Headlines filled with turmoil in the Middle East, racial violence in the United States and arguments about Britain’s place in the world. Not from 2016, but 60 years ago. Towards the end of 1956 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr – the charismatic 27-year-old leader of the Montgomery bus boycott – delivered a rousing speech before an overflow crowd at the city’s Holt Street Baptist church. In a tumultuous year that had witnessed the Suez crisis, a popular uprising in Hungary and an upsurge in anti-colonial nationalism across Africa and the Middle East, King told the supporters of the boycott – whose own year-long struggle against segregated buses was on the brink of a historic triumph – that they were “living in one of the most momentous periods in human history”. “We stand today,” he declared, “between two worlds – the dying old, and the emerging new.”

With one eye fixed firmly on recent events, King explained that “the deep rumblings of discontent from Asia, the uprisings in Africa, the nationalistic longings of Egypt, the roaring cannons from Hungary and the racial tensions of America” represented the “necessary pains” that accompanied the dawning of a “new age”. But, King warned, those who sought to secure freedom and justice were up against the “guardians of [the] status quo” who were “always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive”.

This battle, between the champions of freedom and the guardians of the old order, lay at the very heart of 1956 – one of the most dramatic years of the 20th century.

Across the American South, and in South Africa, people of colour mobilised in their tens of thousands – organising mass marches, engaging in civil disobedience and making stirring appeals to democratic ideals – in an attempt to dismantle institutionalised white supremacy. Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin inspired hundreds of thousands to take to the streets of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and other cities to call for greater political, cultural and economic freedoms, attack the hated secret police and, ominously, to demand the withdrawal of the Red army from the “people’s democracies”. There was growing pressure for change, too, across the old European empires. 1956 saw colonial power surrendered in Africa, as France ceded independence to Tunisia and Morocco, while a half-century of British rule in Sudan came to an end. Agreement was also reached to end colonial rule in the Gold Coast and British Togoland (which merged to form Ghana). Elsewhere, the colonial masters proved harder to dislodge. Caught between the uncompromising demands of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) and the unwillingness of the country’s 1 million European residents to give up their privileged position – and share power with the Muslim majority – France’s new socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, dispatched 300,000 troops to crush the FLN rebels. Then Britain and France, acting in collusion with Israel, sent tens of thousands of troops to seize control of the Suez canal – recently nationalised by the Egyptian leader General Abdel Nasser – only to be forced into a humiliating climb-down by the US.

Rebellious spirit … Elvis Presley, January 1956. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Nor was the year’s rebellious spirit restricted to the political sphere. As Elvis Presley enjoyed his first No 1 with “Heartbreak Hotel”, teenagers rioted at rock concerts across North America, western Europe and Australia. In Britain, more than 80 local councils banned screenings of hit musical Rock Around the Clock amid widespread fears about teenage delinquency. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which debuted at London’s Royal Court theatre in May and helped to launch the so-called “angry young men” group of artists, novelists and playwrights, was widely viewed as a tirade against the British establishment. In America, the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, with its references to illicit drugs and “deviant” sexual practices, and its attack on modern capitalist society, helped usher in the 60s counterculture.

Faced with unprecedented challenges to their authority, those in power fought back, often ruthlessly, in a desperate bid to shore up their position. In the US, segregationists used economic coercion, legal machinations, intimidation and outright violence – including targeting the homes of prominent civil rights activists – in an attempt to hold the colour line. In South Africa, the year ended with virtually the entire leadership of the freedom struggle, including Helen Joseph, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu,, on trial for their lives, charged with treason. In Cyprus, where the British faced growing demands for enosis, or political union with Greece, London authorised collective punishment, and even torture, in its fight against the Eoka paramilitaries of General Georgios Grivas, in an effort to defend its strategic interests on the island, which included two RAF airfields. The story was even grimmer in Algeria, where a terrible spiral of violence, counterviolence and reprisal began that, before independence was finally achieved six years later, would leave hundreds of thousands dead, and the economy in ruins. In early November, Khrushchev, concerned that Moscow’s hold on its eastern European empire was in danger of unravelling, ordered 60,000 troops, thousands of tanks and two air force divisions into Hungary to crush a revolution that had, briefly, captured the imagination of much of the world. And when, on 2 December, Fidel Castro and his band of compañeros returned from exile aboard the Granma to free Cuba from the dictatorship of Fulgenico Batista, the government in Havana suspended the constitution, imposed press censorship, and engaged in abduction, torture and murder. Two alleged terrorists were even strung up from trees along a major highway, just in time for Christmas, as a warning to other potential rebels.

Looking back at 1956, one is struck by how much the world has changed. Apartheid, European empire, the Soviet Union and even communism itself have all been consigned to history, while many of the concerns about rock’n’roll and youth culture now appear old-fashioned. But there is a disconcerting sense of familiarity too. The recent controversies in America over the flying of the Confederate flag, the killing of Michael Brown and other unarmed young black men at the hands of white police officers, and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, offer a powerful reminder that, while the formal segregation that blighted the American South in 1956 might have been swept away, racism continues to plague the “Land of the Free”, despite the election of Barack Obama. Meanwhile, as an expansionist Russia flexes its muscles, causing jitters in Warsaw, Riga and other eastern European capitals, North Africa and the Middle East are – as they were 60 years ago – a hotbed of instability and violence, pent-up popular frustrations and western intrigue.

During 1956, people across the globe spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, risked arrest and took up arms to demand their freedom. Their exhilarating triumphs and shattering defeats not only transformed their world, they continue to shape ours today.

• 1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall is published by Faber. He will be talking at Waterstones in Leeds on 13 January.