* 1954 – Jon Krakauer, American author

* 1954 – Pat Travers, Canadian singer and musician

* 1954 – Thom Bray, American actor

* 1954 – Jane Campion, New Zealand director

* 1954 – Frank-Michael Marczewski, German footballer

* 1954 – John Lloyd, English tennis player

* 1954 – Derek Warwick, English race car driver

* 1954 – Paul Steigerwald, American sportscaster

* 1954 – Ray Jennings, South African cricketer and coach

* 1954 – Radio Pakistan broadcasts the " Qaumī Tarāna ", the national anthem of Pakistan for the first time.

* 1954 – Nico Assumpção, Brazilian bass player ( d. 2001 )

In 1954 – 55, Australia's batsmen had no answer to the pace of Frank Tyson and Statham.

* 1954 – James Charles Kopp, American murderer of Barnett Slepian

* 1954 – Sammy McIlroy, Irish footballer and manager

* 1993 – Alan Kulwicki, American race car driver ( b. 1954 )

After 1890 came philosopher Josiah Royce ( 1855 – 1916 ), botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey ( 1858 – 1954 ), the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s, novelist John Steinbeck ( 1902 – 1968 ), historian A. Whitney Griswold ( 1906 – 1963 ), environmentalist Aldo Leopold ( 1887 – 1948 ), Ralph Borsodi ( 1886 – 1977 ), and present-day authors Wendell Berry ( b. 1934 ), Gene Logsdon ( b. 1932 ), Paul Thompson, and Allan C. Carlson ( b. 1949 ).

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( ; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954 ), was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist.

* 1954 – James Gleick, American author, journalist, and biographer

* 1954 – Benno Möhlmann, German footballer

* 1954 – Gary Peters, English footballer

He served as chairman of the Cartoonists ' Committee in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's People-to-People program in 1954 ( although Capp had actually supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956 ), which was organized to promote Savings bonds for the U. S. Treasury.

Those dates were chosen because in 1954 the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unlawful and 1968 is the year of Martin Luther King's assassination.

In response to attention from the government and from the media, the U. S. comic book industry set up the Comics Code Authority in 1954 and drafted the " Comics Code " in the same year.

By the time it closed in 1954, twelve million immigrants had been processed by the U. S. Bureau of Immigration.

In 1956, after the 1954 closing of the U. S. immigration station, the then Mayor of Jersey City, Bernard J. Berry, commandeered a U. S. Coast Guard cutter and led a contingent of New Jersey officials on an expedition to claim the island.

In the U. S., a post-WW2 tendency toward questioning the establishment and societal norms and the early activism of the Civil Rights Movement was reflected in Hollywood films such as Blackboard Jungle ( 1955 ), On the Waterfront ( 1954 ), Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men ( 1957 ).

:* Philip V. Cardon ( U. S .): January 1954 – April 1956.

" On 10 February 1954 in Meherastana U. P., India, Meher Baba publicly and explicitly declared his Avatarhood for the first time, spelling out on his alphabet board " Avatar Meher Baba Ki Jai.

The United States nautical mile was defined as 1853. 248 metres ( 6080. 20 U. S. feet, based on the definition of the foot in the Mendenhall Order of 1893 ): it was abandoned in favour of the international nautical mile in 1954.

* 1954 – Michael D. Brown, U. S. Federal Emergency Management Agency director

Along with Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy ( 1944 ), The Race Question influenced the 1954 U. S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in " Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ".

* 1954 – The U. S. Navy submarine is commissioned as the world's first nuclear reactor powered vessel.

The U. S. Virgin Islands are organized under the Revised Organic Act of 1954, and have since held five constitutional conventions.

** 96 U. S. Congressmen sign the Southern Manifesto, a protest against the 1954 Supreme Court ruling ( Brown v. Board of Education ) that desegregated public education.

* November 16 – U. S. doctor Sam Sheppard is acquitted in his second trial for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1954.

The incumbent U. S. Senator, Burnet R. Maybank, was unopposed for re-election in 1954, but he died in September of that year, two months before Election Day.

On May 17, 1954, the U. S. Supreme Court handed down its decision regarding the case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the plaintiffs charged that the education of black children in separate public schools from their white counterparts was unconstitutional.

On May 18, 1954 Greensboro became the first city in the South to publicly announce that it would abide by the U. S. Supreme Court ’ s Brown v. Board of Education ruling which declared racial segregation in the nation ’ s public schools unconstitutional.

* Topographic maps of China Series L500, U. S. Army Map Service, 1954 -

* Political Control in the Soviet Army: A Study on Reports by Former Soviet Officers, New York, Research Program on the U. S. S. R ( 1954 )

The U. S. Earth satellite program began in 1954 as a joint U. S. Army and U. S. Navy proposal, called Project Orbiter, to put a scientific satellite into orbit during the International Geophysical Year.