Ilana Trachtman: The Filmmaker Reviving Forgotten Civil Rights History

In this episode of Faithful Politics, hosts Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram speak with Ilana Trachtman, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, about her newest documentary, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round. The film uncovers the little-known story of the 1960 civil rights protest at Glen Echo Amusement Park in Maryland—a powerful moment when Howard University students and white Jewish neighbors joined forces to integrate a local amusement park, facing down segregationists and even the American Nazi Party.

Trachtman shares how her childhood visits to the park inspired the film, what it means to tell history through intimate personal storytelling, and the unexpected intersections of faith, justice, and memory that emerge when ordinary citizens act on conviction. The conversation explores the emotional layers behind forgotten movements, the role of Jewish allies in early civil rights activism, and how filmmakers like Trachtman use art to preserve moral clarity in divided times.

Website: aintnoback.com

Guest Bio: 
Ilana Trachtman is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker with over 30 years of experience producing documentaries for PBS, HBO, Showtime, ABC, and A&E. Her acclaimed works—Praying with Lior, Black and Latin America, and The Pursuit: 50 Years in the Fight for LGBT Rights—explore identity, belonging, and justice through deeply personal stories. Her latest film, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, chronicles the interracial protests that desegregated Glen Echo Amusement Park in 1960, blending historical footage with intimate interviews to illuminate how ordinary people shaped the civil rights movement.

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, we are so thankful you're joining us. um This is Faithful Politics. I'm your political host, Will Wright, joined by my ever faithful, faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. What's going on, Josh? Hey, doing well, well, thanks. And today we have with us a lot. Oh man, Alana Trackman. Did I get the name right? All right. So Alana Trackman, who is a Emmy award winning filmmaker with over 30 years of experience directing and producing nonfiction programs for PBS, HBO, ABC, H, A, and E and Showtime. Her work includes Praying with Lior, Black and Latin America and The Pursuit, 50 Years in the Fight of Four LGBT Rights. And her films explore themes of justice, identity, belonging. through intimate human centered storytelling. And we are talking with her today about her latest documentary called Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, which is a phenomenal piece which we will dig into uh at length here. And just welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. It's really nice to be on the show. Yeah, and we're really glad to have you. I have to ask, just to kind of get a little background about you, uh getting into filmmaking seems like uh not a weird profession, because a lot of people do it, but uh it seems like a profession that would be ignited by some sort of experience, event, moment in your life. And I really just love to learn, did you choose filmmaking as a career? And specifically, why did you kind of choose the genre? of topics to cover. Yeah, no, that's a great question. Actually, I ask myself that regularly and like wonder if there was a different fork I should have taken. um I started out in children's television. Actually, I started on the show reading Rainbow with LeVar Burton. That was my I started. Yeah. I started getting people coffee, essentially, and and worked my way up. um And I discovered on that show that the things that I liked the most. were the true stories, because know, LeVar takes a children's book and then he connects it to a real life story. So if you have a show like, you, a book like, if you give a mouse a cookie in the picture book, which is about chain reactions, then we would go and do a story about how a bowling alley works. And so one of my early jobs was finding the right bowling alley to shoot in. That was gonna be convenient to LeVar and that would let us come in and let us see all the mechanisms. That was so interesting to me the real life so much more so than you know anything that anything that we could have I could have dreamt up that that's sort of how documentary I Would say took took fire um What's the word for take for take fire? What's that word? What's the word when you like? Know there's a word for when when you something catches fire anyway, that's how that's what how it caught fire for me ah and then I was really lucky in that I was always working, I was always working, which was great, and on interesting projects. And at one moment, I came across a child who was uh praying with unbelievable passion. uh there's a Hebrew word, kavana, which means intention. And with so much kavana, with so much intention, and I was at a moment in my life where I was... hoping to learn how to pray like that. And I discovered that the kid, when I turned around and saw him, had Down syndrome. And then that sparked a film about him. And that was my first independent film because independent film in a way is like its own species that should be a DSM-4 category if you're an independent filmmaker. I mean, you have to be so crazy and masochistic and driven to do it. But that's what happened is I met this child named Lior and that was 15 years ago, no, 20 years ago. And that's how my independent film career started because that, you know, you have the blessing and maybe the much bigger curse of being able to make the film that you want to make on the timeline that you want to make it in exactly the way that you want to make it. So... That's how that part happened. But along the way I continue to make films for other people and then occasionally when something, you know, just grabs me by the lapels and I become truly obsessed, then that becomes an independent film and that's what this project was. That is so cool. mean, I'm not a filmmaker. Yeah, I can barely get the podcasting thing down. um So but what I what I appreciate about especially independent filmmakers is it seems like at least independent films I've seen. You all are really good at getting into the weeds of kind of the human condition uh and really kind of bringing that out so people can kind of see how other people, human, I