Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the summer of 1960, a group of white, primarily Jewish, suburban residents joined a group of Black students from Howard University in a demonstration to desegregate Glen Echo Amusement park in Maryland, becoming one of the earliest large-scale integrated protests apart from the civil rights movement. Now, their efforts are the subject of a documentary, it's called Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round. Featuring never before seen footage, the film revisits the atmosphere of Jim Crow, Maryland. It also includes current testimonies of the people who lived in that time, many of whom who became young activists involved in sit-ins and picketing in the face of American Nazis who were targeting them.

A review in the Washington Post states, "In some ways, Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round plays like a here's-what-really-happened version of John Waters Hairspray," where the sweetly subversive comedy delivers its barbed wrapped in cotton candy. The grimmer realities and dangerous stakes come into sharper focus here. Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round opens at the IFC Center tomorrow, Wednesday night, and will run until Monday, September 22nd. The film's director, Ilana Trachtman, joins me now to discuss. She also directed the 22nd 2016 PBS documentary, The Pursuit: 50 Years in the Fight for LGBT Rights. Thank you for being with us.

Ilana Trachtman: Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. Have you ever been to Glen Echo national park in Maryland, or do you remember the amusement park that was there before 1968? What did you learn about the demonstration in the park, or perhaps you participated in protest to end desegregation? Give us a call, share your story. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We want to hear about your participation in any protest to end segregation or if you have any relation to Glen Echo Park. When did you first hear about the park?

Ilana Trachtman: I don't even remember when I first heard about the park because I lived 20 minutes away growing up, so my family went all the time. It wasn't an amusement park anymore, it had become a National park in 1971. It was like a magical place because it kept so much of the infrastructure of the amusement park, and at the same time, it had turned into an arts center. You could see roller coaster tracks, and the shooting gallery was still there. The crystal pool sign and the carousel was still running, and the whole thing Was covered in a 1920s Art Deco font. It just was an incredibly evocative, magical place for me.

Alison Stewart: When did you learn about the history of Glen Echo Park?

Ilana Trachtman: Yes, that's the million-dollar question. The park always had signs about its celebrated past. It was like a beloved icon of Washingtonia, but it wasn't until 20 years after I moved away that I brought my then fiancé to the park because I wanted him to see it and we could consider it as a wedding venue because I loved it so much. We ran into a park ranger who told us the story of how the park became integrated.

At first, I had to just get over myself about the fact that it had been segregated, because it hadn't occurred to me that wasn't part of any of the public telling of the stories of the park. That was an enormous, enormous reckoning, because what I had been nostalgic for was this glory, fun place of accessibility, and it was actually the exact opposite for a whole group of people. It was a place of exclusion and pain and rejection and seeming inferiority. Those few things existed, and that I hadn't known it is really what motivated me to get started working on the movie.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting. Why do you think it wasn't in the telling of the park's story, now that you've made this movie?

Ilana Trachtman: I can't answer that. I think you'd have to ask the National Park Service. In 2008 is when they finally put up a plaque to the five protesters who conducted the first sit in, actually, on the carousel and were arrested, and their arrest went to the Supreme Court. They put a plaque in 2008, but, of course, it happened in 1960.

Alison Stewart: What questions did you want answered?

Ilana Trachtman: Well, first I wanted to just peel back the layers on all of my own narrative about what I imagined that Washington was like. Then I wanted to understand how it was that I hadn't known the story, but then learning the story, how it was that these two groups of people who had no experience of the other-- We say that the world is segregated now, and it is, but in that time, it was completely reasonable for an educated person, Black or white, to spend their entire life without having a meaningful conversation with the other. For Howard students, it was a watershed, and for the Bannockburn, that's the white community that pitched in, also, there weren't friendships, there weren't relationships, and so how those two groups of people worked together.

Alison Stewart: Yes, my mom grew up in Washington, DC, so I know it well. I know the history quite well. The inspiration for the title comes from a Langston Hughes poem, which is heard in the documentary. Let's take a quick listen to that.

