Helen Keller's Family
Helen Adams Keller was born a healthy child in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880.
On her father's side she was descended from Colonel Alexander
Spottswood, a colonial governor of Virginia, and on her mother's side,
she was related to a number of prominent New England families. Helen's
father, Arthur Keller, was a captain in the Confederate army. The family
lost most of its wealth during the Civil War and lived modestly.
After the war, Captain Keller edited a local newspaper, the North Alabamian, and in 1885, under the Cleveland administration, he was appointed Marshal of North Alabama.
When Helen Keller Met Anne Sullivan
At the age of 19 months, Helen became deaf and blind as a result of an
unknown illness, perhaps rubella or scarlet fever. As Helen grew from
infancy into childhood, she became wild and unruly.
As she so often remarked as an adult, her life changed on March 3, 1887.
On that day, Anne Mansfield Sullivan came to Tuscumbia to be her
teacher.
Anne was a 20-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind.
Compared with Helen, Anne couldn't have had a more different childhood
and upbringing. The daughter of poor Irish immigrants, she entered
Perkins at 14 years of age after four horrific years as a ward of the
state at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts.
She was just 14 years older than her pupil Helen, and she too suffered
from serious vision problems. Anne underwent many botched operations at a
young age before her sight was partially restored.
Anne's success with Helen remains an extraordinary and remarkable story and is best known to people because of the film The Miracle Worker.
The film correctly depicted Helen as an unruly, spoiled—but very
bright—child who tyrannized the household with her temper tantrums.
Anne believed that the key to reaching Helen was to teach her obedience
and love. She saw the need to discipline, but not crush, the spirit of
her young charge. As a result, within a week of her arrival, she had
gained permission to remove Helen from the main house and live alone
with her in the nearby cottage. They remained there for two weeks.
Anne began her task of teaching Helen by manually signing into the
child's hand. Anne had brought a doll that the children at Perkins had
made for her to take to Helen. By spelling "d-o-l-l" into the child's
hand, she hoped to teach her to connect objects with letters.
Helen quickly learned to form the letters correctly and in the correct
order, but did not know she was spelling a word, or even that words
existed. In the days that followed, she learned to spell a great many
more words in this uncomprehending way.
Helen Keller's First Words
On April 5, 1887, less than a month after her arrival in Tuscumbia, Anne
sought to resolve the confusion her pupil was having between the nouns
"mug" and "milk," which Helen confused with the verb "drink."
Anne took Helen to the water pump outside and put Helen's hand under
the spout. As the cool water gushed over one hand, she spelled into the
other hand the word "w-a-t-e-r" first slowly, then rapidly. Suddenly,
the signals had meaning in Helen's mind. She knew that "water" meant the
wonderful cool substance flowing over her hand.
Quickly, she stopped and touched the earth and demanded its letter name and by nightfall she had learned 30 words.
Helen quickly proceeded to master the alphabet, both manual and in
raised print for blind readers, and gained facility in reading and
writing.
In 1890, when she was just 10, she expressed a desire to learn to speak;
Anne took Helen to see Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the
Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston. Fuller gave Helen 11 lessons, after
which Anne taught Helen.
Throughout her life, however, Helen remained dissatisfied with her spoken voice, which was hard to understand.
Helen's extraordinary abilities and her teacher's unique skills were
noticed by Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain, two giants of American
culture. Twain declared, "The two most interesting characters of the
19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller."
The closeness of Helen and Anne's relationship led to accusations
that Helen's ideas were not her own. Famously, at the age of 11, Helen
was accused of plagiarism. Both Bell and Twain, who were friends and
supporters of Helen and Anne, flew to the defense of both pupil and
teacher and mocked their detractors.
Helen Keller's Education and Literary Career
From a very young age, Helen was determined to go to college. In 1898,
she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies to prepare for
Radcliffe College. She entered Radcliffe in the fall of 1900 and
received a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in 1904, the first
deaf-blind person to do so.
The achievement was as much Anne's as it was Helen's. Anne's eyes
suffered immensely from reading everything that she then signed into her
pupil's hand. Anne continued to labor by her pupil's side until her
death in 1936, at which time Polly Thomson took over the task. Polly had
joined Helen and Anne in 1914 as a secretary.