guess, uh good, bad and the ugly. We spoke with another uh person that had a documentary where they were just focusing on a single January sixer. They followed them around. You can listen to all their stories, you know, and really that was it. But then you walk away and you're like. I have a different perspective of like the human nature of like the people that, you know, I have very strong opinions about. uh So I just think it's really, really great. And I'm curious on sort of the direction you took with uh this particular documentary, the Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, uh you decided to kind of focus on an amusement park. So like, let's start there. Like, tell us a little bit about this amusement park and how did this project come into focus for you? Yeah, that's such an interesting way putting it. I never thought about it like that as I decided to. I wouldn't say that's true. I wouldn't say I decided to focus on this amusement park. It was more that this amusement park, which is called Glen Echo Amusement Park, was called Glen Echo Amusement Park, became a national park in 1971. And so when I was growing up, that park, that public park was a place that I went to often with my family because it was no longer an amusement park. It was an art center. And everyone in my family did some other art form. it retained the infrastructure of the amusement park. So you could walk around and see a pigeon excrement encrusted shooting gallery. And the signs still said bumper car pavilion. And there were still roller coaster tracks in the ground. And the colors were all that faded. yellow, blue, red, and just Art Deco fonts. And uh it was so evocative. And as a national park, they had those interpretive exhibits all over the place and photographs of the park in its heyday, which was actually long from like early part of the 1900s all the way to 1968. And so, you know, over these photographs, you see fashions change, you see new rides added, you see like Washington having the greatest wholesome Norman Rockwell-esque time, you know, at this amusement park. you know, there's a photograph that I loved that I just used to look at often of these sailors who I assume were in the Navy. And I think they were coming back from probably World War I. And they're throwing their girlfriends like in the air. And that carousel is in the background, which and the carousel was still there. And it's the same carousel. So. You know, it was just like, it was a playground of the imagination, honestly. It was really hard to walk around there to this day and not have this sense of um just people screaming their heads off happily, you know, for generations, literally. So I love that park. I love those photographs. And in fact, like I loved it so much that when I was engaged, I brought my fiance there to see like to see it because I thought maybe it would be a great place to have our wedding. And when we went there, and now I had moved away about 20 years ago, but that's what a large place it stayed in my mind. When we went there, we ran into a National Park Service Ranger. His name is Sam Swirsky. And somehow Sam, we got to talking and somehow Sam told us the story of how the park got integrated. And I was Before I could even get to that story, was stuck on the first part was that the park needed to be integrated because it had never occurred to me that the park was whites only. mean, I was so shocked by that. then, you know, I was like, wait a second, like, I've been looking at those pictures. Like I should have noticed. I should have noticed. you know, grew up in an integrated world and, you know, my school was integrated. My county was integrated. I should have noticed that I was only looking at pictures of white people. um And you know and just turning that over and this idea that I was like nostalgic for this time that I didn't know and for this um this place of Joy and wonder and access to fun and it was actually Exactly the opposite of that for a whole population of people. You know, it was a place of exclusion and cruelty and some idea that therefore inferiority because they weren't allowed to get in. And the shock, the change that I needed to absorb about that, of that really cruel juxtaposition, and the fact that really, I I wasn't unusual in that I didn't know that. Really, it was a dirty secret that was hiding in plain sight. um And that was the first like, whoa. And then I started, I really wanted to learn more and like understand how that all came to be. And as I learned more specifically about how the park was integrated, um which, you know, was principally a group of Howard University students and then a group of middle-aged white, largely Jewish people who lived in a neighborhood that was across the street called Bannockburn. those white people ah were very connected to the labor movement. And that my father was a Jewish labor organizer. And in fact, he was the deputy director of the African American Labor Center. And so they felt, you know, reading their newsletters, you know, listening to oral histories with them, they just felt so familiar. They felt like people that could have been at my dinner table. Hmm. my father had died a couple of years earlier. And so like there was, just had the sense that I was like continuing the conversation with my dad. um So, you know, that, that drove me to like kind of like, you know, keep, keep digging, keep digging, keep digging. And then the other thing is like, there was all these little like breadcrumbs along the way that were so remarkable, you know, and that nobody had ever found before. I mean, how often do we ever do that? You know, like this incredibly documented researched world that we live in that there were like, about the early civil rights movement. It was like a story that nobody knew. And because it hadn't been told, there was always something else to discover. I would imagine it's pretty hard to find a picture of, let's say, Martin Luther King that nobody's seen before. I mean, there probably are a couple, but it's not right there for us to find, whereas all of this was there for me to find. And so that's... That's how it became an obsession. I mean, I just, think it's such a cool story and it just shows the iterative nature of creativity when you're trying to work into a story and understand it and you discover more. It's like, it's okay to just start with where you are and then let it. like move you in the direction