Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, and the Nightmare That Won’t Go Away
How the fight to desegregate the Glen Echo amusement park still echoes today.
YOU EVER HAVE THAT FEELING where you’re watching a movie set in the past, and then something happens in real life to drive home that it’s not even history, and might never be?
Talk about reality biting. Last week I saw Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, Ilana Trachtman’s documentary about “the first organized interracial civil rights protest in U.S. history”—a picket line to integrate the whites-only Glen Echo Amusement Park just outside Washington, D.C. Black Howard University students and white residents of the nearby, largely Jewish Bannockburn community protested together all through the summer of 1960.
That was Tuesday night.
By Thursday night, Donald Trump had turned two Washington events intended to fight antisemitism into a demonstration of his own uniquely divisive antisemitism, and CNN had reported that Republican Mark Robinson—the black, Trump-endorsed candidate for North Carolina governor—had in the past fifteen years declared himself “a black NAZI” and a slavery supporter; referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Koon”; and said he preferred Adolf Hitler “over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” The “shit” at the time of his writing being Barack Obama, the first black president, and his administration.
The Obama presidency was, to borrow a phrase from his vice president, a BFD. It took over two centuries to reach that milestone. Less than seventy years earlier, black kids couldn’t even share in the fun promised in Glen Echo’s ubiquitous jingle. As onetime Howard student protester Hank Thomas reflects in Trachtman’s film, right outside the capital of America, the country that stands for justice and equality, “you’ve got this great hypocrisy.”
‘I belong to the human race’
Restrictive housing covenants barred black homeowners in many capital area neighborhoods and often made it difficult for Jews to buy homes as well. Jim Crow segregation was the rule. Glen Echo, then (when it was privately owned) and now (as part of the National Park Service), has a beautiful carousel. The film title is a line from a Langston Hughes poem about a black child asking “Mister” where to sit on a merry-go-round: Where is the Jim Crow section? Where is the “back”?
The Glen Echo protest kicked off on June 30, 1960, with arrests on its merry-go-round. As several white picketers sat on their sculpted horses, five black Howard students were arrested for doing the same.
An exchange between security guard Frank Collins and Laurence Henry, spokesman for the Howard student contingent, crystallized the absurdity of the whole system. “Are you white or colored? . . . Can I ask your race?” Collins said. “My race?” Henry replied. “I belong to the human race.”
A letter to the editor captured the casual but no less corrosive prejudice apparently acceptable in polite society: “The vast majority of white people feel it would be totally wrong morally for young white girls to be bumping hips in a swimming pool with teen-age Negro boys.”
And then the American Nazi Party showed up, injecting the proceedings with raw racism and antisemitism. The Nazi counterpicketers, in their khaki uniforms and red armbands, carried ugly signs spelling out the N-word, as in N-----S OUT NOW! And “WE DON’T WANT TO SWIM with N-----S!” as well as aspirational ones fishing for recruits: “WHITE MAN! FIGHT! JOIN the AMER NAZIs,” complete with phone number. A white woman with a European accent called them the brownshirts. “I would be picketing while there are all these people here from whom I fled,” she said.
World War II had ended not long before. “I remember these two individuals showing me their numbered tattoos. They had just fifteen years prior to that got out of Auschwitz,” Thomas said later. He asked why they were picketing at Glen Echo and they replied that “nobody was there to protest for what was happening to Jews, and they just want to make sure that this type of thing never happened again.”
‘Preemptive scapegoating’ to scare Jews
This type of alliance, of unity, is foreign to Trump and Robinson. Trump in particular, as his party’s third-time nominee, has triggered a wave of backlash since he suggested—at each of his appearances Thursday—that Jews would be to blame if he lost the election. Some other things he said: “We have a lot of good Christians there that love Israel, by the way. In many ways they love Israel more than Jewish people love Israel, which is shocking, but nevertheless, we’ll take it, right?”
Also: “I gave them more than $20 billion, Israel. And I said, when I did it, I said I’m the best friend they ever had. And still, in 2020, so remember I got 24, 25 percent [of the Jewish vote]. Now I did all of these things and I got 29 percent, think of it. So I wasn’t treated right.” And: “In my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss” because he is now at only 40 percent among Jews (more like 34 percent) despite everything he’s done for them and Israel.
“President Trump is trafficking in the most base form of antisemitism,” Senior Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue wrote in the Forward:
The suggestion that blame for a prospective loss should lay at the feet of less than 2% of the electorate—our 2%—puts the Jewish people in grave danger. This is beyond dog-whistle. It is a form of preemptive scapegoating aimed to scare Jews into voting for Trump.
These remarks went beyond his usual offensive mix of grievance and division, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote. “They threaten, if he does lose, and especially if he continues this line of argument, to unleash the fury of disappointed Trump supporters on Jews. It does not take much to imagine the backlash, and the violence, that could ensue. We Jews know something about being scapegoated.”
For what? Not to worry, but he did say that Israel will be “eradicated” and “wiped off the face of the earth” if he doesn’t win. Any Jew who votes for Kamala Harris “should have their head examined.” Because “she is anti-Israel and she is anti-Jewish. And you got to get smart to it.” (Her Jewish husband might be surprised to hear this.)
Trump is clueless and dangerous
No matter how they really felt, most politicians would get that when you’re supposed to show support for Jews, you shouldn’t attack them, insult them, or assume their only issue is Israel. But that, of course, isn’t Trump. He’s come off as clueless and Nazi-adjacent ever since he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest organized by neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups to prevent the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.
This month alone, he’s been traveling with white nationalist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer; his Bedminster golf club hosted a racist, antisemitic January 6th rioter alleged to be a neo-Nazi; and a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe took credit for stoking the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating pets. Trump and Sen. JD Vance, his vice presidential pick, have been spreading the untrue story every chance they get—Trump even mentioned it at the September 10 ABC debate watched by over 67 million people.
What Trump and Robinson really need to hear is what Hank Thomas told young people in Atlanta, years later, about the Glen Echo protest and the more violent protests to come:
This little community, primarily American Jews, started picketing. American Jews were our most important allies in the civil rights movement. They decided they were going to march with us, sit in with us, and a few of them died with us. So whenever you hear anyone, especially a person of color, say anything resembling antisemitism, I want you to tell them that they are talking about our most important allies.
Glen Echo was an intense training ground for activists. It was the first picket line walked by Stokely Carmichael, a Howard student who became a leader of the Black Power movement. It made headlines with visitors like American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell and New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. It produced ten 1961 Freedom Riders, including Carmichael, who rode buses throughout the South to protest segregated bus terminals. And it accomplished its own mission. When the park opened for the season in 1961, there were no racial restrictions.
America’s mission has yet to be accomplished, as the continuing influence of Trump and his MAGA movement make all too clear.
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