The Space for Race: Black American Exile and the Rise of Afro-Speculation

“If you’re president and you need a control factor in the economy and you need to sell this factor, you can’t sell Harlem and Watts but you can sell self-preservation, a new environment. We’re going to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia are ahead of us. The American people understand this.”

—Samuel F. Downer, LTV Aerospace¹

In February 1956, EC Comics’ incredible science fiction #33 reprinted writer Al Feldstein’s and artist Joe Orlando’s “Judgment Day!” (April 1953), which chronicles the visit of Tarlton, an astronaut from Earth to the “planet of mechanical life,” Cybrinia.² As Cybrinia’s unnamed representative shows Tarlton evidence of the planet’s democracy, technological advances, notable strides in architecture, and efficient factory operations, Tarlton notices that while orange and blue robots populate Cybrinia, only the orange robots are allowed to be workers in a plant to create more orange robots. Tarlton is advised that he would have to “go over to Blue Town on the South Side of the city” to observe similar activities at the blue robot plant. These blue robots are relegated to the margins of society and treated as inferior, though the blue and orange robots are actually identical in every way except for their sheathing colors. Because of the orange robots’ biases and the structural manner in which they restrict the rights and mobility of the blue robots, Tarlton decides that Cybrinia has not advanced enough to gain entrance into the Galactic Republic. When the orange leader asks Tarlton if there is hope for Cybrinia, Tarlton counters, “Of course there’s hope for you, my friend. For a while, on Earth, it looked like there was no hope! But when mankind on Earth learned to live together, real progress first began. The universe was suddenly ours.”³

There is, however, a kicker to Al Feldstein’s racial allegory: the comic’s final panel reveals Tarlton, who has removed his space helmet, to be a black astronaut. The ending is meant to be provocative, given that the comic was published just before (and reprinted after) the passage of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the continuing national protests for racial equality: the comic clearly was an allegory of pre-civil rights American society and a scathing commentary on mid-century American racism. This is undoubtedly why the Comics Code Authority, which was established to regulate content that defied purported societal mores and subject matter that might lead to the delinquency of American youth, was displeased with the conclusion to “Judgment Day!” In its 1953 review of the political possibilities of the comics genre, the black American newspaper, The Chicago Defender, had proclaimed that “comics have greater mass appeal than most other types of literature and their influence, particularly upon young minds, is infinite.”⁴ Exceeding his legal authority, the Code Authority’s administrator, Judge Charles Murphy, bristled at the progressive impact comics could have, and in this politicized context he ordered EC Comics to change the race of the “Judgment Day!” astronaut before the comic was reprinted. Feldstein recounts the scene between himself, Bill Gaines (EC Comics’ publisher and coeditor), and Murphy:

So [Judge Murphy] said it can’t be a Black [person]. So I said, “For God’s sakes, Judge Murphy, that’s the whole point of the Goddamn story!” So he said, “No, it can’t be a Black.” Bill [Gaines] just called him up [later] and raised the roof, and finally they said, “Well, you gotta take the perspiration off.” I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, “Fuck you,” and he hung up.⁵

“Judgment Day!” was reprinted unchanged by EC Comics.

Politically and conceptually, this was a portentous choice, for it anticipated the ways in which the emergent space race would offer a ready allegory for U.S. race relations in the Civil Rights Era. But it also discloses the political exigency of black speculative arts during this period. Feldstein’s and Orlando’s decision to...