Speaker 3: Where is the Jim Crow section on this merry-go-round, Mister? Because 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 a horse for a kid that's Black?

Alison Stewart: That poem is from 1942, but why did that seem like the right place to pick the title for your documentary, Ain't No Going Back to a Merry-Go-Round?

Ilana Trachtman: Why did it seem like the right title?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Ilana Trachtman: I think it points out all of it. It points out the idiocy of Jim Crow, and nowhere is that more true than at an amusement park on a carousel, and when you're talking about children's entertainment. It just, it landed there. I actually tried for it not to be the title because it's so long. If you look at a Netflix menu, it's a lot bigger than the thumbnail, and nothing is really usually more than two words, but it was right. Everything else I came up with wasn't nearly as provocative or important.

Alison Stewart: It's so important, Ain't no Back to a Merry-Go-Round. Where's the back?

Ilana Trachtman: Right. What you just heard is Langston reading it himself. That always still moves me to this day, hearing his voice.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. This is Donna, who is calling in from North Bellmore, Long Island. Hi, Donna, thank you for making the time to call All Of It.

Donna: Oh, this is just wonderful segment. I grew up in Maryland, and almost every Sunday my father took us to Glen Echo Amusement Park. This was the '50s. I had absolutely no idea. Never remember anything as a child. My parents aren't alive. I would have loved to ask them that. I really look forward to seeing this movie. This was a major part of my childhood, so thank you.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Did you find that when you talked to people about the park?

Ilana Trachtman: Absolutely. It was overwhelming to me because I had thought it was just me being so stupid in my childhood, looking at these pictures, loving these pictures, and just not noticing that I was only looking at pictures of white people, but then I talked to people who grew up and actually went there who also didn't notice. They were children or they were adults, but it's so interesting how that wasn't part of the consciousness.

To this day, I think that for white people who grew up in Washington, it remains, like Donna said, like this beloved memory of childhood. I know people whose grandparents got engaged on the Ferris wheel. It was like that kind of a place. Jimmy Dorsey used to perform there. Just thousands and thousands of people would come every weekend, but it turns out only few were white.

Alison Stewart: A documentary tells the story of a civil rights demonstration to desegregate an amusement park led by Black college students and white suburbanites. The director, Ilana Trachtman is my guest. We're talking about her film Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, which will be playing at the IFC Center starting tomorrow through Monday, September 22nd. Listeners, we'd like to get you in on the conversation. Have you ever been to Glen Echo National Park in Maryland? Do you remember it as an amusement park? When did you learn about the demonstration to integrate the park? Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. To give us a sense of what the segregation laws were like at the time. What were they like?

Ilana Trachtman: Maryland was absolutely the south below the Mason-Dixon Line, and so was Virginia, obviously. Washington, DC was legally integrated, de facto segregated. In Maryland, if you were a person of color, you could go into a department store and buy something, but you couldn't try it on, because the idea was that if you were a person of color or somebody white wanted to buy something and there was a possibility that a person of color had tried it on, they wouldn't want to buy it.

The Washington, then called Redskins, were the last team in the NFL to integrate, which is just so stunning to me. In Maryland and Virginia, they didn't have public accommodation laws. What that meant was, if you owned a business, you could choose your customers.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Lucy online, too. She's calling from Hastings-on-Hudson. Hey, Lucy, thank you so much for calling.

Lucy: Well, thank you for, for having this segment. It just really helps me remember my grandfather, the Bishop Daniel Corrigan, who was one of the activist who started this desegregation. He had a church in Baltimore, and he just did so many extraordinary things back when religious figures were social justice warriors. He truly was. This was just one of, actually, many things that he did to change the world for so many people, including women in the Episcopal Church. He ordained women in the Episcopal Church.

Then I later got to work with John Waters briefly. We got to talk about that. That was fun, because I remember Hairspray just being-- it didn't really address it, but just being proud that my grandfather had been just such a strong force in this movement and always taught me that just a few people can change a lot of things.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for taking your call. When did white suburbanites become interested in this particular case?

