by on May 13, 2024
Before the March on Washington, there was Glen Echo
A powerful, inspiring and truly wonderful new film premiered at the Maryland Film Festival last week. AIN’T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND tells the story of civil rights activists battling in 1960 to open the Glen Echo amusement park to blacks. It’s a timely reminder of the strategies and tactics activists used to win campaigns for civil rights. It also reminds us how little impact historic court rulings like Brown v. Board of Education had in the real world. The civil rights movement was won in the streets and the legislatures, not in the courts.
Here’s why this new film is so special.
Black-Jewish Alliance
Five students of Howard University built a campaign to force the local Glen Echo amusement park—in Bannockburn, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C.—to open to blacks. Glen Echo was no Disneyland but it had rides, a roller coaster and, most importantly for those hot summer days, a huge swimming pool.
All for whites only.
Filmmaker Ilana Trachtman assembled interviews with many participants in the campaign. Some went on to become Freedom Riders, with Dion Diamond getting arrested over thirty times. Others became lifelong activists. Among them was Stokely Carmicheal, whose first protest was at Glen Echo. The campaign’s Non-Violent Action Group became both a training ground and organizing model for campaigns that would be repeated across the nation in the years that followed.
Because the campaign occurred in 1960 the activists did not have many models to rely upon.They had to figure out what tactics worked on their own; their experience became a model for others.
The Glen Echo campaign highlighted the strong Black-Jewish alliance. The park was located near a suburb filled with Jewish activists and labor organizers. They so strongly embraced the campaign that whites often outnumbered blacks on the picket lines.
The campaign also brought extraordinarily talented women into working for social change. In this pre-women’s rights movement era women who in later generations would be fulltime attorneys, doctors and organizers were stay at home housewives. This left them available to devote all their energies to the Glen Echo boycott.
Interviews with these women evoke how the campaign gave greater meaning to their lives. And made them activist role models for their children.
Attracting National Attention
Glen Echo’s civil rights campaign in the north attracted national attention. The Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan joined counter-protests held by whites. Whites held racist signs and chanted hateful words in a scene that would later be repeated in Chicago, Boston, Yonkers, NY, Detroit and other northern cities. Congressmembers including Adam Clayton Powell showed up to support the civil rights activists.
Despite all of their great work, the summer 1960 season ended without a breakthrough. But victory would soon occur.
It’s remarkable that a film of a 1960 civil rights campaign could have so much archival footage. And so many participants available to be interviewed. We know the stories of legendary activists like John Lewis but the freedom rides primarily comprised people like Hank Thomas and Dion Diamond whose stories also deserve to be known.
AIN’T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND gives us these stories. It offers inspiration we all need in today’s troubled times. My hope is that filmmaker Trachtman can get national distribution for this must-see film.
