Ain’t No Back to A Merry-Go-Round tells the story of how five Black students rode a segregated carousel in Glen Echo Park in Maryland in 1960, igniting one of the earliest organized interracial civil rights protests in US history, the Jews they marched with, Nazis they provoked, Congressmen they inspired, and Civil Rights leaders they became. The film will be shown on Thursday, April 3rd at 7pm at the Regal Nanuet, 6201 Fashion Dr, Nanuet.
With never-before seen footage, and immersive storytelling by Illana Trachtman (Praying with Lior, Black in Latin America, The Pursuit), four living protesters rescue forgotten history, revealing the price, and the power, of heeding the impulse to activism.
A panel discussion following the film includes:
- Wilbur T. Aldridge, Mid-Hudson Regional Director, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
- Bill Batson, Moderator, Artist, writer, activist, 2021 inductee to the Rockland Civil Rights Hall of Fame
- Peter Geffen Educator, civil rights worker for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
- Frances Pratt, President of the Nyack Branch of the NAACP for 41 years
- Carl L. Washington, III, Pastor, Pilgrim Baptist church Nyack celebrating the 150th year
Barbara Williams, witness of bus burning in Anniston Alabama in 1965, featured What Happened to Jackson Avenue, a 2023 documentary on the Urban Renewal debacle in Nyack said, “Ain’t No Back to A Merry-Go-Round is a small story yet it reveals the complexities of its moment in microcosm. The film eschews simple conclusions: for example, there were members of the local African American community that resented the Howard University students as outsiders taking on amusement park discrimination before employment and housing. While many whites protesting segregation at Glen Echo were Jewish, the owners upholding it were too. Even stranger, fifteen years after WWII, American Nazis counter protested, supporting the Jewish owners.”
Unlike a Ken Burns film, Ain’t No Back to A Merry-Go-Round is not a sweeping overview of the Civil Rights Movement, but it’s about one protest, one summer, and one set of individuals. It’s a small story actually, but in living in it I have become convinced that change will not come from the top, or from the internet. It will come from people who are humble before their differences, who learn to know each other.
According to Micki Leader, JCC Film Festival founder, “Our county and our country need to be reminded of the time when Black and Jewish activists and thought leaders worked together to build powerful civil rights organizations like the NAACP and support the Southern Civil Rights struggle.”
