In 1963, the March on Washington immediately became one of the most important moments in American Civil Rights history – a moment so big, everyone knew they were a part of history as it happened. But not every moment of historical importance is as lucky.
Three years before the March on Washington, another piece of history unfolded just mere miles away. In the summer of 1960, Black student activists from Howard University joined forces with a nearby Jewish community and picketed outside Glen Echo Amusement Park, a theme park in Maryland that refused to admit Black patrons. That summer of protest has since been captured in a new documentary called “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” which is playing at this year’s Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.
The film’s director, Ilana Trachtman, is an award-winner documentary filmmaker, whose films include “Praying with Lior,” about a Jewish family as they prepare for their son with Down syndrome’s bar mitzvah; and “Mariachi High,” which follows a mariachi ensemble at a high school in South Texas.
Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Trachtman about her personal connection to Glen Echo and the long, arduous journey of making this film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re here to talk about “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” which is going to be playing at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival this year. But you’ve made a number of documentaries over the years, and looking through them, the topics seem to really vary. When you’re looking for a story, or looking for a new project, what types of things captivate you or draw you in?
Ilana Trachtman: For my independent films, it would be disingenuous to say what I’m looking for, because it’s more the opposite. It’s more like something finds me. Independent film is such a miserable field [laughs], that something has to find me, and I have to be so compelled that I think the world will end if I don’t make that film.
I can’t say that I’m looking for something that fits a certain genre. To work backwards, what I think – and this is really only retrospectively – if I look at the work that I’ve made, not just the independent films, but the jobs that I’ve agreed to take … I think that I’m most interested in projects that are about uncovering worlds and stories and humans that are hidden in plain sight and revealing the humanity in worlds that we may not see, because either we choose not to look at them, they haven’t been represented well by the media – we’ve lost these stories.
Specifically with “Praying with Lior” and “Mariachi High,” for me personally – I can’t speak for the vast civilization – personally, I had never really delved into the soul of someone with Down syndrome, and I never really understood before what it meant to be a Latin American teenager living on the Texas/Mexico border and grappling with a Latino identity without necessarily even speaking Spanish. I think that’s probably what these things have in common.
Glen Echo Park is now a national park that’s beloved by – I forget what the numbers are – millions of people visit it every year. And nobody knows this history. Forget about this protest, it’s really a dirty secret for Washingtonians, that Glen Echo, which is seen as this wholesome, idealized, small, family-owned amusement park, was prohibiting Black people from entering for the vast majority of its existence.
You grew up not too far from the national park that replaced the Glen Echo Amusement Park – speaking of this being a kind of unknown aspect of history, I read an interview with you where you said you didn’t know much about the integration process and the collaborative effort to get there until much later on. It seems like you had a nice relationship with Glen Echo Park growing up, but how did learning about what happened there evolve your relationship to that place?
Trachtman: I can’t say that I love the park any less. In fact, maybe I love it even more, because on the macro level, such an unprecedented, historic, brave event took place there. But I love it even more for the micro level, where people who had never met each other before – and I don’t mean just strangers, I mean people who had never met somebody who belonged to a different race, had [never] encountered each other before. Because this was a time when it was very difficult to have a meaningful interaction with, if you were white something who was Black, and if you were Black somebody who was white. So the days, and weeks, and hours of long conversations that took place at this park with this shared goal is kind of holy to me.
I do acknowledge the deep pain and, in fact, trauma for so many African Americans who grew up there, who were kids and saw the park and were unable to enter. That pain is heartbreaking to me. I guess I would say, I love the park for different reasons now.
I had never heard of this event before. In some ways, the Civil Rights movement was so expansive that it makes sense that there would be pockets of history that you didn’t know about. But, like you said, this was kind of an historic event. I’m always interested in why some events catch on in our historical memory and others don’t. Do you have any thoughts on why that is, in particular with Glen Echo?
Trachtman: I think it’s a combination of things. I’m not enough of a historian of media preservation and cultural analysis to be able to give you something definitive. But my sense is it partially has to do with the way that news was reported and preserved for a long time. There wasn’t a 24 hour news cycle, and if you didn’t live in a place, you didn’t have access to the news that was taking place there specifically. You didn’t get those newspapers. You didn’t see that news coverage. So, a local story was only reported locally, and if it did make press outside of the region, it was usually a few lines. You can find, if you look hard enough, a couple lines about this protest in wide and disparate papers. But it certainly wasn’t given any kind of daily coverage, and it was meaningless if you were outside of DC.
I think Washington DC had so much “newsworthy” events going on all the time that this just got lost. It was so new that nobody understood that it was a harbinger of what would happen from then on. Interracial picketing was unheard of, and nobody understood that this would then spark hundreds of other protests all over the country. And the way news was preserved, everything was on tape, right? Footage and audio – so people just recycled that stuff. It didn’t get saved. It didn’t exist in the ether, like our storage does now. It existed physically. So people just taped over everything. Even newspaper morgues were not saved carefully.
At the time, it didn’t feel like history to people, and it wasn’t earmarked that way, like let’s say the March on Washington in 1963. That was understood at that moment that history was being made. I don’t think anybody understood that a couple hundred people protesting at an amusement park was history.
I wanted to talk about the name of the movie a bit. I know it comes from a Langston Hughes poem, and it’s obviously a pretty apt name for a story about an amusement park. Did you know the poem before? How did that come into your view?
