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Change the names and the circumstances and this could just as easily be almost any recent year as it was this day in 1957.
The Middle East; the perennial powder-keg, the threatened flashpoint where the world would be plunged into chaos. The divider between East and West.
On this day in 1957 news was about the lengthy, saber-rattling reaction the Russians and Chinese had over the recently released Eisenhower Doctrine on The Middle East. How the threat of a possible East-West confrontation loomed if the U.S. stepped in to the turmoil taking place in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel.
Egypt, under Nasser, was undergoing a transformation due largely to the crisis in the Suez Canal a year earlier and his ascent to power via a Military Coup in Cairo. Coupled with the Israeli-Egyptian conflict and the dispute over Gaza and the wave of Arab Nationalism throughout the region, waves of discontent were swelling and threatening.
Algerian militant and National Liberation Front member Djamila Bouhired sets off a bomb in an Algiers cafe killing 11 civilians, precipitating the Battle of Algiers.
And that was only the first week of a new year.
In the rest of the World – Prime Minister Anthony Eden handed in his resignation to Buckingham Palace, signaling the start of the political scramble for control of the British government.
The Cold War world wasn’t warm and inviting, not by a long shot.
And at home – Civil Rights leaders were drawing similarities between the South and Hungary – the repression employed by both motivated Civil Rights leaders to step up the commitment to eradicating racial prejudice. A task easier said than done. 1957 would be a pivotal year for Civil Rights in America.
And that’s just a small portion of what went on this day, as reported and commented on by Mutual News’ Cedric Foster and Gabriel Heater for January 7, 1957.
