We left Virginia after a big breakfast with Lara and Elyse’s family at the inn. There wasn’t much traffic northbound. We made good time around Washington. By a little way onto the Baltimore-Washington parkway we were ready for a pit stop. I got off at an exit that turned out to be going to Fort Meade. That’s the NSA headquarters, which we didn’t want to even have to turn around at. We pulled into what we hoped was a restaurant parking lot, but it turned out to be just a crab market (this is Maryland, remember). The woman at the counter said there were gas stations etc on the other side of the parkway. It wasn’t really at all far. We went into a McDonald’s to use the restrooms and get a little to eat.
Now I know it’s just me, but I was very impressed to see an interracial couple come in to McDonalds, walk up to the counter, and be treated just like anyone else. I still notice interracial couples, even though I really think, “well, why not, after all”.
The thing is, in the spring of 1962, my freshman year in college, I spent a week at Howard University in Washington on a student exchange program. There was a civil rights lunch counter demonstration the Saturday at the end of that week that I went on. In those days the law in Maryland was that the restaurant owner could come over and read a statement, with wording prescribed by the law, something like “Of my own free will I choose not to serve you and I request that you leave my premises.” So one day 44 years ago several busloads of college kids descended on that same town of Laurel, Maryland on the opening day of the horse racing season to make as much of a nuisance of ourselves as we could. The group I was with, two black women from Howard, a white guy from U Maryland at College Park, and I were “read out” of four eateries. Nowadays I think anyone under 40 years old would say, “Yeah, I’ve heard about those days. Wierd, man. What were they thinking?” But I was impressed by the scene at McDs.