The Bonnie Brae Diner

Ground Zero for Restaurant Desegregation in Maryland

The Bonnie Brae Diner was the site of a famous 1961 incident when an African diplomat (an Ambassador from Chad) was denied service due to their race. The incident involved the Kennedy administration, which subsequently intervened to achieve restaurant desegregation in Marlyland. Life magazine reported on the event in a story that ran just before the Route 40 Freedom Ride in December 1961.

The Bonnie Brae diner in Edgewood, Maryland was the site of an incident involving an African diplomat in June 1961.They were made famous by reporting in LIFE magazine. The diner’s owners denied service to the Ambassador from Chad (Adam Malik Sow) due to his color. The incident was one of a handful of similar incidents that occurred on Route 40 in Maryland along with one that occurred at a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Ambassador Sow spoke out against his treatment at the Bonnie Brae. In September 1961, the Baltimore Afro-American sent a team of three black reporters dressed in diplomatic formality with one in African clothing to a handful of restaurants on Route 40. They had limited success in getting seated, mostly in dining rooms separate from the main dining rooms of the restaurants.   

The LIFE magazine article provided perspectives from the diplomats, proprietors, and customers of the restaurants in question. Ambassador Sow: "When I asked for coffee the good woman said she could not serve me. She said 'That's the way it is here.' I cannot say how I felt. I was astonished. I was so angry. President Kennedy himself has made deep apologies, but these humiliations are bad- everybody can exploit them."

Mrs. Leroy Merritt, Bonnie Brae waitress and proprietor: "He looked just like an ordinary run-of-the mill nigger to me. I couldn't tell he was an ambassador. We serve them if they don't get noisy but only out of the goodness of our hearts. I said 'There's no table service here.' We've got our life savings in this place, and the main part of our trade is southern truck drivers."

The Bonnie Brae incident kicked off a year-long affair in the state of Maryland involving the desegregation of restaurants and other public facilities. It led the Kennedy administration to request Maryland’s governor (Millard Tawes) to investigate segregation on Route 40 in the wake of new international attention. This effort led the Tawes administration to support a civil rights law in 1962, the first to pass and go into effect at the state level ahead of the federal 1964 Civil Rights bill.

The Soviet Union had already highlighted southern American racism and racist violence and the Kennedy administration was highly conscious of the country’s image in the context of the Cold War. The administration was also becoming more focused on civil rights, increasingly leaning in with federal support for civil rights legislation and legal efforts to end racial segregation.

By the end of 1961, the owners of the diner had changed their racist practices. The guide brochure for the CORE Freedom Ride on Route 40 listed the Bonnie Brae as “Desegregated” and therefore not a Freedom Rider destination. The site of the restaurant is now the Southern Precinct of the Harford County Sheriff's Office.

Images

Documents

NameInfoActions
Route 40 Racism Exposed pdf / 71.98 kB Download

Map

1305 Pulaski Highway, Edgewood, Maryland 21040 ~ The site of the Bonnie Brae Diner is now occupied by the Harford County Sheriff's Southern Precinct on Route 40 in Edgewood, MD (Pulaski Highway). It is atop Magnolia hill in Edgewood, Maryland on the right side heading east from Baltimore just after the intersection of Route 40 and Mountain Road (Rt. 152).