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Worn painted saddle and brass pole of a vintage carousel horse in soft golden light
Act Four · Baltimore County to the National Mall

Act Four: The Ride to Remember

The headliner: one summer, one park, one carousel ride that history still talks about.

A park on the trolley line

Gwynn Oak Park opened in the 1890s at the end of a trolley line west of Baltimore, in what is now the Woodlawn area of Baltimore County. For generations it offered everything a summer evening needed: a dance hall, picnic groves, a roller coaster and a carousel. In 1947 the park installed a new Allan Herschell carousel, its horses carved in the sturdy style of North Tonawanda's busiest factory.

But for most of its life Gwynn Oak was open to white visitors only. Black families in Baltimore could see the lights from the road and hear the band organ, and were turned away at the gate.

Protest at the gate

Activists picketed the park repeatedly through the 1950s and early 1960s. The campaign peaked on July 4, 1963, when a large interracial group, including Black and white clergy from across the country, tried to enter. Hundreds of protesters were arrested over that Independence Day weekend and the protests that followed. The images of ministers being led away in a Maryland amusement park made national news and pushed local officials to negotiate.

August 28, 1963

The park's owners agreed to integrate. The date it took effect was August 28, 1963, the same day hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That day, Charles and Doris Langley brought their eleven-month-old daughter, Sharon, to Gwynn Oak. She was lifted onto a carousel horse and became widely remembered as the first Black child to ride the park's carousel after integration.

Pull quote
While the nation listened to the March on Washington, a baby in a summer dress rode a painted horse in Baltimore County, and a park changed for good.
August 28, 1963

After the music stopped

Gwynn Oak did not last much longer. In June 1972, flooding from Hurricane Agnes devastated the park, which sat beside the Gwynns Falls. The amusement park closed, and its rides were sold. The site later became a Baltimore County public park, quieter now, with markers that recall its history.

A new stage on the National Mall

The 1947 Herschell carousel found a second life. In 1981 it began operating on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., near the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building, where it still entertains visitors. Many riders have no idea that the horse beneath them once stood at the centre of a civil rights struggle. In later years, that history has been recognised more openly, and Sharon Langley herself has returned to ride the carousel for commemorations.

Telling the story

In 2020, Sharon Langley and author Amy Nathan published A Ride to Remember: A Civil Rights Story, a picture book with illustrations by Floyd Cooper. It tells the story from the perspective of a family who simply wanted a day at the park, and it has become a favourite in classrooms. For older readers, the Maryland Center for History and Culture and local newspapers' archives hold photographs and reporting from the 1963 protests.

Why it belongs on tonight's bill

Carousels look innocent: music, colour, children laughing. That is exactly why they mattered in the civil rights movement. Exclusion from a carousel was exclusion from childhood's simplest joy, and the fight to open the gate at Gwynn Oak, like the earlier struggle at Glen Echo, was a fight for ordinary belonging. When you ride a historic carousel in Maryland, you ride on that history too.

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