Gone, too, from Gwynn Oak Park is the merry-go-round where a toddler in a pink dress took a historic spin on a summer afternoon a half-century ago.
That simple pleasure, a first for a black child at the formerly segregated Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, had become possible just weeks earlier in 1963 when hundreds of black and white protesters thrust Baltimore into the national spotlight and succeeded in integrating the park.
On Sunday, several hundred people filled the grassy Baltimore County park where the rides once stood, toting chairs and picnic lunches and sipping water in the sweltering heat, to mark the 50th anniversary of July 4 and 7 protests in 1963. Until then, nothing at the 64-acre park with picnic tables, playgrounds and a volleyball court hinted at that defining moment in Baltimore civil rights history, when nearly 400 people were arrested for trespassing, including nearly two dozen Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy members.
