The Idea of a Black President

Roy E. Finkenbine

Until the recent inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States, the nation’s highest office has been reserved for white men. The idea of a black president has been so unthinkable to most Americans that, for much of our nation’s past, it has been relegated to rare comedic or fantastic explorations in the popular culture. Only over the last half century has that begun to change.

Throughout most of American history, the idea of a black president has been a subject fit only for satire. One prominent Hollywood example of this tendency is Rufus Jones for President (1933), a short musical comedy about a young African American boy, played by seven-year-old Sammy Davis, Jr., who dreams that he is elected president. The film portrays the subject in hilarious fashion, replete with a variety of offensive racial stereotypes, including African Americans eating chicken, stealing watermelons, and shooting craps. Over the past five decades, African American comedians have viewed the idea as being equally absurd, though highlighting the racism of many whites as the reason. Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle have made it the subject of their standup routines and comedy skits. Chappelle even suggested in one monologue that the first black president would prove so offensive to whites that he would need to select a Mexican vice president to stave off assassination or impeachment.

In the two major works of fiction to explore the subject in the twentieth century, the authors devised creative plot twists to work around the implausibility of an African American ascending to the presidency. The first of these, The Black President (1926) by prominent Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato, was penned while he was living in the United States. Set in 2228, the novel recounts a fictional U.S. presidential campaign between three candidates—a conservative white male, a white female, and a black male named Jim Roy. Late in the campaign, Roy surges ahead and is elected the nation’s eighty-eighth president (doubling Obama’s actual number). He is found dead, however, the morning that he is to take office. By setting the story in the distant future, having the black candidate win in a three-way race, and arranging for his assassination before he is inaugurated, Lobato made the idea of a black president more plausible. Nevertheless, while the novel was published in Portuguese and is a cult classic in Brazil, he failed in his attempts to find an American publisher.

The subject remained largely unexplored in fiction thereafter until popular American novelist Irving Wallace published The Man (1964). Written in the midst of the civil rights movement, the novel focuses on Douglas Dilman, an African American senator who was made president pro tempore of the Senate in what was largely a token appointment. When the president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives are tragically killed in the collapse of an ancient structure during an international summit in Europe, and the vice president refuses the post for health reasons, Dilman ascends to the presidency. Throughout the remainder of the novel, he faces widespread public opposition, charges of corruption, an assassination attempt, and, ultimately, impeachment. Even in the midst of dramatic racial change in the U.S., Wallace could only conceive of a black man becoming president through a series of tragic events—and, then, not for very long. A Hollywood film version of The Man, starring James Earl Jones in the role of Dilman, was released to theaters in 1972. By that time, attitudes were beginning to change.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the political empowerment of African Americans as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, altered the thinking of some Americans about the idea of a black president. A few serious observers even prophesied the future election of a black man to the nation’s highest office. Writing in Esquire in 1958, Senator Jacobs Javits of New York expressed his belief that this would happen by the end of the twentieth century. Speaking on the presidential campaign trail in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy accurately predicted that it would occur within four decades. Several benchmarks marked the way. Five blacks ran for president on radical or racial third-party tickets during the 1960s—this had happened only once before. Rev. Channing Phillips of Washington, D.C. received forty-six presidential nominating votes and Georgia State Representative Julian Bond received eighty-seven and one-half at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Finally, in 1972, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became the first black candidate to run in the presidential primaries. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential primary campaigns considerably broadened public acceptance of the idea of a black president. During the two campaigns, he received nearly ten million votes, won several primaries and caucuses, accumulated hundreds of delegates, and moved millions of Americans with his stirring speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention. His candidacy paved the way for Obama and the other African Americans who have entered more recent presidential primaries.

Over the past decade, popular culture has both reflected and increased public acceptance of the idea of a black president. Deep Impact, Head of State, and other feature films, along with the television thriller 24, offered positive portrayals of fictional black presidents. Dennis Haysbert, who played a black president in 24, suggested to journalists that his “portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people.” By the beginning of the 2008 presidential primary season, polling data showed that race had declined significantly as a factor in choosing a president. In fact, it was less of a handicap to a potential presidential candidate than being female or outside of the American religious mainstream. Whatever the reasons for this change—the civil rights movement, the campaigns of Jesse Jackson, or more recent mainstream depictions of an African American in the presidency—Obama’s campaign was successful, in large part, to the widespread acceptance of the idea of a black president that has taken place over the course of the last half century.

Roy E. Finkenbine is professor of history and director of the Black Abolitionist Archives at the University of Detroit Mercy.