that it's going to take you where you don't have to necessarily make something happen. It's like it's got its own story to tell and you just have to find it to tell it. And I would love for you to like tell this specific story about this sit-in and what happened and why was it a big deal and how did Nazis show up? I just would love to get us a sense of the question. know we got a bunch of, know, uh Will's got a bunch of questions I do, but I just want to level set on that. what's going on with this event? Why was it so significant and even missed? Right. So you want me to sort of like give the overview of start with the overview of the plot of what happened. OK, so and this is the tricky thing about this film, too. It's like, where do you begin? know, because everything. But I'll I'll try to begin like right in the middle, in fact. And in the middle is 1960 and all the everything that's going on in the world in 1960, which is, you know, 1960 is when. Greensboro, when four A &T students sat down at the Woolworths counter in Greensboro. And that single act set off all kinds of sympathetic protests all around the country, mostly started by students at historically black colleges and universities. you can trace them. They're all over the place. And so this one was motivated by um by Greensboro and it was Howard University students who were at Howard in Washington who were ignited. Now, of course, the individuals that I'm talking about were already uh themselves, I would say, really dedicated uh to integration and more than integration, I would say, to equality. um so it wasn't like it took so much to turn them on, but this gave them a roadmap. Those Howard University students started an organization they called NAG, which was the Nonviolent Action Group. And NAG's first target was lunch counters in Arlington. At those lunch counters, they were really savvy. They chose places that um were franchises and so that had uh outposts up in the north. And so if you sat down at like a Woolworths in Arlington, it was going to affect business at Woolworths in New York and so, and drug fair and a whole bunch of others. And so really quickly the lunch counters in Arlington capitulated and two weeks is actually what it took. And once some of them capitulated, all of them did until Arlington's lunch counters were totally integrated. And so then they were like, okay, that was great. What can we do next? You know, and they chose Glen Echo Amusement Park. And it was a really conspicuous target. mean, it was the amusement park of record. You can't find anybody who's like over the age of, I would say, 70, who grew up in the DC area who can't sing the jingle because it was played so often on so many radio stations. in my dad, because he was born in DC. He can do it. I promise you he can do it. And if he can't, just play him the first bar and then he'll do the rest. Yeah. Yeah, he'll be, he'll get it. And actually there were ads that said the tagline, come one, come all. And it was a big fat lie, you know? And it was like, it was, mean, there wasn't signs that said people of color are not allowed, but it was understood and um it was, and everybody knew it. And everyone was just kind of a nerd to it because that's the way it was. That's the way it had always been. And so when the Howard University students showed up at Glen Echo Amusement Park one day to pick it, they were surprised because they were met there by a whole group of middle-aged white people. And You have to also take into account that that point in time in DC was so segregated, not legally, but socially, that it was completely possible for an educated person to go their whole life and never have a meaningful conversation with somebody who's the other race. so, mean, that level, I think, of segregation is hard for us to imagine today. um But so, it was like, there are these white people and for for the middle-aged white people, it like, here's these black students. But they wanted the same thing because these white people had been quietly, as a neighborhood, boycotting this amusement park. Because, as one of them said to me, well, we didn't go because we told our kids we can't go until our black friends can go. Now, they probably didn't have any black friends, but it was the point. And they were very high-minded people. And this neighborhood, Bannockburn, was built um essentially by a group of Jews, labor-minded Jews, who had been unable to get housing in DC because they were Jewish, because there were so many covenants in DC and Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Maryland, and they were there to work for the government. um And so, you know, with little choice, together they communally bought this golf course. They turned it into a neighborhood and It was settled not at that point, not just by Jews, but by like-minded people. And so it definitely had a, uh like a radical reputation uh for being super liberal, super progressive, maybe even, maybe even God forbid communist. ah And so it was definitely like a sympathetic group, but they showed up and the first thing that happened was this conversation, which I want to talk about later, but there stopped the Howard students are stopped at the entrance and then they essentially just barged right in, climbed on the carousel and instead of having a sit in at a lunch counter, they had a sit in on the carousel horses. And the carousel stopped. I know, right? um The carousel stopped. They were told to get off. They refused to get off and eventually they were arrested. uh And that was the inciting incident to what became actually 10 weeks of picketing. uh And so, and every single day that summer, and every single day the Howard students and then eventually like people from the local black community and all over NAACP came in and the Bannockburn residents, which also eventually became like, became Unitarians and other high schoolers came, but uh it was this really uh unprecedented interracial civil rights protest. And it was so unprecedented that there's a headline in the Washington Post, like a headline says, whites join Negroes in protest over Glen Echol Park segregation. Like that's news, whites join Negroes. em And that's what happened. But they got so much attention because it was so rare to see this kind of mixing that uh the American Nazi party came out. They were... uh they were kind of fledgling at that point. George Lincoln Rockwell had founded the American Nazi Party and he