February 04, 2025
Provided image/Washington Star Collection
A group of Black and white protesters staged a sit-in at the Glen Echo Amusement Park carousel in 1960.
Ilana Trachtman was thinking of getting married at a theme park.
Well, a former one. Glen Echo Park hadn't been an amusement park since 1968, but it had transitioned into a cultural destination for families in the wider D.C. area with an aquarium, children's theaters and the vintage Dentzel carousel from its past life. Trachtman, a Philadelphia-based director, had grown up just a few miles away in Rockville, Maryland, and had "beloved, magical memories of the place." But as she toured the site with her fiance, a park ranger shared a story she'd never heard about the theme park. It had long turned Black children and their parents away from its rides, and it took over nine weeks of picketing — and a sit-in on the carousel — to end the segregation.
"That's on me because I grew up looking at the photographs all over Glen Echo, and the photographs only had pictures of white people," she said. "It just had never occurred to me that I was actually looking smack in the face at Jim Crow."
Trachtman left the park not with a venue contract but with the seeds of an idea. Slowly, she began working on a film about the fight to integrate Glen Echo Amusement Park. It took a decade to make, but now "Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round" is playing film festivals and community events, including two in Philadelphia. The 89-minute documentary will screen at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History on Thursday and PhilaMOCA on Wednesday, Feb. 26.
"Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round" drops viewers into the summer of 1960, when an interracial coalition of activists protested Glen Echo Amusement Park's segregationist policies. The campaign caused an instant stir with a June sit-in at the carousel. A group of Black and white students — many from Howard University — ran to the merry-go-round and claimed spots, refusing to budge when the security officer came around. Five were arrested.
The activists planned a picket next, which they swore to maintain until the park was integrated. Some of the white and largely Jewish residents of nearby Bannockburn joined the lines. As Trachtman explains, that neighborhood in Bethesda had begun as a collectively-owned suburb and its progressive residents "felt strongly about civil and human rights and the importance of the labor movement."
That didn't mean the alliance was an easy one. In the film, a white Jewish protester, Helene Wilson, remembers offering her hand to Hank Thomas, one of the Black students from Howard University. He trembled as he offered his back. Only later did someone explain to Wilson that he had never shaken hands with a white woman.
"What they each had to get over in order to be able to collaborate effectively was another revelation to me," Trachtman said. "In 1960, it was still perfectly reasonable for an educated, even progressive person to go through their entire lives without having had a single meaningful interaction with somebody who was a different race."
The picketers hoisted signs above their heads for nine and a half weeks in the summer heat. One woman featured in "Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round" brought her five children to the protest every day. The crowd kept showing up, even after the American Nazi Party mounted a counter-protest.
Though the park remained segregated when it closed for the season, Glen Echo Amusement Park announced it would welcome all visitors when it reopened the following year. That wasn't the protest's only tangible effect; 10 of the activists involved continued to fight for civil rights as Freedom Riders on buses across the South.
Trachtman already had decades of experience as a documentarian when she stumbled upon "Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round," having directed "Mariachi High" and WHYY's "The Pursuit: 50 Years in the Fight for LGBT Rights." (She also produced "Stand Up and Shout: Songs from a Philly High School.") But researching her newest project was a massive undertaking because, as she puts it, the story "had never been earmarked as history."
Philadelphia-based documentarian Ilana Trachtman has previously worked on 'Stand Up & Shout: Songs from a Philly High School,' 'The Pursuit: 50 Years in the Fight for LGBT Rights,' 'Praying with Lior' and 'Mariachi High.'
Provided image/Lauren Harel
"We probably went through at least 70 or 80 archives," she said. "That was a time when there were many local newspapers and newsletters, and some of them were stored in church basements because they'd been defunct for 30 years. ... Ultimately, I would say the most important finds came from people's individual boxes of memorabilia."
Trachtman's research unearthed never-before-seen footage and 946 pieces of archival material — a trove that made editing the film "a bit like wrestling with an octopus," she said. She eventually focused on four "main characters" and two secondary players, all of whom were at the protest. The rest of the film is augmented with voiceover narration from celebrities reading newspaper articles, letters to the editor or documents from the protesters. The cast includes Mandy Patinkin, Jeffrey Wright, Bob Balaban, Lee Grant, Peter Gallagher, Dominique Thorne, Alysia Reiner and Tracie Thoms.
While Trachtman has not distribution plans for the film yet, she hopes to see it air on PBS eventually. For now, she'll continue touring with the documentary at festivals, universities, museums, churches and synagogues where, she hopes, more people will be galvanized by the story.
"History is made by regular people and we never learn about them," she said. "The vast majority of civil rights protests, the participants were local. They were just standing up like in their own community. And they did that, and then maybe they went home. They never showed up at the bridge in Selma. So we never learned their names.
"And it's not just that they're unsung heroes, it's that they're unsung role models. I think that we've kind of done ourselves a disservice by only learning about the giants because there's no way in for the rest of us. We can just so easily give ourselves a pass and say, you know, I'm not Martin Luther King. I'm not John Lewis. I'm not Diane Nash. Or, if you're Jewish, I'm not Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. So I hope that this sparks an awareness that we all actually have a role to play."
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