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Date of Graduation
12-13-2025
Semester of Graduation
Fall
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Department of History
First Advisor
Margaret Mulrooney
Second Advisor
Kevin Borg
Third Advisor
David Owusu-Ansah
Abstract
The 1961 Route 40 campaign in Maryland became a critical battleground where three competing approaches to addressing racial segregation revealed deep contradictions in Cold War America. Route 40, a major highway between Washington D.C. and New York, became an international embarrassment when African diplomats from newly independent nations were repeatedly refused service at restaurants and hotels. This crisis prompted responses from three distinct actors: the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which employed grassroots organizing and direct action; the State Department's Special Protocol Service Section (SPSS), which pursued top-down diplomatic solutions; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which conducted extensive surveillance of civil rights activists. Drawing upon CORE papers from the Wisconsin Historical Society, over four thousand pages of FBI surveillance documents, records from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage, this multi-archival approach provides a comprehensive analysis of how different institutional actors understood and responded to the same civil rights crisis.
The findings demonstrate that CORE's bottom-up pressure campaign ultimately proved more effective than the State Department's bureaucratic approach in achieving meaningful desegregation of Maryland restaurants. Through strategic planning, nonviolent discipline, and coordinated demonstrations, CORE forced restaurant owners to acknowledge that sustained pressure, not diplomatic persuasion, drove their decision to desegregate.
Included in
African American Studies Commons, African History Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Diplomatic History Commons, First Amendment Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, Legal Commons, Legislation Commons, Oral History Commons, Other History Commons, Political History Commons, President/Executive Department Commons, Social History Commons, State and Local Government Law Commons, United States History Commons