Ilana Trachtman: Yes, well, I think it's really important to define who these white suburbanites were. They were not your typical white suburbanites. They were people who had chosen to live in this community called Bannockburn, which was really founded on utopian ideals. Originally, it was founded because there were many Jewish labor organizers and civil servants who had come to Washington in order to work in the New Deal administration, coming from New York.

When they got there, they discovered that there were housing covenants that restricted them from buying homes in Washington, DC and some parts of Maryland. As a response, they bought a golf course cooperatively and developed it into a neighborhood that always had a cooperative nursery school, cooperative swimming pool, cooperative clubhouse. People who joined them, by 1960, it was interfaith, were also like-minded people who were connected to the labor movements.

This community had been boycotting Glen Echo Amusement Park, which was so close that they could hear people screaming from the carousel. They'd been boycotting it for years. In the Washington Post over the '50s, you see letters from them just decrying, what they call this blight on Washington, that this amusement park is segregated. For them, as soon as they heard that the Howard students were showing up, it was a no-brainer to go across the street and meet them, and meet them with lemonade and cookies and access to bathrooms.

Alison Stewart: After the break, we'll discover how the Howard students and these people got together to make a difference. Stay with us. You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Director Ilana Trachtman. We're talking about her documentary, Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round. It's going to be playing at the IFC Center starting tomorrow. We just found out it was extended until September 25th. We're talking about this amusement park. You said Howard students got involved, and they called themselves NAG. Please explain to us who NAG is.

Ilana Trachtman: NAG is the Nonviolent Action Group. NAG was their acronym, because they said they were going to nag the establishment. It was a small group of Howard students, a handful. It was led by a man named Laurence Henry, who was a divinity student. He was old at 25, and the rest of the Howard students were freshmen. They were 18 and 19-year-olds.

It was probably about eight of them initially who had first-- They had been inspired by Greensboro. They had first targeted the lunch counters in Arlington, Virginia, and had incredible success within two weeks because they were really savvy about it. They chose lunch counters that were basically outposts of stores in the north. They knew that economically, it would be really bad if there were sympathy pickets up north, like Woolworths. All of Arlington actually agreed to desegregate within two weeks. Then they were like, "Amazing, what are we going to do next?" Thinking it was all going to be just that simple.

Glen Echo was such a conspicuous target. The jingle was on the air all the time. You would be hard-pressed to find anybody who is over 70 and who can't sing it, actually, who grew up in Washington. Their ads said, "Come one, come all," and everybody knew it was a lie. That's where they went next.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip. This is NAG member Helene Wilson talking about the experience in her life that drove her to become involved with the civil rights movement.

Helen Wilson: I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I went to a school that was all white. In our sixth grade, a Black girl came into the school. Shortly after that, a second Black girl came. I could see that nobody was talking to them. I remember going out of my way to make friends with her. I knew how I would have felt if I was in a school where everybody was different from who I was.

Alison Stewart: How did the Black students react to people like Helene Wilson who wanted to help?

Ilana Trachtman: Helene Wilson was kind of an unusual case because she-- She's a very unusual case. She had in Buffalo befriended Bayard Rustin, and he was close to her and her husband, who was a labor organizer. As a newlywed, they moved to Washington, and Bayard introduced her to Tom Khan. Tom Khan was at Howard, and that is how she was connected to NAG. She wasn't from Bannockburn.

Alison Stewart: Oh, she wasn't. I'm so sorry. Let's take another call. Virginia is calling from East Orange, New Jersey. Hey, Virginia.

Virginia: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi. You're on the air.

Virginia: Oh, well, I told your person that my roommate-- I lived in New York City at the time, and was working. My roommate was very active in the civil rights movement. She was white, and she was at Glen Echo when they were integrating it. A woman threw a brick at her. She almost lost her eye, I think, as a result of that. The hatefulness of the people at Glen Echo that didn't want the place integrated just always stuck with me. Even though after I left New York, I lived in the Maryland, the area, the Delmarva area, I never went near Glen Echo. I had such a horrible distaste for the people around there. That's all.

