1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [39]
Evans, Walker (1903–1975) On assignment for the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration [FSA]) beginning in 1935, Walker recorded in breathtaking detail the lives of people hit by the Great Depression. He produced intensely moving documents of pride and poverty, which convey as much about the human spirit as they do about the hardships of an era in America.
Evers, Medgar (1925–1963) Evers was an African-American businessman who became an NAACP leader in Mississippi, organizing voter-registration drives and other civil rights initiatives. On June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy delivered a broadcast on civil rights, Evers was gunned down in front of his Mississippi home. The murder made him a national figure, underscored Kennedy’s pronouncements, and focused national attention on civil rights and social justice. White segregationist Byron de La Beckwith was arrested and charged with the murder, but was freed in 1964 after two hung-jury trials. He was finally convicted in a third trial in 1994.
Exner, Judith Campbell (1934–1999) Born Judith Inmoor in New York and raised in Los Angeles, she married an actor (William Campbell), divorcing him in 1958 after she became romantically involved with Frank Sinatra, who introduced her to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960. She was having an affair with JFK when Sinatra next introduced her to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, with whom she also had an affair. Reputedly, Exner served as a liaison between Kennedy and Giancana, who is believed to have delivered critical votes in the 1960 presidential election. (Campbell’s name changed again when she married golfer Dan Exner in 1975.)
Fall, Albert (1861–1944) Fall became a symbol of national political corruption rampant in the administration of President Warren G. Harding. He was Harding’s secretary of interior from 1921 to 1923. In 1924, a Senate investigation revealed that Fall had taken a bribe to lease to private oil interests naval oil reserve lands in Wyoming’s Teapot Dome reserve and other reserves in California. The Teapot Dome Scandal rocked the nation, and Fall, convicted of bribery in 1929, served nine months of a one-year sentence.
Falwell, Jerry (1933–2007) Jerry Falwell was among the highest-profile figures of the American religious right, a Fundamentalist Baptist pastor and televangelist, whose moral and political pronouncements regularly generated much controversy. In 1971 he founded Liberty University and in 1979 the Moral Majority, a political action committee (PAC) that pursued an agenda of evangelical political lobbying.
Farmer, James (1920–1999). Farmer led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and introduced into the civil rights movement such tactics as nonviolent sit-ins (to force the integration of segregated restaurants and other places) and Freedom Rides (to force the integration of bus stations in the South). These tactics came to symbolize the civil rights movement during its height in the early 1960s and helped bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Farnsworth, Philo T. (1906–1971) Television was not a single invention, but the result of many innovators, foremost among them Vladimir Zworykin and Farnsworth. In 1927, Farnsworth transmitted an electromechanically scanned image—it was (perhaps hopefully) a dollar sign—composed of 60 horizontal scan lines. Based on this, he submitted the first of his 165 television and other electronic patents.
Faubus, Orval (1910?–1994) One of several segregationist southern governors during the 1950s, Faubus garnered national attention when, in 1957, he called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent African-American children from attending Little Rock Central High School pursuant to a federal desegregation order. Unwilling