brought his storm troopers to counter protest. was the first time in fact that the American Nazi Party counter protested and they're on one side of the street, Glen Echo protesters are on the other side of the street. um All kinds of things happened. mean, uh A. Philip Randolph and Rory Wilkins, were real giants of the civil rights movement, they also made appearances. Adam Clayton Powell showed up. Sammy Davis Jr. was going to do a benefit in order to pay the legal fees for the protesters that had been arrested. Ultimately, protest, the arrest on the Carousel case went to the Supreme Court and was a Supreme Court case that wasn't actually settled till 1964. But yeah, and I mean, I mean, all kinds of things. Ten of the following years freedom riders of the 1961 freedom riders were black and white young adults who had been incubated on that picket line. And Stokely Carmichael was one of them as well. mean he was going into his freshman year at Howard and it was his first protest. You know, the since we're on the topic of Nazis, I think that one of the things that stood out to me and I can't remember the woman's name, but she was um like remembering World War Two, the Holocaust. And she made a statement that was just super powerful. And I'm probably going to mix it up. I don't know if she said. The Holocaust radicalized me or like World War Two radicalized me. But I just thought that was like such a powerful comment because her her entire point was, yeah, like it happened and nobody stood up for us. And now she's like, we're seeing it here and we want to we want to make sure it it's prevented. I love maybe just kind of unpack that that a little bit more for us. Yeah, I mean, it was really important to me doing the film to take a super tightly focused lens on individuals, you know, to tell, to restore this history, but to restore the history through the point of view of people who lived it and why they were there and what happened to them there and then actually what happened to them afterwards. So you're talking about Helene Wilson, who was essentially like a middle-class Jewish young woman who had, excuse me, who had grown up in Buffalo, New York. And... very affected by the Holocaust. And the way that, that did different things to different people, but what that did to Helene is turn her into an activist and turn her into uh someone who protested. for people with people whose rights were being subjected. And um it wasn't like a big jump for her to think about um Jews being stripped of their rights in Nazi Europe and to think about African Americans having much lesser rights in... in the US and that therefore being something that she didn't do something about. actually says, know, lot of my friends were joining Hadassah, but I wasn't interested in that. You know, I was interested in the civil rights movement, what was happening there. And, you know, that's pretty remarkable. But for sure, Helene was somebody whose motivation for being there was the memory of the Holocaust. And that's true, I think, for some of the Jewish people as well. And the non-Jewish people as well. like there was in Bannockburn, It was 1960, it was only 15 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. There were people in Bannockburn who were Holocaust survivors, there were people who had lost people, and so um I think, Jewish or not, that community was aware of the dangers of discrimination. um My favorite part in the entire movie that literally had me laughing um was, and if I recall, like an Indian prime minister or something was coming down. Eisenhower had made some deal to allow them and his kids to come in. And from there, oh some of the nag people thought they would capitalize on that. And like, the first image that came to my mind was like coming to America because like just the image. So like, you like, can you set that up for our audience just so they can kind of understand what the inside joke is you and I share? Sure. Well, I mean, one of like the I mean, there are so many idiocies about discrimination, but like one of like the ridiculous um what proves it is that, you know, in this park, you weren't allowed to come in if you were African American. But because the Eisenhower administration wanted to look good in front of African diplomats. They made a deal with the owners of the park that African diplomats and their families could come in. So if you were African, you can come in, but if you're African-American, you couldn't. so capitalizing on that, well, I'll back up for a second. there's actually in the film is, I was so excited to find it talking about like breadcrumbs was newsreel footage of when Sukarno came to visit. And so his kids are on the, you see footage of him on the rides in between the Nixon girls. And um when that was published in the papers, these, you know, these photographs of like a brown skinned on m the teacups, like in between these, Nixon girls and their like little dresses, starch dresses, like it was like, it was a furor, you know? uh But the fact that that was allowed to happen was like ridiculous, but it also gave a hook to the protesters and so two of the protesters who happen to be protagonists in the film, Diane Diamond and Hank Thomas, they were dressed up as African diplomats. I don't even know if they knew what African diplomats looked like, but it was people's idea of what an African diplomat should look like and so they dressed them in various kinds of traditional cloth and they got um one of the white women to uh act as an interpreter. They got a Bannockburn dad to be the chauffeur and um they pulled up in front of the amusement park speaking in pidgin French. mean, they didn't really know French, but they just faked what they thought it sounded like. And in this real costume, essentially, it has to be let in. And um the guard was totally flabbergasted by that. I actually, he actually said to them that they need to come back another time because there's so much going on there because pickets were going on. um So I don't know if he bought it or not. But yeah, I mean, I think I love that story too because, um you know, it wasn't, obviously it was solemn work. Obviously it was dangerous. Obviously it was serious. But also like they could poke fun at the ridiculousness of this. And um they understood. and Bannockburn understood that there's no difference between humans. Yes. You know, I would love for to go into even a little bit more detail on why the