Helen Adams Keller deafblind American author lecturer, socialist and pacifist was born a healthy child in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880. to a Confederate veteran ,a plantation owner who had previously enslaved people of African descent. Keller was raised on the farm during the violently racist post-Reconstruction era when Southern plantation owners and Northern capitalists were striking deals for de facto re-enslavement of recently freed Black people.
At just 19 months old she contracted an unknown illness perhaps rubella or scarlet fever, that left her deaf and blind which she later described as living “at sea in a dense fog”. She started to develop her own signs for communicating with her family and she identified people by the vibration of their footsteps.
She could communicate with her family with some rudimentary signs, but was difficult to control as she grew older.As Helen grew from infancy into childhood, she became wild and unruly. She was lucky to have been born into a family of means, otherwise she would have been sentenced to an asylum.
Her parents sought the advice of Alexander Graham Bell, who recommended they contact the Perkins School for the Blind in South Boston.The Perkins School arranged for a 20-year-old instructor Anne Mansfield Sullivan to tutor Helen at home.
Helen had no understanding of words or the fact that objects even had names until she started working with her teacher, Anne who began to spell words into Helen’s hands and slowly, she started to associate objects with words. Helen was determined to communicate as conventionally as possible and incredibly, she learned to speak. She listened to others talk by placing her hands on their lips and throat to identify the movements.
Helen went on to learn to read and write and communicate in several languages and educate others despite the odds. She was also the first blind person to earn a Bachelors degree.
Anne Sullivan was nearly blind herself, but she was not so lucky as Helen Keller. Her parents, working-class Irish immigrants, sent her and her younger brother to an institution. There, disabled children were abused by staff and mentally ill adults. Her brother, like 20 percent of the inmates, did not survive childhood.
For 49 years Anne Sullivan lived with Helen Keller, from 1888 when she began to attend the Perkins School in Boston, through two decades in Wrentham, Mass. Then they lived together another two decades in Forest Hills, N.Y.
In 1905, Anne married John Macy, a magnetic Harvard instructor who like her was also a Socialist, and the three lived together in a home Anne and Helen bought in WrenthamDespite her background Keller as an adult she became a staunch anti-racist, an outspoken supporter of the NAACP https://naacp.org/ that she had helped found , and wrote for its magazine, “The Crisis.” She demonstrated through the 1950s, into her elder years, in anti-segregation protests and rallies.Her growth as a thinker and activist was no miracle. It was rooted in her access to the extensive political library of Annie Sullivan’s socialist spouse, John Macy. By 1908, after her graduation from college, Keller was reading Marx, Engels, socialist publications and Marxist economics, often in German Braille.
In 1909 Keller joined the American Socialist Party and campaigned for its candidates, including Eugene Debs, the SP leader who ran for U.S. president from his prison cell in 1920.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/10/eugene-v-debs-5-11-1855-2010-26-working.html She supported striking workers, including those murdered in 1914 in the Colorado Ludlow Massacre by hired mercenaries, and called owner John D. Rockefeller a “monster of capitalism.” She defined herself as a “militant suffragist,” campaigning for women’s right to vote because she believed this was linked to the struggle for socialism.
Throughout her life, Keller continued to be a dedicated socialist, saying once "How did I become a Socialist? By reading." Over time she would shift her focus to the union based Industrial Workers of the World otherwise known as the Wobblies which interestingly enough was founded on this day June 27th 1905 https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/11/an-injury-to-one-is-injury-to-all.html after becoming dissatisfied with the SP’s electoral tactics.
Here's a link to her essay Why I became IWW. https://libcom.org/article/helen-keller-why-i-became-iww
She celebrated the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, named Vladimir Lenin one of the three greatest men of her era and regularly wrote articles for Communist Party newspapers and journals..She travelled the world giving speeches and lectures about women’s rights, war, social politics and campaigned for peace..
With the assistance of Annie, Keller lectured nationwide on the issues of the day. In Terre Haute Indiana, for example, she expressed her opposition to prohibition, saying that poverty was the cause of drinking rather than the reverse. While speaking in Los Angeles, she said that being a member of the working poor was worse than being blind. In Boston, she rode in a suffrage parade.She kept a large red flag in her office and refused to cross a picket line to see the premiere of a movie about herself. She advocated strikes and window smashing and above all hated child labor.
Keller identified her Marxist analysis and her socialism as deeply interconnected with her disability activism. As she studied economics, she visited factories and felt the very vibrations of the brutal industrial conditions that resulted in worker injuries. She concluded that the main causes of disability in the U.S. were industrial and workplace accidents and sickness from owners placing profits above worker safety.
In her writing Keller indicted capitalism for causing most disabilities and for amplifying the misery of disabled people through increased poverty and isolation she discovered the poor had a greater chance of going blind than the rich, She connected the abuses suffered by blind people to the oppression of workers and women.. Her 1913 “Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision” articulated this analysis. Other political writings included “Social Causes of Blindness” (1911) and “The Unemployed” (1911).
