Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round*
* a poem written by Langston Hughes

USA 2024 | 1 hour 29 minutes
Sunday, February 23rd at 2pm
at the JCC of Greater Albuquerque

Since 1909, Glen Echo Amusement Park was a white-only recreation destination for metropolitan Washington, and Black children living nearby could only gaze from the road. In protest, Howard University students sat on the gilded horses of a Maryland merry-go-round in June 1960, and the arrests made headlines in the nascent “Sit-Down Movement.”
Nearby, Jewish housing cooperative residents joined the Howard students’ protest. Despite sweltering heat and violent counter-protesters from the American Nazi Party, Black students marched with white suburbanites for ten weeks. Union bosses collaborated with student leaders, young people became radicalized, and some future giants of the Civil Rights Movement were born.
While Black people could sit in the back of the bus, there Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round.
This is a timely cinematic excavation of this little-known Civil Rights story. Using just-discovered archival footage, and focusing on the stories of six individuals, viewers can visualize the times when private businesses could choose their customers, and the walls between Black and white were so high that friendships were unimaginable.