trachtman finds it extremely gratifying that both the Jewish and the Black festival circuits have “embraced the film.” It won Best Documentary Feature at the D.C. Black Film Festival in August, and then, a few weeks later, sold out at the D.C. JCC five nights in a row. “By having it play in both of these places simultaneously, which I think is probably pretty unusual for a film, audiences of one are going to the other,” she said. “I was worried that people would feel like it was just a Jewish story or a Black story, but the fact that both of these communities feel enthusiastically that it’s their story, feels like the biggest honor. It’s very satisfying.” And it has the added benefit of every festival screening being “kind of like a built-in opportunity for Black-Jewish dialogue.
“I think that film is a really powerful way to demonstrate humanity in places that people don’t see it, or are not used to looking for it,” Ms. Trachtman concluded. “And I appreciate that the people who see this film, while it’s 60 years later and they weren’t on the picket line, will get to have these intimate understandings of the people who were involved, and get to know them as if they were walking next to them on the picket line for days on end.”
What: “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” a documentary film about the integration of Glen Echo Amusement Park, will be screened as part of the Teaneck International Film Festival, followed by a live Q&A with producer and director Ilana Trachtman.
Where: At Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck
When: On Sunday, November 10, at 4:45 p.m.
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