coalition that we saw here in this story of these black students with uh Jewish families and people sympathizing in the neighborhood, and then you have some other coalitions that seem to come in. Maybe you can help us get a sense of who are all the coalitions that are involved in this if we haven't said them all. so we can get our mind around it. And I know we have Nazis and we have like, you know, like bad guy Nazis, good guys, you know, with the civil rights. And I totally, totally get that. But even on this side, like, what was unusual about this coalition, maybe even more than we've talked about. Like I get the sympathies, but maybe even like, why was this surprising or was it really as surprising as we think it is? mean, what was surprising, bottom line is that you just did not see black and white people together. you know, the Congress of black and white people protesting together was, it didn't exist. There weren't any optics of this, you know, there wasn't anything to reference. It was like, you know, it was shocking. It was shocking. ah You know, I mean, you should remember like, know, loving is still on the books. know, I mean, let me back up for a second. Washington, D.C., which is like suppose it was the capital of America, but Washington, D.C. was so backward. You know, if you were African American, you could go into a department store and you could buy something, but you could not try it on. You were not allowed in the dressing room because there was an idea that a white person wouldn't want to buy it if it had been touched by somebody who was African American. I mean, it's hard to imagine football. as an entirely white sport. I mean, that just seems ridiculous, but the Washington Redskins, which is what they were called at the time, were the last team in the NFL to integrate. you know, so it just, you just didn't see any, you just didn't see it. You didn't see it. So that is the most important thing about why it was shocking. uh In terms of the coalitions, so, you know, one thing I really discovered and, m take to heart all the time about working on this film is that there are no monoliths. So except for the fact that the Howard University students had some things in common and there were Bannockburn, every other group that I could point to, I'm talking like there was a sprinkling of Catholic people and there was a sprinkling of people from... the Unitarian Universalist Church. And there was a small group of people that actually referred to themselves as the eggheads, which were like math nerds from a local high school. So there isn't really like, I can't say then blah, blah, blah came out, you know, and be talking about one thing other than Bannockburn and Howard. But with Howard, know, Howard's, I forgot what the number of the Howard student body was at that time, but it was in the tens of thousands. And this group had maybe nine or ten Howard students. So, you know, I can't say Howard students were behind this. It was a small group of Howard students. And the vast majority of Howard students were not interested in protesting because at that time they were there to join the middle class. You know, they were there to get a dental degree. They were not there to get arrested. And if you're a woman, you were there to get married to somebody who was going to be a dentist. You were not there to get arrested. You know, I'd imagine having a bunch of white um neighbors to this this music park showing up to your protest as a black person would probably make would probably make them nervous, especially during that period. like I like how did how did the the black protesters, um you know, reach a point where now they're picketing alongside? the people that they maybe were a little bit nervous about. Yeah, no, I think that's really important. OK, so first of all, these these white allies, and I say that now, like knowing full well that that whole concept didn't even exist, like nobody knew what ally ship. That wasn't a word, you know, but they were they already had, let's say, for lack of a better word, street cred, because they there was editorials in The Washington Post from people from that neighborhood. decrying segregation at the amusement park and what a blight it was on Washington that such a thing existed and it existed so close to them. So it wasn't like um they just like came up with the cause of that moment. they had that. um The other thing is I think that the Howard students recognized right away that there was value added. So number one is they got press and they knew they wouldn't get press if there was just African Americans out there and it just wouldn't get that much attention. And actually it would even be more dangerous for them. So to some degree having having white people there got them press and also bought them a certain amount of safety. Other like really practical things like where do think they use the bathroom? It's not like they could go in this amusement park and use the public bathrooms, like they went across the street to these people's houses at Bannockburn that opened up their houses to them and said, here's the key, you can go use the bathroom. And in fact, one of them said to me, we didn't just go over there and use the bathroom, we would usually open the refrigerator. If there was a piece of chicken, we would have that too. So I think that sort of very easy generosity of spirit um won them over. Also, in terms of practicality, because they were union members and all union affiliated, they immediately had a game plan that the Howard University students didn't have. for example, if you look at their signs, the signs, there's a reason that their signs are very beautifully printed and the Nazi signs are horrible. And it's because the union printed them. They were printed on union printing presses. um And like on the first day, you see all these homemade signs. And then as the protest develops, you know, all this, it's replaced by really lovely um printed graphic signs. uh You know, the unions knew, union people knew how to, uh just how to organize a picket line, just the kinds of things that they didn't have that experts tease. And ultimately, they had contacts in the federal government because many of them were civil servants. And those contacts are what led to the parks integration at the end of the day. That's a really like, sorry, excuse me, cool story because it just shows you, again, the causal effect that you can't necessarily