While still a student at Radcliffe, Helen began a writing career that
was to continue throughout her life. In 1903, her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published. This had appeared in serial form the previous year in Ladies' Home Journal magazine.
Her autobiography has been translated into 50 languages and remains in print to this day. Helen's other published works include Optimism, an essay; The
World I Live In; The Song of the Stone Wall; Out of the Dark; My
Religion; Midstream—My Later Life; Peace at Eventide; Helen Keller in
Scotland; Helen Keller's Journal; Let Us Have Faith; Teacher, Anne
Sullivan Macy; and The Open Door. In addition, she was a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers.
The Helen Keller Archives contain over 475 speeches and essays that
she wrote on topics such as faith, blindness prevention, birth control,
the rise of fascism in Europe, and atomic energy. Helen used a braille
typewriter to prepare her manuscripts and then copied them on a regular
typewriter.
Helen Keller's Political and Social Activism
Helen saw herself as a writer first—her passport listed her profession
as "author." It was through the medium of the typewritten word that
Helen communicated with Americans and ultimately with thousands across
the globe.
From an early age, she championed the rights of the underdog and used
her skills as a writer to speak truth to power. A pacifist, she
protested U.S. involvement in World War I. A committed socialist, she
took up the cause of workers' rights. She was also a tireless advocate
for women's suffrage and an early member of the American Civil Liberties
Union.
Helen's ideals found their purest, most lasting expression in her work
for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). Helen joined AFB in
1921 and worked for the organization for over 40 years.
The foundation provided her with a global platform to advocate for
the needs of people with vision loss and she wasted no opportunity. As a
result of her travels across the United States, state commissions for
the blind were created, rehabilitation centers were built, and education
was made accessible to those with vision loss.
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 during World War
II.
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. Her active participation in this area began as early
as 1915, when the Permanent Blind War Relief Fund, later called the
American Braille Press, was founded. She was a member of its first board
of directors.
In 1946, when the American Braille Press became the American Foundation
for Overseas Blind (now Helen Keller International), Helen was appointed
counselor on international relations. It was then that she began her
globe-circling tours on behalf of those with vision loss.
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.
Helen Keller's Worldwide Celebrity
Helen was famous from the age of 8 until her death in 1968. Her wide
range of political, cultural, and intellectual interests and activities
ensured that she knew people in all spheres of life.
She counted leading personalities of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries among her friends and acquaintances. These included
Eleanor Roosevelt, Will Rogers, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Eugene
Debs, Charlie Chaplin, John F. Kennedy, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Katharine Cornell, and Jo
Davidson to name but a few.
She was honored around the globe and garnered many awards. She
received honorary doctoral degrees from Temple and Harvard Universities
in the United States; Glasgow and Berlin Universities in Europe; Delhi
University in India; and Witwatersrand University in South Africa. She
also received an honorary Academy Award in 1955 as the inspiration for
the documentary about her life, Helen Keller in Her Story.
Helen Keller's Later Life
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. (The others were
Tuscumbia, Alabama; Wrentham, Massachusetts; and Forest Hills, New
York).
She made her last major public appearance in 1961 at a Washington,
D.C., Lions Clubs International Foundation meeting. At that meeting, she
received the Lions Humanitarian Award for her lifetime of service to
humanity and for providing the inspiration for the adoption by Lions
Clubs International Foundation of their sight conservation and aid to
blind programs.
During that visit to Washington, she also called on President John F.
Kennedy at the White House. President Kennedy was just one in a long
line of presidents Helen had met. In her lifetime, she had met all of
the presidents since Grover Cleveland.
Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, at Arcan Ridge, a few weeks short of
her 88th birthday. Her ashes were placed next to her companions, Anne
Sullivan Macy and Polly Thomson, in St. Joseph's Chapel of Washington
Cathedral.
Senator Lister Hill of Alabama gave a eulogy during the 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."
Source :
http://www.afb.org/info/about-us/helen-keller/biography-and-chronology/biography/1235
