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year later, and there was no lead from the White House. Eisenhower expressed neither'approbation nor disapproval' of the judgement. 86 The lines in the South were being drawnagain.By the mid-1950s Hollywood was also changing. Joseph Breen, the conservative RomanCatholic who headed the Production Code Administration, retired in 1954. Backed by theRoman Catholic Legion of Decency, he had sought to maintain the strict Christian moralitythat had imbued the Production Code. He was replaced by the more flexible GeoffreyShurlock. Breen's departure came as Hollywood was reassessing its position withdeclining audiences, the challenge of television and the loss of its control over exhibition. 87It had succeeded in amending clauses in the Production Code on suicide (1951),miscegenation, liquor and profanity (1954) and in 1952 films were granted the protectionof the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. 88 In 1955 it began itsrapprochement with television when it started to make programmes for the medium andsold the first batch of films to a television company. 89America in the mid-1950s was ready to explode. The Brown judgement had threatened theSouth's racial arrangements. Civil rights leaders were pressing for more change but, apartfrom the cautious NAACP, did not have effective political leadership to co-ordinate action.Southern racists, who killed the young African American, Emmett Till, were cleared of hismurder and the University of Alabama expelled Autherine Lucey, the first AfricanAmerican to be enrolled there. Hollywood now returned to the delicate issue of slaverywith the release of Seven Angry Men (1955), which retold John Brown's attempt to free theslaves in the late 1850s. While this again depicted him, as in The Santa Fe Trail, as afanatical revolutionary, this time the opposition was shown to be equally violent in theirsupport of slavery. With only six years to go before the centennial of the Civil War a newcivil war seemed just over the horizon. In December 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give upher seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Civil Rights Movement, unknowinglyat the time, had found a cause and a leader in Martin Luther King, Jr.79