“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” from a poem by Langston Hughes, is a new documentary that tells the all-but-forgotten story of the fight 65 years ago to desegregate Glen Echo Amusement Park, a destination for decades for white Washngtonians but barred to non–whites until a coalition of Black students from Howard University and largely Jewish residents of nearby Bannockburn mounted a successful months-long protest.  After the arrests in 1960 of five Black students who dared to ride the carousel and an unrelenting desegregation campaign, the park owners opened its doors to everyone. Ultimately, the park closed and was purchased by the National Park Service, which still owns and operates a vast variety of activities there for the community at large.

Protestor arrested in 1960 for riding the carousel at segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park

The Glen Echo protestors included several Howard students who in 1961 would board interstate buses as “freedom riders” into the Deep South. Nearby Bannockburn was a recent postwar subdivision founded on cooperative principles and populated by many Jewish government workers who had moved south to work in Democratic administrations. The film is a landmark in presenting largely forgotten or suppressed local history that belies the narrative of Montgomery County as a traditionally welcoming and progressive place. The history is recent and “Ain’t No Back…” deserves wide distribution. At this writing, no major local media outlets have covered it.   It had its DC-area premiere Sept. 15 at the AFI in Downtown Silver Spring.  Ilana Trachtman, the film’s director and producer, grew up in the county and said that as she learned more she was ashamed that she had known nothing about our segregated past.

Lincoln-Thomas Day

Another chapter in our local history played out on Northwest DC on July 12-14, 1864, when Confederate troops seeking to capture the nation’s capital attacked Fort Stevens, at 13th and Quackenbos Streets NW in the Brightwood neighborhood.  The property in and around the fort was owned by Elizabeth Proctor Thomas, a free black woman born in Charles County who purchased the property in 1840. To defend the capital, Union troops took her property and her animals to feed the defending troops.  Instead of rebelling, she pitched in to feed and attend to the soldiers. President Lincoln,, who narrowly escaped being shot at during the battle, promised her reimbursement for her losses, but, of course, he was assassinated a year later. Mrs. Thomas lived to 1917, and since 2012 a street has been renamed Elizabeth Thomas Way in her honor, and on or around Sept. 22, when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a Lincoln-Thomas Day event has been held at the reconstructed fort.  This year, I was honored to be one of several “distinguished authors” invited to participate. Thirty-seven years ago, in 1987, I toured the remnants of eight Civil War forts for an article in The Washington Post. The ranger who was my guide was helpful and full of information, but made no mention Elizabeth Thomas. I am grateful at long last to also know her story.

Freeman’s Challenge, a revelatory new book on prison labor for private profit

But these stories are not limited to states like ours located below the Maxon-Dixon Line (thus in “Dixie”).  This past summer we visited Auburn, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. This was the town to which abolitionist Harriet Tubman retired after the Civil War and where she established a home for elderly former slaves and lived until her death in 1913.  So of course we visited the Tubman house and museum in Auburn and also the city museum in nearby Seneca Falls, known largely as the site of the 1848 woman’s rights convention. What we did not learn during our visit was that the individuals alleged and convicted criminal detained at the state prison in Auburn worked without pay inside the prison walls for private companies even before the Civil War, and afterwards. The use of prison labor for private profit became widespread and, some argue, was fundamental to the mass incarceration of minorities even today. Now, a new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, tells the story of how a black man imprisoned for murder and leased to work in prison for a local manufacturer filed a successful court challenge for lost wages.

Mark you calendar!  I’ll be speaking at Harpers Ferry on Sunday, Oct. 13.

This October marks the 165th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, in which he and his small band occupied the town, seized the federal arsenal and rifle works and attempted to incite a slave insurrection. Though the raid failed in to abolish slavery, historians regard is as the spark that led to the Civil War that ultimately ended that form of legalized human bondage. Among the 18 raiders were five American Americans, the subject of my book Five for Freedom. The sole survivor who wrote the only insider account of the raid was Osborne Perry Anderson. The Harpers Ferry Park Association has published a new edition of his book “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry,” including an introductory essay I was honored to write. To mark the publication and commemorate the raid, the association has organized “Voices from Harpers Ferry: Generations of Perspective on John Brown’s Raid,” to be held on Sunday, Oct. 13, in the Allies for Freedom Room on the second floor of the John Brown Museum in Harpers Ferry. To help launch the 2024 reprint, I will highlight Anderson, his life and afterlife, myths and facts about this man whose place in history has been treated with ambivalence. He’s a hero—but not quite a hero in the raid on Harpers Ferry.  My session begins at 1:30 p.m.   To see the complete program, please click here.