Alison Stewart: Virginia, thank you so much for sharing. Did you want to weigh in on that?

Ilana Trachtman: Yes, I would love to actually know your roommate's name, because I've talked to, at this point, 150 people or so who were there, so I'd be interested if it's someone that I had spoken to. I have met along the way many people, African American people, who still refuse to go into Glen Echo, even though it closed in 1968, and it's now obviously fully integrated national park. Many of the park rangers are African American, and they have told me about how it was a real process for their families to come around to where they were working.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious if there was any sort of disagreement in the protesters, the way they went about things?

Ilana Trachtman: That's a great question. It was not Kumbaya. It was not Kumbaya. Actually, I hope that that's clear from the film. Anytime you have any groups of people, but here you have people who have completely different life experiences, expectations, and tactics, and for the most part, Bannockburn people were 20, 25 years older than the Howard students. They had children at home. The Howard students did not, and the Bannockburn people had labor union training.

Alison Stewart: That's right.

Ilana Trachtman: That's a very particular approach. There was definitely bumps, but I do think that one of the reasons that the protest was so successful is that they really recognized and appreciated each other's strengths and played to their strengths. For example, the NAG students were going into the Black churches in DC in order to recruit people to come to the picket line. Bannockburn had connections in upper echelons of the federal government so they could bring congressmen to the picket line.

They were all thinking about their shared goal, and there was nothing better than the optics, because in Washington, DC, having an integrated picket line was so unusual, and one with congressmen, that the Washington Post ran a headline that said Whites Join Negroes to Protest Glen Echo Park Segregation. That was a headline, whites join Negroes. Yes, it wasn't simple, but ultimately was successful because they got past themselves.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Quincy from West Orange. Hi, Quincy, thanks for calling All Of It.

Quincy: Hi. I grew up in the DC area and I took swimming lessons in the pool at Glen Echo Amusement Park, which was kind of amazing. It was an amazing pool with a huge fountain. I don't remember, it was like '65 or '66, if it was integrated or not then. As a kid, I wouldn't have noticed one way or the other, but I did ask my mother years later what happened because it was such a fabulous amusement park and we used to go there for swimming and also for amusement, and she said that, people, they started to integrate it and bus in African Americans and white people didn't like it and it basically went out of business, except for the carousel. I was just astounded, like, I don't know how I missed that.

Alison Stewart: Let me follow you up on that. Is that what happened?

Ilana Trachtman: I think that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. The park didn't close until 1968, and it was partially due to just declining numbers of people coming. If you look at family-owned amusement parks across the United States, I think there's some number, like 89% or something of them closed between 1960 and 1972 because Disney World opened and Six Flags and air travel became expensive and just family-owned amusement parks were closing. I love your story of learning to swim in the Crystal Pool. When I was a child, it was there, but it was empty. It was just concrete, but 3,000 people could swim in Crystal Pool, and it had beaches.

Alison Stewart: Wow. What do you want people to learn from this film in the last minute?

Ilana Trachtman: I think that when we learn about the civil rights movement, we learn about the giants. It's hard to name more than four or five people for the average person who is active. I think that it's such a disservice to us that we don't learn about the thousands of people who just acted locally. They didn't go to the bridge at Selma, they just stood up at their local lunch counter, amusement park, library, movie theater.

When we learn about those people, which I hope a viewer does when they see the film, we then see our own capacity for being able to act. I'm just so excited for New York audiences to get to see the film. I'm going to be there, actually, Wednesday and Thursday and Saturday and Sunday.

Alison Stewart: We love it. Director Ilana Trachtman. Her new film is called Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, which opens at the IFC Center tomorrow. Thanks for coming in.

Ilana Trachtman: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It tomorrow. I'm Alison Stewart. I'll meet you back here.