Fifties (126 page)

Emmett Till was fourteen years old when he allegedly whistled at a white woman in Money, Mississippi. He was beaten and then killed, his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River weighted down by a heavy cotton-gin fan.
UPI/BETTMANN

His was a powerful voice in a powerful cause: Martin Luther King, Jr., scion of one of Atlanta’s most prominent black families, became the symbol for a generation.
DON UHRBROCK/
LIFE
/TIME WARNER, INC.

Mrs. Rosa Parks sits in the front seat of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, more than a year after she was arrested for violating the city’s segregation laws. In December 1956, the Supreme Court ruled the laws unconstitutional.
UPI/BETTMANN

Little Rock became the first great battleground of the civil rights struggle when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied a court order to integrate Little Rock Central High (some of whose students are shown here). Riots provoked by Faubus and his allies followed, and President Eisenhower reluctantly sent in elite airborne troops and federalized the Arkansas National Guard.
BURT GLINN, MAGNUM PHOTOS, INC.

In the rising affluence of America in the fifties, it was sometimes easy to forget that the society’s blessings did not extend to everyone. The South was still segregated by law and custom (as shown here at drinking fountains in North Carolina in 1950), though a series of Supreme Court rulings undermined the idea of separate but equal facilities.
ELLIOTT ERWITT, MAGNUM PHOTOS, INC.

Supporters of Faubus rallied behind their man in 1958 and the lines were drawn at Little Rock. Federal officials had to push integration almost at gunpoint, helping the governor politically. Faubus, whose chances of reelection had once seemed slim, now presented himself to white voters as a victim of integrationists and was reelected several times.
COSTA MANOS, MAGNUM PHOTOS, INC.

Nothing captivated the nation like the quiz shows of the late fifties, and no one was a bigger hero than Charles Van Doren, a graceful, charming young Columbia English instructor from a famed literary family. Here he beats Herb Stempel, right, in
Twenty-One.
Millions of Americans were later shocked to find that Van Doren had been given the answers.
TIME

Van Doren and
Twenty-One
M.C. Jack Barry show their pleasure as Barry adds up Van Doren’s record-breaking winnings.
THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Though the striking success of Elvis Presley produced many imitators, there was nothing artificial about Presley. His success was immediate and powerful. The night that a Memphis radio station played his songs for the first time, its switchboard lit up; the deejay sent for Presley and interviewed him that night; he also made sure that the singer gave the name of his high school so listeners would know he was white.
FRED WARD, BLACK STAR

Powers, released after serving time in a Russian prison, holds up a model of the U-2 as he testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
UPI/BETTMANN