On a fall night in 1957, two travelers stopped at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Dover, Delaware, for a roadside break. But they were rebuffed, told to take their beverages outside because Black people were not allowed to dine inside. As the men walked out in protest, leaving their drinks on the counter, one made a promise: “You can keep the orange juice and the change, but this is not the last you have heard of this.”
That man was Ghana’s finance minister, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, who had hosted Vice President Richard Nixon in his home just a few months earlier, when the African country celebrated its independence from Britain. “If the vice president of the U.S. can have a meal in my house when he is in Ghana, then I cannot understand why I must receive this treatment at a roadside restaurant in America,” Gbedemah said at the time.
State Department officials scrambled to publicly apologize for this “exceptional and isolated incident.” On October 10, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Gbedemah to breakfast at the White House to make amends; according to Time magazine, Gbedemah expressed hope—at least publicly—that “the people of Ghana understand that there are very few people in the U.S. who act that way.”
Gbedemah’s 1957 meeting with the president was a portent of greater challenges for Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, who was elected in 1960, the year 17 African nations declared their independence from colonial rule. As these countries established diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., their representatives witnessed the racism directed at Black Americans firsthand—experiences that fueled growing calls for comprehensive civil rights reform in the United States. Kennedy, whose campaign had focused on neutralizing the threat posed by the Soviet Union, found himself forced to contend with a new, rapidly changing foreign policy playing field.
“With the end of formal empire, it means that there are many more world players out there,” says Renee Romano, a historian at Oberlin College. “American foreign policy in Africa had largely been dealing with [European imperial powers] … but now, it’s a very different story in terms of who you need to talk to. And [the United States is] very worried about these new countries becoming communist and then bringing others with them.”
Concerns over adversaries using domestic racial issues as a cudgel had been brewing among American officials for years. In 1947, a committee convened by President Harry S. Truman released a report discussing segregation’s negative effect on America’s international reputation. “The shamefulness and absurdity of Washington’s treatment of Negro Americans is highlighted by the presence of many dark-skinned foreign visitors” who are rejected from establishments in the nation’s capital, the committee argued. Observing a peculiar dissonance of segregation, the group added, “Once it is established that they are not Americans, they are accommodated.”