1949 in 33 pictures

Using Google Images as my time machine, here is some of what I saw in 1949:

Click on images to enlarge or see the film; click on links to go to posts on the given subject:

Dorothy Dandridge in a glamour photo, circa 1949:

Lena Horne and Duke Ellington on the cover of the October 1949 issue of Ebony:

Jackie Robinson baseball card:

Billie Holiday:

Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois at the World at the Peace Congress in Paris, April 20th 1949:

Josephine Baker was in Paris:

Richard Wright was in Paris. Here he is with his daughter Julia:

James Baldwin was in Paris too, having just moved there in 1948. I could not find any pictures of him in 1949, but I did find a picture of the cafe near where he lived, Cafe de Flore, where he would write “Go Tell it on the Mountain” (1953):

FRANCE – 1949: Paris. The terrace of the Flore cafe. March, 1949. RV-88278 (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Chloe Wofford in high school in Lorain, Ohio. In 44 years she will win the Nobel Prize for Literature:

“Annie Allen” by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first book by a Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize:

“Uncle Tom’s Children” (1938) by Richard Wright, now in paperback:

A scene from “Souls of Sin”:

The 1949 movie poster for “Pinky”, about a light-skinned Black woman who passes for White:

“Field Hand” by Samella Lewis:

“Trenton Six” by Charles Wilbert White:

Fort Scott, Kansas by Gordon Parks:

Chicago by  Stanley Kubrick:

Harlem by Richard Avedon:Dining-car cooks:

Tons of Black people were still sharecroppers, but it seems they fell out of fashion with photographers in the 1940s (they were huge in the 1930s). Photography, like writing, seems to be a largely middle-class medium.

Howard University:

The Andante Club, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:

Wigs (natural hairstyles were not yet a thing):

Part of an ad for a skin-lightening bleaching cream:

White people in blackface:

a Montreal area church circa 1949. (MONTREAL GAZETTE)

The 1949 edition of the Green Book, which listed restaurants, hotels, etc, which would serve Blacks:

A map of civil rights laws. Notice how Jim Crow extends to Arizona:

Paradise Park For Coloured People in Florida: I am not sure if this picture is from 1949, but it probably is since that is when the park opened:

A kindergarten class in Topeka, Kansas:

A White family standing in front of their new house in Levittown, a suburb of New York City where no Black person was allowed to live, an example of a sundown town:

August 27th, Westchester County, just north of New York City: people shouting insults at carloads of concert-goers who have come to see Paul Robeson. This will turn into the Peekskill Riot:

A Klan rally in Alabama:

A race riot in St Louis, Missouri:

And, of course, Times Square:

My mother says that 1949, at the time, seemed completely ordinary. In writing this post I see what she means. It is like when you become used to hearing an accent – you stop hearing it.

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

• Times Square through time
• 1949 according to this blog – the same sort of exercise, but done with this blog, not Google Images
• Reading the Mechanical Bride
• Mark Matcho
• June 29th 1916 – what I could find out about that day from the Internet
• White Default
• What if there were a Black Default?

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