Tue 2/18 @ 7PM
Many key events from the Civil Rights era are legendary, from Rosa Parks’ bus sit-in to Bloody Sunday at Selma, Alabama’s Pettis Bridge when police attacked peaceful marchers on their way to the state capital, to the bombing deaths of four little girls at Birmingham, Alabama’s 16st Street Baptist Church. But there were countless others across the county from the late 50s to the mid 60s.
One of those was a sit-in at the carousel at Washington D.C.’s Glen Echo Amusement Park in 1960 by students from Howard University, protesting the park’s whites-only policy. The Black students were joined by white, mostly Jewish neighbors, the first interracial civil rights protest in the country. And then, to up the ante, the American Nazi Party showed up, bringing the hate.
The film Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (the title was taken from a Langston Hughes poem about Jim Crow segregation) depicts these incidents and their fallout. The film uses recently discovered archival footage to focus on the stories of six particular people who were involved in trying to change a system carefully constructed to keep Black and white people from associating with and getting to know each other — and realize they had common interests.
The film will screen at the Maltz Museum, co-sponsored by the Cleveland Jewish Film Fest. Go here for tickets. Go here for more information about the film.