A 50 mile ride after riding just one month? Cool.
To stop quickly in an emergency, you must use your front brake. If you do it correctly, you won't fly over the handlebars.
In fact, I've had more danger from locking up my rear wheel when I grabbed both front and back brakes in a panic stop. The skidding rear wheel starts fishtailing side to side since it has no traction. ( I let off the back briefly and recovered, but it's scary.)
Practice hard braking on a smooth road with no traffic in sight.
With experience, I can tell if I can make the upcoming turn easily, and how much distance a fast stop will take. So now I'm more confident going faster downhill than when I was a new rider.
Read this
short article by Sheldon Brown on braking.
From the article:
Many cyclists shy away from using the front brake, due to fear of flying over the handlebars. This does happen, but mainly to people who have not learned to modulate the front brake.
The cyclist who relies on the rear brake for general stopping can get by until an emergency arises, and, in a panic, he or she grabs the unfamiliar front brake as well as the rear, for extra stopping power. This can cause the classic "over the bars" crash.
Jobst Brandt has a quite plausible theory that the typical "over-the-bars" crash is caused, not so much by braking too hard, but by braking hard without using the rider's arms to brace against the deceleration: The bike stops, the rider keeps going until the rider's thighs bump into the handlebars, and the bike, which is no longer supporting the weight of the rider, flips.