Helen Keller: Deaf and Blind, Harvard Educated, Author and Activist

Helen Keller as a Child

Born in 1880 Tuscumbia Alabama, Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing at 19 months of age, most likely from meningitis, rubella or scarlet fever, leaving the young girl in a state of “at sea in a dense fog,” she would later recall in her autobiography. Desperate to help their stricken daughter, when Helen was six years of age, her parents hired 20-year-old Anne Sullivan—a recent graduate from the Perkins School for the Blind, and a woman who had experienced blindness herself as a child, until her condition was corrected by surgery.

To teach Helen the manual alphabet, Anne began spelling words in sign language on Helen’s open palm, and while the process was slow and frustrating at first, Helen’s ah-ha moment happened when Anne held the child’s hand beneath a stream of water, at the same time spelling water in sign language on Helen’s palm. Once her epiphany was made, Helen became a voracious learner and an excellent writer, at the same time learning to understand other people’s speech by employing a tactile lipreading technique known as the Tadoma Method.

Helen Graduates From Harvard

With Anne’s constant and lifelong companionship, Helen graduated from Harvard’s Radcliffe College—the first deaf-blind person to ever achieve a college degree—thanks to her insatiable thirst for knowledge, and the financial assistance of Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers and Mark Twain, who once wrote that:

“Helen is a miracle, and Miss Sullivan is the miracle-worker.”

Mark Twain

Helen Keller The Author and Activist

Authoring fourteen books over the course of her lifetime, when Helen’s 1902 autobiography was published, entitled The Story of My Life, playwright William Gibson borrowed Twain’s language for his Tony Award-winning 1959 play The Miracle Worker, which was later made into an Oscar-winning film in 1962.

Helen worked for the American Foundation for the Blind from 1924 until her death in 1968, touring and speaking throughout the United States and 35 foreign countries, advocating for those with disabilities. An original member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Helen joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909, at the same time campaigning tirelessly for women’s suffrage, labor rights and world peace, and when her book entitled How I Became a Socialist was burned by Hitler Youth in 1933, she penned an open letter to the Student Body of Germany condemning censorship and prejudice, making the life and works of Helen Keller, a shining light amidst a world of silent darkness.