Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round Screening at the St. Louis International Film Festival

The documentary Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round is the untold story of the nation's very first organized interracial civil rights protest. Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round centers on the partnership between visionary Howard University students and Jewish suburbanites who collaborated to integrate Washington's "recreation destination." Ain't No Back is narrator and expert-free, transporting the viewer to the summer of 1960 and intimately capturing the impulse to activism, the dismantling of stereotypes, and the mechanism of social change. While we all learned about the historic friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, we never learned the names, nor the example of the thousands of "regular" people who acted locally and fueled the Civil Rights Movement. In our incredibly charged socio-political moment, the film offers a model of partnership and bridge-building. Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round When five Black college students sat on a segregated Maryland carousel in 1960, their arrests made headlines. When the Jewish community near Glen Echo Amusement Park joined the protest, a history-making interracial demonstration was born. The cause, and the collaboration, provoked counterprotests by the American Nazi party, and brought Congressmen and national leaders to the picket line. Picketing together led to partying together, union bosses mentored student activists, and ten 1961 Freedom Riders emerged, including Stokely Carmichael. With never-before seen footage, and immersive storytelling by Emmy-award winning director Ilana Trachtman, four living protesters rescue this untold story, revealing the price, and the power, of heeding the impulse to activism. Featuring the voices of Jeffrey Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Bob Balaban, Lee Grant, Peter Gallagher, Dominique Thorne, Alysia Reiner, and Tracie Thoms.

Event Links

Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2723570-0

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