Historic Route 40 in Maryland was the setting for some civil rights struggles of the early 1960s

Route 40 spans the nation from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Atlantic City, New Jersey, through parts of Maryland, to those of the Pacific off San Francisco, some 3,000-plus miles across the country’s midsection like a great macadam belt.

Its origins date to 1806, when an act of Congress signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson established what locals still call the National Road or Baltimore Pike. Its eastern leg stretched 750 miles from Baltimore, through Cumberland, to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, making it the country’s first interstate road.

Often compared to Rome’s ancient road Appian Way, it quickly became the major route over the Alleghenies and throbbed with traffic on horseback, stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons piled high with freight bound for eastern markets, passing dream-filled visionary pioneers heading westward.

But it was the sound of the steam whistle that sounded the death knell for the National Road. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad built its line westward in the 1850s, and its freight and passengers quickly were diverted to trains that could travel between Baltimore and Wheeling, West Virginia, in just 16 hours, rather than days over a frequently mud-clogged road in spring and winter that often was frequented by drunken drivers and highwaymen.

As the old road fell into a weed-choked highway, a victim of the rise of railroads, it was the invention and accessibility of the automobile 50 years later that revived it.

But as a main artery of commerce, the segment of Route 40 that passes through Maryland, was also the setting for a dark and ugly past in the early 1960s.

African Americans traveling by car in the state, especially north of Baltimore, were not welcome at diners, restaurants, hotels or motels.

In those days, before Interstate 95 was completed and segregation was still the law of the land, Route 40 was the major route for diplomats and people of color traveling between New York and Washington.

Early in the spring of 1961, William Fitzjohn, charge d’affaires for Sierre Leone in Washington, en route to Pittsburgh, stopped with his driver at a Howard Johnson’s near Hagerstown for dinner and because both men were Black, they were denied service.

This American snub, and others like it, caused an international furor.

President John F. Kennedy was outraged by what had transpired and received Fitzjohn in the White House while the president of Howard Johnson’s apologized.

In June 1961, Adam Malick Sow, Chad’s ambassador to the United States was on his way to Washington to present his credentials to the president and was refused service when he stopped for a meal in Edgewood.

In September of that year, President Kennedy sent a telegram to 200 Maryland civic leaders seeking “voluntary cooperation for an immediate end to segregation in restaurants and other places of public service on U.S. Route 40 in Maryland.”

Maryland Gov. J. Millard Tawes also apologized for the incidents and supported the president’s position, while suggesting that African diplomats should select restaurants with an open-door policy.

“It is a terrible reflection on this state that this thing [rebuffs to diplomats] should be repeated time and time again after the president urged us to correct this condition,” said former Gov. Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin.

The Rev. Douglas B. Sands, a civil rights activist, who retired as pastor of White Rock Independent Methodist Episcopal Church in Sykesville, was at the time executive secretary of the state Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations.

One day he and a fellow protester, Caroline Ramsay, found themselves in the uncomfortable position of staring down the barrel of a gun held by Anthony J. “Tony” Konstant, owner of the Redwood Inn in Aberdeen, as they attempted to enter the restaurant.

“It was a very busy time along the road in those days,” Sands, 89, who retired from his church in 2019, recalled recently.

“He told us we weren’t wanted and to get out and he came to us with the gun raised,” Sands said. “And he was so infuriated because my companion Caroline was a white woman. This was unique for us because no one had done that before, and we left.”

Then the racist changed and became a supporter of desegregation.

“Tony had a change of heart later and he believed in what we were trying to do in getting a state accommodation law that would allow service to be given to everyone,” Sands said. “And I never had a reason to be fearful.”

Konstant became a leader in the effort to get restauranteurs along the highway to integrate.

“It is not an easy thing to go up to a Negro and tell him you won’t serve him,” Konstant told The Evening Sun in 1961. “It is morally wrong and Christianly wrong. There is a new Negro emerging, and we have to recognize him. … I’m not bitter about CORE’s role in the thing. Let’s face it, we never would have done it if they had not applied pressure. They were fighting for a principle.”

He had visited more than 35 restaurants and told the newspaper: “What I found was a softening attitude. But at most places the operators said integrating was the only decent, moral thing to do, and that they were willing if everyone else was.”

He added: “If I had to do it all over again I would have quietly desegregated and that would have been that. It’s the only sensible thing to do.”

For his efforts in playing a major role in integrating Route 40 and his civil rights activism, Konstant received a letter of thanks from U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Freedom Riders targeted Route 40 establishments, and 47 restaurants between the Delaware Memorial Bridge and Baltimore agreed to desegregate by November 1961.

Janice E. Grant, 90, a retired Harford County public school teacher and civil rights activist, held planning meetings in the living room of her home at 430 S. Law St. in Aberdeen. “A group of Freedom Riders came down from New York and we used to hold meetings in a church on Thorn Creek, but then the Klan started burning Black churches, and I said we couldn’t meet there, so they came to my house at 11:30 the first night.”

Grant was arrested after trying to integrate a restaurant in Edgewood. She was joined in her protests by her husband, Woodrow Benjamin Grant, a former serviceman.

“We sat everywhere we could along Route 40,” she said. “Afraid? I was never afraid. I had driven alone in Mississippi when they were killing people and I had been beaten badly.”

Additional pressure was applied when James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, better known as CORE, told the newspaper the restaurants that were balking at serving Black citizens were facing a Dec. 15 deadline.

“If not, we shall feel free to take necessary action,” he said in a statement.

CORE had published a list of more than 30 businesses between Maryland and Delaware that continued to refuse service to African Americans.

In early December 1961, more than 500 Freedom Riders staged an anti-discrimination demonstration along the highway, with 14 protesters being arrested, including James Peck, one of the original Freedom Riders.

The activism of the Route 40 protesters finally led to the passage of the state Public Accommodation Act in 1963 — the first such law passed by a state below the Mason-Dixon Line — that went into effect that year and effectively outlawed segregation in Maryland. The act was upheld by a referendum in November 1964.

It went into effect weeks before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1963, Sands resigned from the commission and accepted a job as special protocol officer with the U.S. State Department under Angier Biddle Duke, and later held posts during the 1970s with the Howard County chapter of the NAACP. In the 1980s he served in the cabinet of Maryland Gov. Harry R. Hughes.

Konstant, who was 87 when he died in 2011, later became the co-owner of the landmark Williamsburg Inn in White Marsh — located where else, but along historic Route 40.

Baltimore Sun photographer Amy Davis and Sun researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this article.