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Helen Keller

Origin: Tuscumbia, Alabama
(June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968)

Heroic Values: Achievement, Courage, Faith, Perseverance, Tolerance, Vision, Wisdom

Background

Helen Keller was born a healthy child in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At nineteen months of age she came down with a serious illness (likely scarlet fever or meningitis) that ultimately left her deaf and blind. This had an immediate and devastating impact on Keller and her family. Reaching great levels of frustration, both with Keller's disability as well as her resulting bad behavior, they sought help from Alexander Graham Bell, a specialist in working with deaf children. Bell advised the family to hire a teacher for her, and they finally hired Anne Sullivan, a former student of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to be Keller's teacher, governess, and companion in 1887.

Sullivan immediately began teaching Keller to finger spell, and also worked with her using the Tadoma method (touching the lips and throat of others as they speak) and Braille. Keller's first major turning point in her education came when Sullivan took her outside to get water from the pump. While water was running over Keller's hands, Sullivan finger spelled “water” into her palm. This was the first time Keller made the connection between words and their meaning, and described it as “the mystery of language revealed.”

Keller later embarked on a long journey of formal education, finally attending Radcliffe College. She became the first deaf/blind person to ever earn a Bachelor's Degree in 1904.

After graduating from college, Keller became a worldwide advocate for the blind. In 1915 she founded the non profit organization Helen Keller International, in 1920 helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, and in 1924 joined the American Foundation for the Blind. With Sullivan first (until her death in 1936) and later with Polly Thompson and Winnie Corbally (her later companions) she traveled to thirty nine different countries and all across the United States campaigning to change living and working conditions of the blind and raise money to support the cause.

Keller's lifelong goal was to learn to speak, and while this goal was never fully achieved, she did become a speaker (with help of a translator), author, and political activist who campaigned not only for rights of the blind, but also for suffrage, rights of the working class, and the political socialist party.

In her lifetime Keller also wrote twelve books and several articles focusing on her life experiences as well as her thoughts on religion and socialism. She wrote her autobiography, "The Story of My Life" in 1903. In 1953 a documentary film “The Unconquered” was made about Keller’s life, winning an Academy Award for best feature length documentary.

Keller spent her later years at her home after suffering a series of strokes. During this time she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and she was elected to the Women's Hall of Fame in 1965 at the New York World's Fair. She died June 1, 1968.

Her legacy is well summed up in her own words:

“The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the best of himself so that he can win light through work.”

Submitted By: Karen Langdon

Sources

Wikipedia
The online encyclopedia

RNIB
Supporting blind and partially sighted people

Helen Keller Kids Museum Online
Site designed for kids