In 1950, most white people’s exposure to black people were the maids and janitors who cleaned their toilets. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine a black mayor or councilman, let alone a black POTUS.
Black folk might’ve daydreamed about it. But it would be like how I sometimes daydream about flying like Superman. They probably wouldn’t have even dared mention such fantasies out loud lest they get called crazy.
(Hell, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe that Obama could be elected until the morning after the election. I wouldn’t let my hopes get too high, I guess.)
So I’m thinking that it would be 90/10 Apollo. We’d just done kicking ass in the war. No one could tell us nothin’. A few years earlier, no one had ever seen an airplane. By 1950, everyone had (on newsreels, at least). If an airplane can fly to the other side of the planet with a million bombs strapped to it, why wouldn’t we be able to fly to the moon with a little more ingenuity? Hollywood was also starting to implant the idea that alien invasion was right around the corner. Art taps into the consciousness of the time. If it’s believable that aliens would be knocking on your door, then the reverse is also believable.
In 1950 there were few to zero movies or books about black people being anything bigger than maids and janitors. Except for “The Birth of a Nation”. I think a black president would be more believable once we got to the early1960s, though. The Civil Rights Movement was cooking on high at this time, and even if you didn’t like Martin Luther King, Jr., you had to admit he was nobody’s mealy-mouthed janitor.
One thing we also have to account for: Perception of timeline scale.
In 1950, 1969 is 19 years away. We’ll be living in all-electric houses but that’s pretty ambitious.
2008 is all the way in the super-future 21st century when we’ll have flying cars and jetpacks and atomic-powered toilets and all-skyscraper cities with rolling sidewalks and be wearing aluminized onesies, etc.
So, man on the moon by 1969? Likely, but not certain or imminent. A Negro President by 2008? Unlikely, but not utterly unthinkable.
In 1950, I think most Americans expected we would eventually go to the moon. That it would happen within twenty years would have been a surprise but it was a possibility most people had considered.
The vast change in race relations, on the other hand, was unexpected in 1950. This was a period when race relations were still essentially frozen where they had been since the 1870’s. This was back when allowing black people to vote for white candidates was still considered a controversial idea. If you had taken a poll in 1950 of when the first black man would be elected President, a significant number of people would probably have responded it would never happen.
:smack:
Originally I linked to this one of the Obamas dancing, until I realised it was frigging huge and would probably annoy someone. Changed the picture, forgot about the left and rights…
I did think of this. But I still went 90-10 Apollo. But it is difficult to say. When I was a kid 2000 seemed impossibly far away. Oh my God I’ll be 32! 2008 to someone in 1950 would seem like the far future.
And then look at my Grandfather. Through a combination of marrying old and me being the youngest son of a youngest son my grandfather was a couple of generations older than the grandparents of my peers. He was born in 1884. He was an adult before cars outnumbered horses where he lived. He was too old for WWI. When the space program happened it was too much change for him. He never believed it happened even though he lived through it.
But I still feel that the vast majority would think Apollo was more likely. Into the 2000s I felt that the first black president would have to be a Republican to get wide enough support. In 1950 rockets were popular with kids. Lots of rocket experiments with Nazi technology. Sputnik and Mercury were only a few years away. I think most people would think that going to the moon was likely but probably not that soon. But more likely than a black president.
From what I’ve heard from professors (we were talking about presidential knife fights) and in 2000 it seemed unbelievable that we’d have a black president by '08.
Well there are people today that think we’ve never landed on the moon, so I can’t put the number at 100% for Appollo.
Then again, there are people today who think Obama isn’t the president, so I don’t know what people from the '50s would believe.
19 years to put a man on the moon? Ridiculous! The average man on the street might have been vaguely aware that rockets existed, but the notion of putting men inside a fire cracker is just absurd.
The notion of a negro in the White House? Nonsense!! The average white person was aware that they existed, but purely to entertain or serve us. It’s not their fault, but they are from patently inferior stock*.
*Please imagine me dressed in a zoot suit, wearing a fedora and staring at a dame with great gams whilst reading this paragraph
I disagree. We’re well aware of V2s today, because we’ve sat through countless documentaries on the Hitler Channel. Back in 1950, that footage existed, but wasn’t available to the general public.
Contemporary newspapers and newsreels would have mentioned rocket attacks on London, but the reports couldn’t have shown much more than a hole in the ground. There was certainly coverage of Werner von Braun being captured, but that was in 1945.
By 1950, there was nothing. NASA didn’t exist. Sputnik hadn’t been launched. The Air Force had some jets by then, but the first test firing of a US missile was in 1949, only entering service in 1956.
In 1950, both Destination Moon and Rocket Ship X-M were released. Both dealt with humans traveling into space as a realistic possibility in the near future.
What was the first movie that portrayed a black president?
And it could have happened if Colin Powell hadn’t chickened out. I suspect a lot of Democrats would have voted for him, and the Republican Party was not quite so radicalized in 2000.
As I was less than a year old in January 1950 I can’t say I have first hand experience of what people believed. But I go along with the 80/20 moon landing folks.
Hell, I didn’t even believe Obama could be elected when he surfaced to national attention in 2004, although I thought it was more to do with his name than his race.
Jokes aside, James Earl Jones was The Man in '72, as per the '64 novel.
But, as mentioned upthread, folks didn’t exactly need fiction in 1950 to note that UCLA valedictorian Ralph Bunche had followed up his PhD with a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the Middle East and was teaching at Harvard; it was in the papers.
