When a black historian couldn't get a meal in DC but in 2 places

HNN Editor: In the fall of 2007 historian Vaughn Bornet wrote a piece for HNN called,"How Race Relations Touched Me During a Long Lifetime." One section seems particularly relevant now:

Having gotten the Stanford doctorate in history in 1951 and written an essay for the Journal of Negro History, I planned a journey East the next year on a Ford grant to research trade unions and radical politics. I quite naturally sought to schedule lunch with the Journal’s fairly new editor, Charles H. Wesley. “In all of Washington, D. C.,” that scholarly historian wrote in reply, “there are only two places we can have lunch: the café in the National Archives basement, and Methodist House.” (Actually, the Supreme Court lunchroom, too.) I never, ever forgot his astounding words, which were written after the close of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, and at the dawn of the Eisenhower years. We did indeed dine pleasantly in the National Archives restaurant (if a trace emotionally). It had been a devastating shock that anything like these restrictions could exist in the capitol of any nation that had just spent years waging a world war for democracy and freedom. “How do Negroes feel every day?” I pondered morosely in mid-century America.