King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

As the United States fought the Cold War with the Soviet Union, seeking to gain political and military influence around the world, American leaders sought to present themselves as the champions of global freedom. But the country’s treatment of its Black population undercut that position. When the finance minister of Ghana visited the United States and tried to order orange juice at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Delaware, he was told that Black customers were not welcome. “Racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this Government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations,” wrote Dean Acheson, the secretary of state in the Truman administration, as part of a brief filed in Brown v. Board of Education, “and it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”