Fifty years ago, on October 10th, 1957, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, Finance Minister for the newly independent nation of Ghana, entered a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Dover, Delaware, and ordered a glass of orange juice. As he was handed the drink, wrapped to take away, the waitress explained that he could not have a seat in the restaurant because "coloured people are not allowed to eat in here", writes Kevin Stevens
Gbedemah, who was on an official visit to the United States, was outraged. Six months earlier, he had entertained Vice-President Richard Nixon at his home in Accra. He informed the press of the incident, which came to national attention. The State Department quickly issued an apology and the US Ambassador to Ghana stated publicly that the incident was "exceptional and isolated". President Eisenhower invited Gbedemah to the White House and over breakfast disingenuously explained that such situations "happen all over the place and you never know when they'll blow up, or where".
Eisenhower knew better. Two weeks earlier he had deployed federal troops to Arkansas to protect black students at Little Rock Central High School. Three years after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark US Supreme Court ruling that declared state-sponsored segregation of schools to be unconstitutional, the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had grown impatient with the state's failure to implement the mandated change. When the NAACP enrolled nine African-Americans at Central High, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus responded by ordering the national guard and local police to prevent the students from entering the school.
Faubus's actions were not exceptional. In spite of legal change at the federal level, local and state legislation throughout the American South - the so-called Jim Crow laws - continued to enforce "separate but equal" status for black Americans. De jure segregation would prevail well into the 1960s, not just in schools but at lunch counters and on public transport, on golf courses and in public parks.
Of course, "separate but equal" was a phrase of convenience used to camouflage racism. In all cases, facilities for African-Americans were inferior. In black schools, for example, everything was older and shoddier than in white schools - desks, equipment, sports gear, even the buildings themselves. Textbooks were out of date and bore the names of the white children who had owned them first. And because, like other political institutions, school boards were dominated by whites, change was almost impossible to effect.
In the South, segregation was sanctioned at the highest social and political levels. In 1956, 96 senators and congressmen, including the entire Arkansas delegation, signed the Southern Manifesto, a document drawn up to counter Brown v. Board of Education. The Arkansas signatories included J. William Fulbright, the longest serving chairman in the history of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and John L. McClellan, who, in the year of the Little Rock crisis, was rising in national prominence as chairman of the Senate committee tasked with investigating organised crime.
Around the time that Eisenhower was having breakfast with Gbedemah, he received a telegram from McClellan demanding that federal troops be withdrawn from Little Rock. The troops, McClellan claimed, were there for one purpose only: "to compel integration of the races in the school". They were "an obstruction to any early peaceful solution to the problem." What McClellan said in the language of politics was expressed in other ways on the ground. Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP, had a rock thrown through the front window of her Little Rock home with a note tied to it saying, "Stone this time. Dynamite next." Two nights later, the Ku Klux Klan set a eight-foot burning cross on her lawn beside a white-lettered sign that said, "Go back to Africa".
The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be known, stayed in school, but the stand-off took years to resolve. Troops remained for the entire school year. The following summer, with support from Governor Faubus, the school board cancelled the 1958-59 school year for its three high schools. Thousands of students left the city to attend schools in other districts, or enrolled in all-white private schools. It wasn't until the autumn of 1959 that the board, compelled by further federal court rulings, opened an integrated school system.
As William Faulkner so acutely observed, the South suffered from a pathology of racism that left an indelible stain on its culture. But state-sponsored racism was not confined to the southern states. De jure segregation was in effect throughout the US not long before the tumultuous years of the 1950s. African-Americans were barred from many federal government jobs until the second World War. A California law, still in force in the 1940s, authorised the segregation in public schools of children of Japanese, Chinese and South-east Asian ancestry. And the American armed forces remained segregated until 1948.
Moreover, de facto segregation in the US continues to be a problem into the 21st century. Housing patterns, economic factors and "white flight" from urban areas have created segregated neighbourhoods and, consequently, segregated schools. And though poverty is now the critical factor, poverty and race are intertwined. Poor school districts, predominantly black and Hispanic, have poorer schools - which are still segregated, still separate, and still unequal.