predict, but that you look at and like, this is how things happen in the real world with these certain people seeing it. certain people then getting behind it, people being inspired by that, some small group of people coming and then other people getting like credit for it, like actually getting into the details is where you get the real like punch of the story, which is that ordinary people can make a difference in pretty powerful ways. And I would love for you to just kind of wax eloquent about that. and how ordinary, like how this taught you how ordinary people can make a difference. I'll happily try to wax. I don't know I can wax eloquent, but I'll wax. How about that? So look, when I don't know about you, when I learned about the civil rights movement uh and I thought my school probably did a good job, as good a job as anybody, I probably could have like named five civil rights activists, know, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Diane Nash, know, Goodman and Schwerner, you know, like that's basically it. um I had no idea. mean, I never thought about anybody beyond those people. And I mean, I knew it was not just, have a dream on the steps, but I mean, didn't, and I knew, I mean, I knew about Montgomery bus boycott and, but I did not know about all of these regular quote unquote people who never went to the bridge at Selma, you know, they weren't there because they were just in their own communities. They were standing up at their own lunch counter. amusement parks, swimming pool, library, movie theater, and um it was right there in front of them and that's what they did. And the thing is, if we only learn about the giants, right, then we don't ever learn about people that are just like us. And we can give ourselves a pass, because like, I cannot, I admire Martin Luther King so much, but I cannot see myself in him, you know? And so then I can say, well, I can't do what he did. And that was part of why I wanted to drill down so tightly on these, on just a small group of individuals, because I wanted to get to know them well enough that somebody watching could say, oh, you know, she reminds me of me or of my second grade teacher or of my grandmother's best friend, you know, somebody who we could know and therefore somebody then that we could be. You know, I'm about to break the fourth wall here because we sent you a bunch of questions and I don't think we've gotten to a single one of them yet. And I'm about to ask you another one that's not even on my list, but it was something that popped in as you were talking. I'm curious, like, so you've got a group of white allies, you got a bunch of black folks that are fighting for equal rights. Like, how difficult was it for you to kind of thread that needle to not make, like, the white people look like, you know, the Black saviors? And being a white director yourself, like, I'm just curious, like, or if that thought crossed your brain. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think that's a really good question. So, I mean, number one, I was always going back to the content, right? And so that is actually part of the reason that the film doesn't have a narrator and there's um no expert, there's no talking head person saying, this is what happened, which honestly would have made the film way, it would have been easier and I would have cut it in a few months and not in a couple of years. But because I didn't ever want to editorialize. so everybody who's in the film was there and they're all speaking for themselves and representing their own experience. And I didn't hear that. I didn't hear that sense of like white savior ship. I didn't hear that of like, pour them and we need to step in and help. That's just not, that wasn't what they were doing. And so it wasn't hard then to avoid that because that just wasn't in their emotional vocabulary as they were reminiscing. And I think that was pretty authentic, especially because none of these people were um media trained. Most of them hadn't talked about this before. So they were recalling the events and their feelings about the events as they were talking to me, which is actually what makes them good interviews. um The other thing I think is really important, you know, in bringing up being a white director is I was so conscious, self-conscious all the time of, and I still am, about that I'm, you know, that I'm a white person, I'm a white Jewish person telling this story. And, you know, you can't ever get around that, but something that I, something that... I did and I couldn't have done the movie any other way is by surrounding myself with people of color who worked on the film. And really most importantly, I would say, is my lead editor, Sandra Christie. Sandra, besides like she's a genius and she's like worked on most civil rights films that you can, documentaries that you can name is, know, Sandra, was like a full collaborator. It wasn't like she was my editor and I told her to make this cut, you know? It was like, we shaped this film together. em And if it's a good film at all, it's because it has Sandra's fingerprints on it as much as mine. And there are all kinds of times, I mean, I can give examples if you want of like places where we really had to educate each other on even like tiny little things like a music cue, you know, about why this was or wasn't a fair representation. And then after we, once we had cuts of the film, we did focus group testing. And I mean, and I learned a lot from em from the people who saw the film. And a lot of times they disagreed with each other. I I would have veteran civil rights activists in the room and they were like, uh-huh, that's how it was. You got it. That's right. That's how it was. And then I would have young people of color who'd be like, what, you know, wait a second. When she says that, you know, she's, that sounds like she means this, you know, which, wasn't necessarily the older people's experience, but I had to take in all of that um and constantly and just be. Be in front of the story with incredible humility. I think that's what, you know, that's what it is. It's just like, I don't know anything. And because I don't know anything, I'm gonna let them tell it and then show me how to tell it. I hope that answers your question. it does. It does. I'm curious also, like you chose to use like animation for some of the, I don't know, like flashbacks or stories or whatnot. like talk to us about like, how did you choose