She became known as an advocate for people with disabilities and in 1915 she co-founded Helen Keller International, an organisation devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition.In 1917, Helen moved to Forest Hills, N.Y., with Annie and John Macy. There she worked on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, .Helen Keller’s work made a huge difference to the field of sight and hearing loss.
She was celebrated as a miracle, but her intelligent and articulate views and opinions were denounced as misguided thinking that came as the result of her afflictions. Contemporary critics lambasted Keller for her socialism. In a 1924 letter to social reformer U.S. Sen. Robert La Folette, she replied: “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics — that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world — that is a different matter!”
Keller was highly adept at connecting the dots between the issues, understanding the relationship of war and militarism to economic injustice and the abuse of women, workers, children, and others. She also understood the power of nonviolent struggle, noncooperation, and organized direct action.
In her famous 1916 “Strike Against War” speech, Keller said to the workers of the nation, “It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery and the dread-noughts and to shake off some of the burdens, too, such as limousines, steam yachts and country estates. You do not need to make a great noise about it. With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms.”
As the Great War raged on in Europe, Keller as a pacifist increasingly called for peace. Helen's optimism and courage were keenly felt at a personal level on many occasions, but perhaps never more so than during her visits to veteran's hospitals for soldiers returning from duty.
In 1919, Keller starred in Deliverance, a film based on her life, along with many of her friends and family. Continuing her entertainment foray, Keller even began a vaudeville act in 1920. Also in 1920, Keller and other contemporary visionaries, including Jane Addams and Roger Baldwin, founded the American Civil Liberties Union.https://www.aclu.org/ Over the next few years, Keller continued her advocacy work, donating to strikers at Christmastime in 1921 and meeting with the President on behalf of the blind in 1926.
Besides being a trailblazer Helen Keller was an accomplished author whose book titles illustrate her fierce determination to overcome challenges: "Optimism," "Out of the Dark," "Let Us have faith" and " The Open Door" among them.
Annie Sullivan died in 1936, and in 1939 Helen Keller moved to Easton, Conn. From Easton she traveled the world. She raised money for the American Foundation for the Blind and continued to campaign for peace. Helen was very proud of her assistance in the formation in 1946 of a special service for deaf-blind persons. Her message of faith and strength through adversity resonated with those returning from war injured and maimed.
Helen Keller was as interested in the welfare of blind persons in other countries as she was for those in her own country; conditions in poor and war-ravaged nations were of particular concern. Helen's ability to empathize with the individual citizen in need as well as her ability to work with world leaders to shape global policy on vision loss made her a supremely effective ambassador for disabled persons worldwide.
During seven trips between 1946 and 1957, she visited 35 countries on five continents. She met with world leaders such as Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Golda Meir.
In 1948, she was sent to Japan as America's first Goodwill Ambassador by General Douglas MacArthur. Her visit was a huge success; up to two million Japanese came out to see her and her appearance drew considerable attention to the plight of Japan's blind and disabled population.
In 1955, when she was 75 years old, she embarked on one of her longest and most grueling journeys: a 40,000-mile, five-month-long tour through Asia.
Wherever she traveled, she brought encouragement to millions of blind people, and many of the efforts to improve conditions for those with vision loss outside the United States can be traced directly to her visits.
In 1962, movie was made about her childhood success when working with Annie Sullivan, it was called "The Miracle Worker" and starred Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as Sullivan.
Toward the end of her life, a college student asked her what could be worse than losing her sight. Keller replied, “Yes, I could have lost my vision.”
At the height of McCarthy anti-communism, she affirmed in an interview that she was still a socialist. She hastened to add that she still owned a copy of Marx and Engels’ “Communist Manifesto” — in Braille.
Helen suffered a stroke in 1960, and from 1961 onwards, she lived quietly at Arcan Ridge, her home in Westport, Connecticut, one of the four main places she lived during her lifetime.
By the time Helen died peacefully on 1st June 1968 at her home in Westport. aged 87 the FBI had kept her under surveillance for most of her adult life.
How she applied her gifts to helping others reach their true potential is the stuff of legend.She willed her papers to the AFB, which has since cultivated an image that did not include Socialism, the Wobblies or window smashing. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published. has been translated into 50 languages and remains in print to this day.
Senator Lister Hill of Alabama gave a eulogy during her public memorial service. He said, "She will live on, one of the few, the immortal names not born to die. Her spirit will endure as long as man can read and stories can be told of the woman who showed the world there are no boundaries to courage and faith."
Let us honor Helen Keller life and legacy, her lifelong commitment to pacifism, ending war, equality,socialism women’s rights, labor and workers’ rights, suffrage,anti-racist, disability rights activism and more. Remember her for her remarkalle courage, and as a woman who understood the relationship between systems of injustice, and the challenges of being deaf, blind, or mute. Keller saw clearly that, while she lost sight and hearing through illness, many people were becoming deaf or blind through workplace injuries, poverty-related sicknesses, and lack of access to affordable healthcare. Still others had functional sight and hearing, but were willingly turning blind eyes and deaf ears to the causes of injustice. Her activism positively impacted the lives of many people Without her efforts, the world today may be very different for deafblind people.Her work continues.
