3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

"The Other Cheek" : ReUn9ubhing Selt"Daienre,l9SS"1956
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n 1955, Winston Churchill, architect of Allied victory in World War Q,
resigned as prime minister of Britain . That same year, scientists at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced the first ultra high-frequency (UHF)
waves while their students crammed phone booths, sat atop flagpoles, and executed panty
raids. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita, and Salvador Dali painted his vision of the Last
Supper. The AFL and CIO merged under the leadership of George Meany.
Ford introduced the Fdsel, a medium-priced, gadgety car that promptly flopped ;
James Dean fatally crashed his Porsche into a much simpler Ford on a lonely California
highway . Sugar Ray Robinson won the world boxing championship from Carl "8obo"
Olson, and the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in a seven-game World
Series, 4-3, after losing the first two games . Charlie "Bird" Parker, legendaryjazz
saxophonist, died, as did two other notable black Americans : Mary McCleod Bethune and
Walter White. And in Montgomery, Alabama, a tired black seamstress named Roses
Parks started a revolution when she refused to give up her scat on a city bus .
Local black leaders in Montgomery had been searching for the ideal time and
legal excuse to challenge the city's Jim Crow bus laws, and Parks provided the
opportunity for which they had been looking . On the evening of Thursday, December 1,
1955, she paid her usual fare at the front of the bus, boarded at the "black entrance" at the
rear, and took a seat near the middle, in the "no-man's land" between the black and white
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