Hungarian Revolution

The 1956 Hungarian uprising caught the imaginations of Americans. The Cold War was at its height in the mid-fifties when it appeared that a group of Hungarian "freedom fighters" struck a blow against Soviet communist control. The Soviet Union brutally repressed their brief, but heady revolt. In the United States there was widespread sympathy for the Hungarians and some conservatives even called for President Dwight Eisenhower to commit U.S. forces to the struggle. Among African Americans the Hungarian freedom fighters became a symbolic brother-in-arms in the struggle for freedom. The Richmond Afro American for example covered the events in Hungary in great detail and put a quote on its masthead from the Hungarian nineteenth-century freedom fighter Louis Kossuth. Almost 250,000 Hungarians fled the Soviet repression and became refugees. Some of them emigrated to the United States, a few ending up in Roanoke and other parts of Virginia.