Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama . At nineteen months, she contracted a high fever and lost consciousness. When she awoke, she was both deaf and blind. No one understood at the time that her loss of sight and hearing was permanent.

Although she learned to perform simple household tasks such as folding laundry, Keller knew she was different from other children, and she often reacted to her situation with frustrated rage. Her parents realized their daughter needed professional help if she was to live in the real world. At the age of six, she accompanied her father to Washington, D.C. , where Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), the inventor of the telephone , examined her. Bell had developed a system of visible speech (sign language) to help the deaf communicate. He urged Keller's father to write to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts , to request a teacher.

Enter Anne Sullivan

The teacher assigned to Keller was Anne Sullivan (1866–1936), and she would remain Keller's teacher and mentor for many years and her friend for life. Sullivan worked with Keller in the privacy of a small guest house in the Keller family's backyard. It was important for Keller to be separated from her parents, who tended to indulge her and give in to her wishes in order to keep the peace.

Sullivan taught Keller sign language by signing words and names for things into the palm of Keller's hand. One day, the pair walked toward a well, where someone was drawing water. Sullivan spelled the word “water” into Keller's hand as she placed her other hand under the spout to feel the running water. It was at that moment that Keller realized everything had a name that could be spelled.

With that realization, the world opened up for Keller, and she became immediately curious about everything around her. Sullivan patiently continued to teach her, and soon Keller learned to express herself. After that came the ability to read Braille, a system of writing for the blind that uses characters made up of combinations of raised dots. At age ten, Keller attended the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, where she progressed rapidly and even learned to speak French and German.

Becomes a reformer

Keller continued her studies at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, where she studied history, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and literature. In 1904, she graduated with honors from Radcliffe College.

Keller overcame her physical limitations and came to understand that the next step was to battle the public's indifference to the welfare of the disabled. She spent the rest of her life promoting social reforms aimed at improving the education and treatment of the blind, deaf, and mute. Credited with prompting the organization of state commissions for the blind, Keller was key in the effort to end the practice of placing deaf and blind people in mental asylums, which was common in the early 1900s.

Keller did not stop there. She made it her mission to educate the public in the prevention of blindness in newborns by writing newspaper and magazine articles discussing the relationship between sexually transmitted disease and blindness in newborns. She traveled across the globe, lecturing about the need to improve the quality of life of disabled individuals. Her work won many awards and citations.

In 1903, Keller wrote and published the first volume of her autobiography and called it The Story of My Life. The second volume, Midstream: My Later Life, was published in 1929.

Still friends

Although Keller is the one who received most of the attention and accolades, Sullivan made it possible for Keller to achieve all that she did. Sullivan married John Macy, the editor of Keller's autobiography, but she did not let that interrupt her friendship. Instead, Sullivan continued to help her former student by manually spelling lectures and reading assignments into Keller's hand throughout school and college. When Keller toured on lecture, Sullivan accompanied her and gave her full support.

This mutually beneficial partnership ended with Sullivan's death in 1936. In 1957, a television play titled The Miracle Worker aired to high praise. It brought to the world the story of Sullivan and Keller at the well, where Keller first understood what language and communication were all about. Two years later, the play went to Broadway and was an immediate hit. The production ran for nearly two years. It was made into a movie in 1962 and earned Academy Awards (Oscars) for both actresses who played Keller and Sullivan.

Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and took that as a sign that it was time to retire from public life. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive, in 1964. She died four years later at the age of eighty-seven.