The American Fault Line
Segregation on the world stage
Just off the side of U.S. Route 40 along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, among the dry, woody barrens and robins singing in tree canopies, there’s a moss-covered stone that’s no more than a foot and a half tall. As William Fitzjohn and his driver bounded westward along the four lanes of traffic on Route 40, they almost certainly did not see it—or any of the similar stones that appear every five miles. The stones, by that point late in early March of 1961, had been there for nearly 200 years, before the American Revolution, and long before the road they traveled was built or given a name. The stones were placed there to settle a border dispute between the Penns, who ran the colony of Pennsylvania, and the Calverts, who controlled the colony of Maryland. To officially mark the territories, the families commissioned two English astronomers —Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon—to create an official boundary. Years later, it would simply be called the Mason-Dixon line, the demarcation between North and South.
But none of that was on Fitzjohn’s mind. While he understood that the highway he was traveling was more than just a road—it was a national fault line—he mostly just wanted something to eat. That spring had been a whirlwind for him and everyone in his native country of Sierra Leone. The country was amidst its own fight for independence, a fight to end over 150 years of British colonial rule. In fact, it was part of what was branded “The Year of Africa,” during which 17 different African nations declared their independence. For Fitzjohn, it was a particularly momentous time. Here he was, 45 years old, his country’s chief diplomat to the United States, on the brink of achieving international recognition from the greatest economic and geopolitical power on the planet.
But Fitzjohn knew that in America, he was just another Black man on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon Line. And he knew—as he and his driver rode from Washington D.C. to Pittsburgh where he was scheduled to give a speech—that Jim Crow had no respect for diplomatic immunity. In fact, he had planned for it. As they drove on Route 40, Fitzjohn told his driver that he heard that the Howard Johnson’s in Hagerstown, Maryland served Black customers. Fitzjohn knew the reality: Maryland was on the wrong-side of those moss-covered stones—and in 1961, racial segregation was still the law in the South. As they pulled into the parking lot, Fitzjohn simply hoped to be treated with respect—and to be given a hot meal. He received neither. The waitress inside refused to take his order, even after he showed her his diplomatic passport, in an attempt to prove that he was not an American. But Fitzjohn wasn’t surprised. He knew about Route 40—it seemed that everyone did. As Stokely Carmichael, who founded the Black Power movement, later wrote, "I developed a deep hatred – one shared by many – for Route 40."
Back in Washington, President Kennedy—mere months into his first term—was incensed. The President asked one aide, "Can't you tell those African ambassadors not to drive on Route 40. It's a hell of a road,” continuing, “I wouldn't think of driving from New York to Washington. Tell them to fly." Kennedy himself was not ready to fully commit to doing anything about segregation—in fact, he would not fully commit to Civil Rights until June 11, 1963 (a story I wrote about back in June, in this page’s first post). However, the President called on the State Department to create the Special Protocol Service Section (SPSS) to address the racism the African diplomats faced, and tapped a young aide named Pedro Sanjuan to lead it. He told Sanjuan flatly, to “end all this business.” Soon, Sanjuan’s office discovered that the problems were even deeper than the Administration realized. Among other things, they found out that, of the 200 buildings close to the African embassies in Washington, only eight would allow African diplomats to rent in them.
For years by then, American officials had recognized the dissonance between America’s rhetoric on freedom abroad and its lack of action toward freedom at home. In 1948, President Truman warned Congress that “if we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy…We must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.” However, even with the desegregation of the Armed Forces that same year, and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision a few years later in 1954 that ruled racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, segregation remained the spirit and letter of the law below the Mason Dixon Line. The ensuing years brought more progress, as the next phase of the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. But still, the American Apartheid remained—and so did those stones, gathering moss, but maintaining their power.
The world had noticed. In Moscow, Soviet propaganda began to regularly depict America’s hypocrisy on race, wondering how a segregated nation could lay claim to leadership of the “free” world. Years before, a native son of Maryland had noticed a similar moment when America seemed out of step with the international order. That native son had said, “Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference…Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable.” That native son of Maryland—Frederick Douglass—had said those words in 1852. Now, over 100 years later as William Fitzjohn stood outside the Howard Johnson’s just miles from where Douglass was born along the banks of the Tuckahoe Creek in Maryland, the greatest empire ever to exist—the United States—stood naked on the world stage.
To amend Fitzjohn’s mistreatment, the White House scheduled a meeting between Kennedy and the diplomat, on April 27, 1961—the very day that Sierra Leone achieved its independence. Inside the Oval Office, the two men exchanged pleasantries, as Kennedy announced the formal recognition of Sierra Leone as its own nation. But still—beyond the niceties was the reality. There was no guarantee that the next time, in any establishment south of the line marked by those moss-covered stones, that Fitzjohn would receive the same respect in ordering a hamburger as he had when he met the President of the United States.
Even after the meeting, the problem persisted. That June, another African diplomat traveling along Route 40—Chad’s Ambassador, Adam Malick Sow—was refused service at the Bonnie Brae diner just off the highway in Edgewood, Maryland. Later, Life magazine asked the waitress who refused Sow, Mrs. Leroy Merritt, about her rationale. She told the reporter, “He looked like just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill n----- to me. I couldn’t tell he was an ambassador.” Another proprietor, Clarence Rosier who owned the Cottage Inn nearby, told Life, “I am a patriotic American. But when people come around here from the State Department telling me what I can do in my place, then I say this country is going Communist. I’ll sell and move to Russia. There’s more freedom there.”
Today, most of those restaurants are gone. The metal, wood, and laminate that made up the physical structures have been torn down, and the waitresses and small business owners that self-policed the laws of America’s racial dominion have mostly all died and been buried. And even so, most drivers now use the interstate instead of Route 40, as travelers spend their money at massive fast-food chains that can be found off any exit, off any American highway. But those moss-covered stones that Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon put into the ground remain, entrenched in the dirt, a permanent part of the American landscape.
Sources:
https://harfordcivilrights.org/items/show/4
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-09-bk-foner9-story.html
https://www.newspapers.com/image/21846047
https://www.history.com/news/african-diplomat-segregation-scandal-jfk
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220306-the-us-highway-that-helped-break-segregation
Hope those moss covered stones will always remain there as a reminder. Thank you.
Thank you, Tim, for a very needed informative story. Worth reading and thinking on.