6 Times American History was Changed by Underdogs

Larry Doby
Larry Doby was born in 1923. He was an African American living at a time when having any other skin color than white meant that you had to live a substandard lifestyle. While slavery had been abolished some sixty years earlier, African Americans still earned much less than their fairer
skinned counterparts and it was still forty years before the Civil Rights Act would be passed.

Larry became a major league baseball player for the Newark Eagles in the 1940s about three months after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. A year into his career, he had won a World Series Championship and was also voted an American League All Star for seven seasons straight. He truly changed American History. Elizabeth

Jennings Graham
Jennings was an African American woman born in 1827. She was born a free woman and stayed that way. However, since she was black, she was not allowed to avail the same transportation as white people. In 1854, she boarded a carriage in New York City intended for white people and refused to get off. The buggy driver told her to get off and eventually physically threw her off the carriage.

As a result, her father took this case to court. They won the case and the result was the desegregation of the public transportation system in New York City in 1865. This was even before the passage of the 14th Amendment that outlawed slavery. Jennings was a pioneer in a struggle that was successfully taken to its end in American History by Rosa Parks in the 1960s.

Alexander Bain
Fax Machines are archaic technology in this age of WhatsApp messages and cloud transfers. However, there was a time that the fax machine was the fastest way you could get a message to someone.

Alexander Bain was a Scottish mechanic who invented the machine in the 1840s yet refused to patent it or even show it off to people. He never got it past the prototype phase and hence was never hailed as the inventor he should’ve been in his lifetime. Over the next twenty years, other inventors brought the fax machine to a commercial market in America.

Sybil Ludington
We’ve all heard of Paul Revere’s historic midnight run. However, he wasn’t the only one. There were a slew of others including Sybil Ludington. She was from upstate New York and only sixteen years of age when she set out to warn people that the British were coming. She was the daughter of an American Colonel who was asked to embark on a dangerous mission at night.

She rode about forty miles in the freezing rain after sunset, escaping cold and highway robbers along the way. She also contributed to making American history that night.

Frank Wills (PICTURED)
You’ve all heard of the Watergate Scandal that brought Nixon down, but you’ve probably never heard of the night watchman that alerted everyone to the crime. On June 17, 1972, Willis was making his rounds at the hotel as usual when he noticed that a piece of tape had been placed over the lock of a basement door.

He removed the tape but later found another piece placed on the same door later on. He called the police who conducted a thorough investigation of the Watergate Hotel and found five burglars, leading to the only resignation by a President in American History.

Joseph Warren
Dr. Joseph Warren was born in 1741 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a physician who also happened to write a series of resolves that served as blueprints for the first American Government. He sent Paul Revere on that famous ride and was a close associate of other founding fathers like John Hancock.

He died in the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 so he wasn’t around to see the signing of the declaration of independence. However, he did help make American History by serving as an architect for the very first government.