Trachtman: I didn’t know about this poem before. I did love Langston Hughes, but I didn’t know about this poem. There were very few analyses or reports retroactively about this historic event, but one piece of research that I did have … an undergrad had written a paper on the event, and somebody else had written a master’s thesis, from different perspectives than the film. Both of them, as well as a play about this, all three of them were called “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round.” So I am not the person that made that connection.
That’s so funny. I wonder if they all know about the connection, or they came up with it separately.
Trachtman: I’m probably the only one that went through the process of licensing it through the Langston Hughes estate. [Laughs] But I can’t take credit for making that connection.
I know this movie took you quite a long time to make – 10 years. I’ve heard you talk about how difficult the fundraising was, and the gathering or archival footage, which I can only imagine took forever, and tracking everyone down. I wanted to talk a little bit about the editing process. When you have 10 years of work in the can, how do you go about deciding what to keep and what to leave out? How does the structure come about?
Trachtman: Great question. First of all, 10 years includes the editing process. So it’s more like six or seven years.
Still a long time!
Trachtman: Still a very long time. I’m trying to think about where to begin and how to explain it. After assembling the timeline for ourselves, of the events, and even the arrests timeline, because there were so many of them, it was then really important to figure out who could tell the story. I pre-interviewed probably about 150 people, and then for camera interviewed maybe 30. It was figuring out who were going to be the salient voices who can represent this.
The criteria was, it needed to be people who, number one, were truly representative of others who were on the picket line; number two, had pretty intact and reliable memories; number three, who were good storytellers and were going to be compelling; and number four that I had a way to prove their existence on the picketline. Anybody who was in Washington in 1963 says they were at the March in Washington, you know? I needed a way to actually verify that they were there.
There’s sort of four A characters, and then there’s a few more minor characters, and then after that, there’s sort of a Greek chorus. Then, I needed to figure out how their stories weave together. What are the places that they overlap? What are the places that this person can carry the story, then that this person can carry the story? Because the chronology of the summer needed to continue moving forward, as opposed to then circling back on itself.
There was a lot of wrestling between me and the advisors, but most especially between me and my two brilliant editors, Sandra Christie and Ann Collins, about how far back to go and how far forward to go. Each of these people have backgrounds that are extremely relevant. I wanted to understand personally, and I wanted the audience to have an inkling as to why these people were standing up and picketing when the vast majority of people did nothing. And you couldn’t really understand what it was that made them [do it] without understanding where they came from and who they were and who raised them, and what long line they were the result of.
Even the history of the park. I mean, there’s a lot of interesting history that happened later on with the park that just wasn’t related to this particular protest, and so this had to be the ending point. I mean, I could have easily done a 10-part series.
I’ve heard you talk about how towards the beginning, you weren’t sure if there was any footage of the protests to be found. Could you talk about finding that footage, and the feeling of, okay – we do have a story here?
Trachtman: I knew we had a story before I found the footage, so I knew there was going to be a story, but it just helped a tremendous amount. Every single piece of archival footage of the protest, and also of the particular protesters even outside of the protest, is a miracle in and of itself. Every single one deserves its own 20-minute conversation to tell you where it came from, and how it came, because it’s stunning. All kinds of serendipity had to happen for us to find things.
The most incredible piece of footage … I had the recording of the conversation between the police officer and [Howard divinity student and protest leader] Laurence Henry, when [the police officer] says, “Can I ask your race?” That was an audio recording recorded by a radio reporter named Sam Smith, who was at the protest and who was there for that interaction, thankfully, and who himself knew the overt racism in that conversation – can I ask your race? – was so outrageous that he saved it. He didn’t tape over it, the way he did with probably everything else he recorded. Many, many years later, he donated that piece of audio recording to the park. I had that, but I didn’t have any visuals.
In the process of researching the story and speaking to hundreds of people, one of the people that I had talked to early on, who had been like a seven year old [during the protests], called me a few years later – thank God she saved my phone number – to say, listen, I was going through his box that was hid in my parents’ basement, and there’s this little yellow Kodachrome box, and it says Glen Echo 1960. Do you want it? I, of course, said yes. I had her FedEx it to me. But it was Super 8 [film], and I didn’t have any budget. So I couldn’t have paid like, Colorlab to transfer it, because it’s so expensive. So I bought a $35 movie projector on EBay, and taught myself how to use it with one of those YouTube videos, and set it up in my office. I carefully fed [the film], and as soon as I saw the first frame, and I saw that it was the protest – I mean, I literally fell on my knees. Then I jumped up and quickly turned it off, because I was afraid it would catch fire, you know? [Laughs] So I did put it on my credit card and sent it to Colorlab. And that’s 90 seconds, which is incredible, and used constantly in the film.
Then, it was only about five or six years after that in the edit room that we figured out that the conversation that Sam Smith had recorded was actually taking place at the same moment that this woman’s … father was filming on Super 8. Because Super 8 is silent, and the whole movie was silent. He was filming that conversation, and it synced to the audio recording. That audio recording and that piece of Super 8 footage were living 3,000 miles apart, and it was only this incredible miracle that we were able to marry them together. That’s probably the most fantastic story, but there’s so many stories about each of the pieces of archival footage.
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” plays at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on March 2.