number one, like animation um as sort of like the medium and like what was your sort of like thought process on? OK, it needs to be this kind of squiggly line for the hair, you know, or or this sort of color or whatnot. Yeah, yeah, thank you. um Well, so one thing is like, actually, I don't think of it as animation. mean, I think of it as like, kind of like a watercolor effect on real footage. there's nothing that's like drawn from scratch. It's all like, it's all something that exists. And then what we're doing, hopefully, is like signaling to the audience, this isn't real. Like this isn't the real thing that happened because Because I was telling a story that hadn't been told before, I felt a tremendous responsibility to be as accurate as possible. So there were some great stories that I heard from people that I interviewed, but if I couldn't verify them backwards, forward, sideways, and upside down, they're not in the film. And to that same end, like I can talk about it later, but all the footage that I have of the protests and of the park is the actual footage, you know, and especially gosh, right now with AI, that's really important to say. So anytime that I didn't have the footage, I wanted to make sure that you as the audience member knew it. And I didn't want to, you know, sometimes documentaries will use recreations and that's fine. That was never going to be fine for me because I didn't want to pull one over on the audience, you know, and make them think, oh, that's really what his hand looked like when he touched the turnstile. um So I wanted to make sure it was really incredibly obvious. But at the same time, this is why don't like saying animation, I didn't want to take you out of the story. know, and sometimes people use like line drawing animation. I've seen documentaries that use like clay animation and that's like lovely, but that's a departure. You know, that takes you out. And so I wanted to keep you in by keep by using footage that was contemporaneous that is like what it could have looked like, but isn't necessarily that story. So for and you know, it's the bane of any filmmaker's existence when you don't have the visual to tell the story. But so, like, for example, Dion, um who's one of the Howard University students, has a story about how every single of the main characters tells one story that kind of helps you understand how they came to be who they were. And so Dion's story is about being a little boy in Petersburg, Virginia, and being an intellectually curious person and going to the library and having to use the colored entrance and not having access to the stacks where the books were kept. And so as a little boy, he would then like go into the stacks and wait until they call the police and then run out of there. So I have footage of a little boy in what would have been like the late 40s running across Blacktop. It's not Dion. I don't want anyone to think it's Dion. I don't want to pretend, you know, like, this black boy is the same as that black boy. ah And so that's why it's treated and you see that there's like an, there's an effect on it. So I hope the audience gets it, that that's not Dion, but that is what it could have looked and sounded and felt like. Does that make sense? That actually makes a lot of sense, uh which is interesting because I was already planning on doing this anyways. I was planning on rewatching it after we talk because I think it would add just a lot of color and context. We're just podcasters, right? So it's not every day we get to talk to a director of a documentary. Give me a break. Come on. You talk to a lot of really interesting people. And I know I've been listening. Yeah, we do, I guess. Okay, so I need to ask you... I got a couple more questions, but the main question I'm going to wait till the end. But I do need to ask you about the name, the name of the documentary, Ain't No Back to America Around. What's the origin story of that title and how did you land on that? Right, so the name of the film, which by the way I did not want to be the name of the film, I tried really hard to come up with anything else, um and just nothing else was, nailed it really. um So Ain't No Back to Mary Go Round is a line from a Langston Hughes poem, um and the poem is in the voice of a little boy who's from Jim Crow South. who says like, you where I come from, black and white can't sit side by side. So where am I supposed to sit? Because there ain't no back to a merry-go-round. I'm supposed to be in the back and there ain't no back. um And so that line of that poem was actually the title of the, the only artifacts that I had was I had one college student wrote a junior year history essay um on this. And there was another woman, Sandy Eskin, who wrote a play. And then there was another graduate student who wrote a master's thesis. And all three of them were called Ain't No Back to America Round. you know, it was sort like, well, that's an amazing title. I mean, then it was a whole long story about getting the permission of the Langston Hughes estate, which is the other part about filmmaking that we don't have to get into, but it's like ugly and boring and really unglamorous and so takes so long. But yeah, that's how we got that title. listen, know, if you look on Netflix and you want to screen something, if the name of the show or the movie doesn't fit under the thumbnail image of it, then the name gets changed. So, know, Ain't No Back to America Around would take an entire screen. So I don't know if it will always have this title, but I like this um Okay. Go ahead, Josh. just I really appreciate your work in this and I appreciate you taking the time to you know just hearing your thoughts on it and taking the time to really make sure it's accurate make make sure that it's creative make sure that it's bringing people into the story I mean I just think it speaks to your craft and also I am I'm just thankful that we have these kinds of things out there that we can be challenged by no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. And there's quite a few, you know, obviously we know people in this country that probably wouldn't appreciate the film and might be upset or any number of things. And on this program, you know, we've tried to... build bridges. That's really what we try to do, build as many bridges as we can, even with people that we so disagree with that we kind of like feel like they really should not be having this view and