Average Citizens Who Made a Difference

Many of us think that a person has to be powerful or rich to have an impact on the world but I say that those things are not a requirement.  Here are ten people that made a difference in our society.

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Rosa Parks was a seamstress who, in 1955 was wrongfully arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man.  The event caught the eye of the American media and brought a new awareness of the tremendous racism that faced black Americans.  Her arrest sparked the boycott that began the civil rights movement.

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Radio commentator John Henry Faulk (shown above with Bob Dylan at a American Civil Liberties banquet) was accused in 1967 of leftist political leanings by a right wing hate group called Aware.  Six years later, Faulk successfully sued the company out of business and began the erosion of the infamous Hollywood Blacklist.

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Frank Will was the security guard at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. who noticed a piece of masking tape holding an office door open on June 17, 1972.  He called the police.  President Richard M. Nixon was impeached as a result of the investigation which discovered illegal phone tapping activity that the President had ordered be conducted on his political rivals.  As a result, government officials have become accountable for their ethical, legal, and moral conduct as well as put an end to an era where Washington press agents routinely ignored the questionable conduct of our nations leaders.

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Des Moines, Iowa teenager MaryBeth Tinker was suspended  from school in 1965 for wearing a black armband in class at her junior high school.  MaryBeth, her brother John and his friend Christopher wore the armbands as a protest against the war in Vietnam.  The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) lawsuit that followed gave all students the rights of free speech, directly enabling the antiwar protest of the Vietnam era.

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Tennessee school teacher John T. Scopes was arrested in 1925 for teaching evolution in a state that permitted teaching only the biblical version of Genesis.  The resulting trial argued by Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, gave a voice not only to the conflict between religion and science but to the separation of church and state as well.  On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the law but overturned John Scopes conviction.  This case is still being referred to today and continues to create lively debate.

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In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Allan Bakke, a white man, had been unfairly denied admission to a medical school.  That school had at the same time accepted black applicant with weaker academic credentials.  This decision established “reverse discrimination.  It also specified that race could not be a determining factor in admission to any school.

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N.G. Slater was a New York manufacturer of pin-on buttons.  Around 1969, he started making and marketing “smile” buttons.  The design was not his own and was originally used by an insurance company to remind their employees to smile more when helping customers.  It soon turned up in the artwork of underground comic artist R. (Robert) Crumb, who intended it as a joke.  However, it became a pop culture icon.

Other articles by Bren Parks include:

• Greatest Fashion Atrocities Through the Ages
• The Good Old Days, or Were They?
• Slogans, Quotes and Political Statements Gone Awry
• Press Cover Ups: The White House
• Shady Politics and Election Fixes in History