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https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220306-the-us-highway-that-helped-break-segregation>
"Adam Malick Sow had a headache. He was several hours into his trip from New
York to Washington DC, and after his limousine crossed into the state of
Maryland, he asked his driver to find a place to stop.
A few miles later, the newly appointed ambassador to the United States from the
African nation of Chad stepped into a diner along US Route 40 and asked for a
cup of coffee.
The answer on a summer day in 1961 would change history.
The wife of the diner's owner refused to serve the diplomat because he was
black. "He looked like just an ordinary run of the mill [N-word] to me. I
couldn't tell he was an ambassador," Mrs Leroy Merritt later told the national
magazine Life. "I said 'There's no table service here'."
The insult sparked an international incident, making the front page of
newspapers across Africa and Asia. Soon after, diplomats from Niger, Cameroon
and Togo reported similar experiences at Maryland restaurants. Like others,
they travelled on the same highway from the United Nations in New York to their
embassies in Washington. And their treatment set off a little-remembered civil
rights struggle that paved the way toward outlawing segregation in the United
States.
Today, not even a marker commemorates the dozens of demonstrations that
followed along the road, and most travellers zoom by the area on Interstate 95,
one of the busiest highways in the country. But if they look carefully, they
can find traces of the remarkable story of US Route 40, which parallels
Interstate 95 in northern Maryland."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
