The segregated diners along Maryland's Route 40 were always somebody's problem – mothers packing sandwiches for a daytrip to the nation's capital, Jim Crow on their minds – but they were not always John F. Kennedy's problem. That changed in the early 1960s, when African diplomats began arriving to the United States to present their credentials to the United Nations and the White House. Between the high-modernist universalism of the former and the neo-classical, republican universalism of the latter, at just about the place where ambassadors got hungry, lay a scattering of gaudy, ramshackle restaurants straddling an otherwise bleak stretch of highway. As the motoring diplomats discovered to their shock, the diners excluded black people in ways that turned out to be global: whatever their importance to US foreign policy, African economic ministers and cultural attaches received no diplomatic immunity.

The incoming Kennedy administration soon confronted an international scandal, as the officials filed formal complaints and US and overseas editors ran with the story. “Human faces, black-skinned and white, angry words and a humdrum reach of U. S. highway,” read an article in Life, “these are the raw stuff of a conflict that reached far out from America in to the world.” Kennedy, reluctant to engage the black freedom struggle except where it intersected with Cold War concerns, established an Office of the Special Protocol Service to mediate: its staff caught flak, spoke to newspapers, and sat down with Route 40's restaurateurs, diner by diner, making the case that serving black people was in the United States’ global interests. High-level officials argued for the desegregating of Maryland's public accommodations for both visiting dignitaries and African Americans. “Let me say with a Georgia accent,” stated Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “that we cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.” In the context of Cold War rivalry and African decolonization, Route 40's petty apartheid was no longer just its own. Racialized power had a geopolitics; one that had suddenly brought the President to within two degrees of separation from the owners of the Double-T Diner.

This chapter explores intersections between the politics of racialized difference and the United States’ geopolitical histories, and the rich varieties of ways that historians have mapped them.