Carousel

From page 1

Langley’s story in 2008, when she read about Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in the book Here Lies Jim Crow, by Baltimore Sun columnist C. Fraser Smith.

“I was amazed that I had grown up in Baltimore and never heard of that [Gwynn Oak] story,” said Nathan, who attended Gwynns Falls Junior High and Western High School. Eager to find out more, she searched for Sharon Langley. “I had to do a whole lot of tracking down, but I found Sharon in California and said, ‘This would be a great story for a book for kids.’”

The subject was so complex that Nathan decided first to write a 260-page book about the many Baltimoreans involved in the park’s desegregation, dedicating a chapter to the Langley family. Round & Round Together: Taking a Merry-Go-Ride into the Civil Rights Movement was published in 2011.

In 2013, Langley returned to Baltimore for the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, join- ing clergy members and others who had been among the protestors at the park. That’s when she met Nathan in person, and they re-dedicated their efforts to write a children’s book together.

An award-winning illustrator

After several years, Nathan and Langley finished co-writing their book and secured a publisher.

Impatient when the publisher was slow to assign an illustrator, Langley scoured the books in her elementary school’s library and suggested they approach awardwinning illustrator Floyd Cooper, who had illustrated more than 100 titles, most about African American history.

Nathan contacted Cooper through Facebook and attended one of his book signings in New York, handing him the manuscript in person.

When Cooper read it, he later said, “I was so moved that immediately — on the spot, I reached for some art [supplies]. I had to get it out,” he recalled. “Sharon’s story is our story, America’s story.” (Cooper died of cancer in 2021 at the age of 65.)

A Ride to Remember was published just before the pandemic, so Cooper, Langley and Nathan had to do most of their book tour via Zoom.

However, they did manage to have a book launch at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in downtown Baltimore. Cooper also was able to join them to present the book at an annual convention of English teachers.

Just before the lockdowns, Nathan read the book in person to children at three elementary schools in the area. In discussions there and on Zoom later, Nathan asked students to write down something they’d like to change. Their ideas ranged “from ‘equal pay for women’ to ‘more ice cream,’” Nathan said.

A mother’s activism

Langley moved away from Baltimore when she was nine years old, due to her parents’ divorce. She and her mother relocated to Atlanta, where she graduated from high school and college.

Although both of her parents have passed away, Langley remains “incredibly grateful and appreciative” that they were part of the civil rights movement. “A lot of what I know about it is what my family shared with me. Family oral history is so important,” she said.

Langley’s mother, a nurse, also confided in her daughter about her own unfair treatment growing up in Kentucky. When Mari- an wasn’t allowed to attend a new high school in her neighborhood, she appealed to the superintendent, citing the recent Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation of public schools in 1954.

They refused, instead paying for Marian to ride a Greyhound bus to a Black high school in Lexington. The following year, however, as more students came forward, the school system reluctantly desegregated the new high school.

The merry-go-round today

Gwynn Oak Amusement Park closed in 1973 after financial decline and hurricane damage, but the 69-acre site in Woodlawn is a Baltimore County public park today.

Of course, the rides were sold off, and in 1981, the carousel was moved 40 miles away to its current spot on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Now the property of the Smithsonian Institution, it has been shut down since the start of the pandemic.

Although the carousel and its music are currently quiet, visitors can glimpse the carousel’s most famous wooden horse, the “Freedom Horse,” which is marked with a brass plaque engraved with Sharon Langley’s name.

The marker and another plaque in front of the merry-go-round were placed there by Stan and Donna Hunter, who acquired

See CAROUSEL, page 33

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Jackie O

From page 30

After the death of billionaire Onassis in 1975, Jackie took a job as an editor at Viking Press in New York City for $200 a week.

Eaton said that before taking the Viking job in 1976 (and for a time after, while she was living in an apartment on Fifth Avenue), Jackie contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. She died in 1994.

Carousel

From page 32 the concession rights to the merry-goround in 1988.

“I remember Stan telling me how much he enjoyed seeing families enjoying the carousel, and how happy he was to know that it had been part of something important,” Langley said.

Inspiring new generations

This year, Nathan is working on two more books (“Whenever possible, I try to include Baltimore in all my books,” she said), and Langley is busy working fulltime in California.

Both authors hope the story of the park’s desegregation, however difficult it may be to hear, will inspire others to stand up to injustice or change the status quo.

“Why do we talk about it? Not because

Eaton noted that poet Stephen Spender once asked the former first lady what she thought her greatest accomplishment was.

“She replied it was that, after some rather difficult times, she was still relatively sane,” Eaton said.

A personal reflection

On a personal note, in the summer of 1980, when I [Robert Friedman] was a reporter for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico, I was invited to cover a fundraiser we want to hurt children or give them feelings of inferiority or make them somehow feel ashamed. No,” Langley said.

“I like to point out that not only were there black clergy and black children and young adults who were there to protest the being held in the Brooklyn home of author Norman Mailer.

When I arrived at Mailer’s book-filled apartment, Jackie Kennedy was standing out on the balcony alone, a cocktail glass in hand. Accompanying me was my wife, Ginny, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy.

As soon as Kennedy saw my wife and her condition, she walked inside and greeted her with a warm smile. She gave me a nod of recognition; we had met on unfair policy at the park, but you also see that there were white children; there were Jewish rabbis; there were white parents.

“There were people who chose to be on the right side of the issue.…There are people who speak up for others. And that’s one of her earlier visits to Puerto Rico. The nod said, “We’ll talk politics later.” something that we can still do, even if the issue is not the same.”

Instead, Jackie spoke softly and caringly to Ginny about babies.

That is my memory of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who knew what was really important and meaningful in life.

The official launch of Finding Jackie took place on February 2 at 7:30 p.m. at Lost City Books in Adams Morgan. Eaton will do several readings throughout the city. For more information, visit findingjackie.com.

The book A Ride to Remember is available in print and as an audiobook at Amazon.com. To watch Sharon Langley read the book aloud, visit bit.ly/RidetoRemember.

Echoes of Baltimore’s carousel in Glen Echo

The Washington area’s Glen Echo Amusement Park, which opened in Glen Echo, Maryland in 1891, admitted only white people for its first 70 years.

In the summer of 1960, however, Howard University students protested at the park and rode its “whites only” carousel in an effort to force desegregation.

They were arrested for riding the carousel and then sued, hoping to get courts to invalidate private businesses’

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claim to the right to segregate. Their case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and their convictions were overturned, but on narrow grounds.

The spring after the arrests, park owners agreed to open their gates to African Americans. But it wasn’t until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed by President Johnson, that facilities open to the public, like Glen Echo Park, were prohibited from discriminating.

Glen Echo Park closed eight years later. Today, a nonprofit arts organization operates the antique carousel and other restored buildings, offering art studios and galleries, art and dance classes, free concerts and social events.

The park, located at 7300 MacArthur Blvd., is open daily, except Thanksgiving and Christmas. For more information, visit glenechopark.org, email info@glenechopark.org or call (301) 634-2222.