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Kate Jackson
If you ’ ve ever climbed on a set of monkey bars or gone for a run in one of Tampa ’ s dozens of parks , you might take a minute from your cross fit training to thank Kate Jackson .
Jackson founded and led the all-female Tampa Civic Association in 1910 . Even lacking the vote , the TCA women advanced their causes through determination and political finesse . They fought for and succeeded in the creation of the city ’ s first recreation department , the city ’ s first library , and Tampa ’ s first water sewage system .
An astute businesswoman , philanthropist , and environmentalist , Jackson was instrumental in establishing the Academy of the Holy Names , in starting and leading the nation ’ s second Girl Scouts of America troop , and in advocating and contributing to the purchase and preservation of the initial acreage for what became Everglades National Park .
She penned essays and the title of one , “ If I Can , I Will ,” epitomizes her legacy : She Could and She Did . Or , in the words of former Tampa Mayor D . B . MacKay : “… she would not be denied .”
Robert Saunders Jr .
In 1952 , Robert Saunders Jr . got a job offer most people would never have accepted . The Tampa native and Bethune Cookman graduate put law school on hold and returned to his hometown as the Florida field
director for the NAACP after the state ' s first field director was killed by the Ku Klux Klan .
Assuming a difficult and dangerous leadership role , Saunders guided the state through the civil rights era and landmark legal decisions on voting rights , school desegregation , the integration of public beaches , facilities and housing , and equal pay for Black teachers .
After a decade-long stint at the U . S . Office of Equal Opportunity , he returned to Tampa in 1976 and directed the Office of Equal Opportunity for the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners until his retirement in 1988 . From that time until his death in 2003 , he remained an active and outspoken community leader , and was named " Twenty-five Who Mattered " over the last 100 years in Florida by the Tampa Bay Times .
Charlie Wall
Unlike the others on this list , Charlie Wall was famous for all the wrong reasons . From the 1880s through the 1930s , Wall was the unquestioned king of Tampa ’ s underworld . Running gambling houses , prostitution rings and worse , the former Tampa blue blood preferred to run with a rougher crowd , fighting Cuban and Italian criminal groups for control of Tampa ’ s lucrative – and illegal – bolita racket . It all caught up to him one night in 1955 , when police found him dead in his home , his throat slit ear-to-ear in what looked to investigators like an inside job . Wall ’ s killer was never found , and the crime remains one of Tampa ’ s greatest unsolved mysteries .
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