The 2025 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival is about to kick off from Feb. 19- March 16 with a slate of flicks that incorporates the documentary “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round.” Impressed via the Langston Hughes poem “Merry-Go-Round,” the movie paperwork the battle to desegregate Glen Echo Landscape, a common sleep terrain in Maryland.
What began as 5 Howard College scholars being arrested for driving the terrain’s merry-go-round in 1960 resulted in the primary arranged interracial civil rights protest in U.S. historical past as Howard College scholars and Jewish contributors of the Bannockburn society, a ancient community simply 3 miles north of D.C., labored in combination to combine the terrain.
The Atlanta Resonance talked with Ilana Trachtman, the movie’s director; Yvonne Thomas, spouse of Hank Thomas, a self-rule fighter featured within the movie; and Lily A.C. Flores, Hank’s great-granddaughter and a contributor to the movie.
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” will premiere at the festival on Sunday, March 2, at 4:15 PM on the Sandy Springs Acting Arts Middle.
The Atlanta Resonance: The movie’s identify comes from the Langston Hughes poem “Merry-Go-Round,” which results with the series, “Where’s the horse for a kid that’s Black?” Ilana, for individuals who will be capable of attend to the movie when it premieres on the Atlanta Jewish Movie Pageant, are you able to give perception into what the movie is ready and the worth of the poem to the tale?
Ilana Trachtman: “The film is about what is the first organized interracial civil rights protest in America, specifically, the first time that a Black student protest was assisted by an organized white community. The poem was written 18 years before this happened by Langston Hughes, and he was talking about being a kid in the Jim Crow South and being subjected ridiculously to the back of everything. And where would one sit at the back of a merry-go-round, because merry-go-rounds don’t have a back.”
AV: “There’s so much untold history out there, especially when it comes to the Black experience. We know about sit-ins during the civil rights struggle, but when you dig deeper, you find these interracial protests and their impact. How does the story of this Black-Jewish alliance come across your desk and why was it important for you to tell this story?”
IT: “I actually grew up about 20 minutes away, and by the time I was growing up, the amusement park had long been closed. But there was a national park there that was built on the remains of the amusement park, and it was really like an arts colony. And so as a child, we went all the time, and it was just this beloved place that we went to for puppet shows, and I went to day camp there. And it was so beautiful because the merry-go-round was still there. The National Park Service even had photographs around of what the park had looked like since the turn of the century, and it just always felt like this magical place. I always thought about it as a wholesome moment of Washington, D.C. history that was gone.
“It wasn’t until 20 years later, that I went back to see the park as a potential wedding venue, that we ran into a national park ranger who told us the story of how the park was integrated. And my first my first reaction was, ‘What do you mean, how the park was integrated?’ It never occurred to me that the park had been whites only, which is stupid, because I’ve been looking at those pictures my whole life, and it had never registered to me that I was only looking at white people in those photographs. That meant that there was an entire community that was denied access. And that was really a wake-up call; that was really shameful to me. I just felt complicit, and that was the beginning.
“When I learned more about who it was that integrated the park — the white community that was largely Jewish and the Howard students — the white community was made up of people who were involved in the labor movement and the federal government. My dad had been a Jewish labor organizer, and when I started working on the film, my dad had passed away a couple of years before that, so it was a way to understand him a little better. It was a way to stay connected to him, because those people in Bannockburn reminded me of my parent’s friends.”
AV: And Hank Thomas was once one of the most featured self-rule warring parties on this movie who got here from this mini the town in Georgia to being at the leading edge of this civil rights effort. Mrs. Thomas, what did you each be told from his point of view of this hour in his occasion?
Yvonne Thomas: “I always say, Thomas was born to be an activist. He started very young. He grew up in Wadley, Georgia, and it was there that he’d gone into a store with all of the other kids that was owned by a white guy. He was walking down the aisle and brushed against a white woman, and she just put her hands on him, stopped him and said, ‘Just stand still and and go this way.’ And so he did that not thinking anything of it, but the guys he was with were so frightened that they all ran out and ran home. He didn’t know what was going on, and when he got there, the kids had already told the parents that Thomas had brushed up against a white woman. Everybody was alarmed that, here’s this kid, probably no more than five or six years old, and they were frightened. They didn’t know what was going to happen. So, that really stuck with him. They didn’t live there very long. They pretty much left and went to Jacksonville, and it was almost like he had just become an activist.
“He always had the sense of right and wrong and equal and what to do. Whenever he saw anything going that he thought was not the way all people should be treated, he always reacted. He just never accepted status quo.”
AV: A query within the movie was once, why Glen Echo? There have been alternative fights available reminiscent of process alternatives. What did that battle to desegregate the sleep terrain characterize for the ones protesters?