should not be, you if it was our preference, just wouldn't even, nobody would be saying this, right? And yet we have to deal with people that are so different than us. And I would just love to hear like, what would your like... What would your appeal be to someone who is looking at this film, they're hearing it, and they're like, I don't know, it's just another, it's just gonna be another liberal propaganda. That's the kind of stuff I hear all the time, you know? What is your appeal to them to consider the argument that you're making in So when I started working on the film, Obama was president. And I thought I was making a film that was really just like tracing the straight line from, you know, an interracial protest to a post-racial presidency. And it's not lost on me that now my film is in the world, is coming out at a moment that there actually is a concerted effort to get rid of racial history. yet, like, and I'm not just, I'm not just like telling a story, I'm telling a buried story, you know? I'm like bringing a story to light when there's a desire to bring the stories that we know, you know, into the graveyard. I think, I think that, I hope that somebody who has that viewpoint would be able to see the movie. because I don't, I mean, that's part of another reason I don't have experts. You know, there's nobody framing this story in a way, you know, and putting their spin on it, their liberal spin, their propaganda spin on it. It's just people telling their own stories of what happened. The only exposition comes from the newspapers that were printed at the time. um Like all the lines are are lifted right out of the pages of the newspaper, including letters to the editor, some of which are like so overtly raised that you can't believe that somebody could publish that and sign their name to it. But it's all what was there. It's all what was there. And I don't know, it's hard to argue with that. I mean, it's another reason that I also felt compelled, just like we were saying before, to let you know when I'm... quote-unquote making it up, you know, with using footage that doesn't exist to show you, you know, with this watercolor treatment. This part isn't real, guys. Okay, this part is a memory. And memory is blurry, and you know, the lines and the animation are blurry. ah So, you know, I hope that somebody would be able to take it as, if nothing else, as just testimony. It's hard to argue with... somebody's experience. Like they tell you their experience. You can say that didn't happen or you know, that's not real, but you can't say you didn't feel that way. That's true. So my last question, the one I've been waiting for this entire interview, as I mentioned to you before we start recording, I am like 10, 15 minutes away from finishing the entire thing. So I don't know how it ends and feel free to, know, spoiler alert to anybody that's made it this far in the podcast. Although I watch our stats, most people don't make it past like the 50 minute mark. That's fine. um So, yeah, so how did the film end? Did the park integrate and everybody lived happily ever after or kind of just sum it all up for us? The park did integrate. It integrated a year later, but not everybody lived happily ever after. And I think that was actually really important um to include um because I wanted people to see how these individuals' lives turned out. That was their fork in the road and who they were and the things that happened to them as a result. um So Helene Wilson, for example, um who was the Jewish woman that we mentioned and was a newlywed, she and nine other people from Glen Echol went on the Freedom Rides. And she was arrested like everybody else who went on the Freedom Rides and she spent, I forget the exact number, I'm gonna get it wrong, number of days, a lot of days in Parchman Prison. And in that time um was subjected to horrific things. And um when she came back home, she was a changed person. She was a traumatized person and that ended her marriage. And then obviously there was fallout from that. And Hank Thomas, uh he went to Vietnam and when he came back from Vietnam, actually in the... uh Veterans Hospital, this part isn't, this detail isn't in the film, uh he met a Jewish man who said, know, you know what you need to do is you need to follow the Jews, what the Jews did and like create businesses in your own community, right? And so at that time it was virtually impossible for a black man to get a business loan. So this Jewish man would get the business loan for Hank, sign it over to Hank and then Hank would pay him back. And so that started first coin operated laundries, um then Dairy Queens, um and ultimately Marriott Hotels. And Hank became a very, very successful business man. um And anyway, I can talk about each of them. But basically that's what the end of the film does, is kind of like show you where each of them landed. And I hope it hints at the price and the reward of being an activist. Wow. If somebody's watching this and they want to check out the film, learn more about it, where should we send them? send them to the website, which is ain'tnoback.com. The film is actually opening theatrically in New York City next week um at IFC and New Plaza Cinemas and also outside of Boston and Somerville. And then we're going to Alaska, Fort Lauderdale, Birmingham, Memphis, a bunch of other cities. But on ain'tnoback.com, there's a screenings tab in... That's where you find out. And also we're doing a lot of uh people are bringing the film themselves to their own, you know, church, school, political club, fraternity, alumni, church, and we're all over that too. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, uh Lana. This has been, you know, just a real delight just getting a chance to talk to you and getting to to learn more about your your movie and your your filmmaking. uh The the documentary is called Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round. This is Alana Treckman. Wait, is it Ilana or Alana? Ilana. OK, so this is Ilana Treckman. uh Make sure you check it out. We'll put all the links and everything. um in the show description and yeah, just just thanks again for stopping by Thank you. Thanks for such good questions. It was really fun to think about them. Yeah, our pleasure. And to our audience, hey, thanks for stopping by. As always, make sure you keep your conversations not left or right, but keep your conversations up and we'll talk to you later. Bye.