Would most Americans have known who Ralph Bunche was?
Remember that 1950 was not the media world we live in now. Most people didn’t have TVs. The evening news would have been, what, a 30-minute program on the radio? There were newspapers, but would there have been biographical sketches about Ralph Bunche or any other person in the president’s administration. People were probably doing good if they knew who the vice-president was.
The OP is an amazing query because it illustrates just how fast the world can change. As backwards as 1950 seems to me, it really wasn’t that long ago. Both of my parents were alive then, and they are on the youngish side for Baby Boomers. So within a single lifetime, we’ve gone from a society where almost no one had television sets and multiple households shared phone lines to one where almost everyone can watch TV shows and movies almost anywhere, on their phones.
Flying cars aside, we are the Jetson’s. It makes me wonder what the Apollo/Obama-type question in 2053 will be. I can’t wait!
I’m trying to imagine how sketchy a newspaper article would be on the day in 1950 when Bunche was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Heck, imagine doing it backwards from 1950; in 1892, folks would be asking which is more likely: that a plane will land on an aircraft carrier within 19 years, or that we’ll have split the atom to nuke city after city within 58 years?
There were rockets in 1950. The advancement of technology and engineering had helped the country win WWII so the future looked bright for scientific engineering. Science fiction was gaining a hold on peoples imagination.
I gave 20% on Obama just because a lot of smart, talented black entertainers were emerging. Many were popular among whites even if they didn’t admit it. So it wasn’t totally inconceivable that a black politician would emerge but the chances were nonetheless quite slim.
The poll is somewhat skewed because the moon landing was in 1969 and it was 39 years later for a black president to get elected. The odds of electing a black president in 1969 were far, far less than the chances of landing on the moon by 2008.
I turned 5 in 1950. All through my childhood, there were rockets, and Sputnik was launched when I was 12. So it’s not too much of a stretch to think people would someday go to the moon. But I also remember thinking that all “negroes” lived in the slums, since there weren’t any in the suburbs at that tiime. The concept of an African American President was unthinkable. It just wasn’t something anyone could have predicted back then.