YT: “D.C. was, quote, an integrated area. There was segregation around Maryland, Virginia, and all around, but D.C. was supposed to be integrated. And when they learned that there’s this community in D.C., and we’ve got dignitaries from around the world coming, and yet there was segregation. So when they saw it, they thought, if we don’t have total integration here, then we don’t have it, period. And what’s the rest of the country to do? So, they saw it as something they had to get involved with.”
IT: “I think also it’s easy to underestimate how pervasive Glen Echo was in popular culture. I mean, those radio ads, those jingles — anybody who’s over 60 can sing them by heart. And the ads in the paper said, ‘Come one, come all.’ It was just part of being a Washingtonian. It’s just that if you were a Washingtonian of color, that was off-limits to you. Not to mention, the metaphor of the fact that what could be more benign than an amusement park? And the fact that there’s an amusement park that is off limits to children was just so hideous that, how could you not make that public?
AV: At the end of the film, Hank said American Jews were our most important allies during the Civil Rights Movement. For you all, when you look at the unity between Howard University students and the Bannockburn community when it comes to the fight to desePhoto gregate Glen Echo Park, what did the particular alliance between Black and Jews tell you about their unique experience in America throughout time?
YT: “The freedom rides, which is what Hank was a part of, was definitely an integrated movement. We’re not that far removed from the Holocaust, and knowing that, in a sense, we’re brothers in struggles against the system.
Lily A.C. Flores: “It’s trauma bonding.”
IT: I feel that’s a good manner of hanging it, Lily. I feel that the enjoy in The us of being othered is one thing that the Unlit society and the Jewish society shared. It doesn’t get started with the Civil Rights Motion. Even the origination of the NAACP was once a shared undertaking. So, I don’t assume it’s a must to glance that dried to search out examples of Unlit-Jewish partnership. However on the identical hour, I feel it’s in point of fact remarkable.
“I’m personally uncomfortable with the film being described as a Black film, or a Jewish film, or even a Black-Jewish film, because it’s not. It is not about the relationship writ large. It’s not about the Civil Rights Movement writ large. It’s about this one protest, this one period in time, this one group of individuals. I hope that I’ve done my best to be true to Hank Thomas’s experience, true to Dion Diamond’s experience, true to Esther Delaplaine and Helene Wilson’s, and so I feel like I can only really represent what I understand from those individuals, as opposed to the whole Black-Jewish relationship, because, as we know, it’s complicated.”
AV: How remarkable do you assume it’s to premiere a movie like this with the atmosphere of the rustic that we’re in?
YT: “I think it’s very important. We’ve forgotten that we are one people. The whole idea was that, no one person is no better than the other. It has nothing to do with race our creed; we are all equal. And we think of all the progress that African Americans have made in this country, and now to see things being rolled back is frightening. It’s totally un-American, and I never thought we would be going in this direction today. I never thought she [gestures to Lily] would witness this.”
LF: “I think is very important for especially people my age, because they obviously concept what’s going on in the country right now, but I don’t think they really understand how far back the clock is turning instead of going forward.”
IT: “And I think that it’s easy to forget that the truth is, if they come for one of us, they’re coming for all of us, right? It might be immigrants today, but I, sadly, think it’s going to be other groups tomorrow and other groups a day after that. The only way that we have any power is by working together.”
AV: “After a year of protests, Glen Echo operated on an integrated basis. It led to interracial protests against local segregation across the country. How do you all hope this film upholds the lasting impact of this fight?”
IT: “One of the things I want people to take away is learning that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just fought by Martin Luther King Jr. I think it’s pretty easy to only hold on to the celebrity heroes of any movement, and you never learn about ‘regular’ people. You never learn that, actually, thousands of protests took place where people just acted locally. There is plenty of Hank Thomas’ and Helene Wilson’s and people who were just like us. If we only learn about the famous people, then we give ourselves a pass and we say, ‘Well, I’m no Martin Luther King Jr. What can I do?’ But in fact, I really hope that people say, ‘Oh, she reminds me of my grandma. Oh, that’s kind of like my seventh-grade science teacher.’ And if those people could do something, and didn’t necessarily need to wait for a whole bunch of other people behind them to lift them up, then what am I doing? We actually do have agency. We do have power to make change, and we also have responsibility.”
YT: “I’m hoping people look at it and realize it’s important that we all take action and that we can make a difference. It all starts with one, and I think we’ve got a young activist here, and I am so proud of the way she stands up when she sees things wrong.”
IT: “Hank Thomas is a local Atlanta hero, and I feel like this is an opportunity for Atlantans to embrace him and pay respect. I’m really thrilled that the film is playing in Atlanta at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival because I know that that’s something that is really important to him. Not so much about not so much about glory, but the fact that this story is being told in the Jewish Film Festival is something that means a lot to him.”