Helen Keller’s Amazing Journey
January 4, 2010 by admin
Filed under Handicap Success
Success Through Faith and Not By Sight
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first deaf blind person to graduate from college. A woman from the small farm town of Tuscumbia, Alabama who taught the world to respect people who are blind and deaf.
Her childhood
Helen Keller was less than two years old when she came down with a fever. It struck dramatically and left her unconscious. The fever went just as suddenly. But she was blinded and, very soon after, deaf. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time her only communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who was able to create a sign language with her; by age seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family.
Formal education
Starting in May 1888 Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, companion to Helen Keller, moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and Horace Mann School for the Deaf. Helen moved on to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in 1896 and in the Autumn of 1900 entered Radcliffe College, becoming the first deafblind person to have ever enrolled at an institution of higher learning.
Political activities
Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate 
for people with disabilities amid numerous other causes. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, a Wilson opposer, a radical socialist, and a birth control supporter. In 1915, Helen Keller and George Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller and Sullivan traveled to over 39 countries, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every US President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, and Mark Twain.
Helen tours the World
In 1918 Helen and Anne moved to Forest Hills in New York. Helen used their new home as a base for her extensive fundraising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind. She not only collected money, but also campaigned tirelessly to alleviate the living and working conditions of blind people, who at that time were usually badly educated and living in asylums. Her endeavors were a major factor in changing these conditions. However that same year Anne fell ill again and this was followed in 1922 by a severe bout of bronchitis which left her unable to speak above a whisper and thus unable to work with Helen on stage anymore. At this point Polly Thomson, who had started working for Helen and Anne in 1914 as a secretary, took on the role of explaining Helen to the theatre going public. They also spent a lot of time touring the world raising money for blind people.
After World War II, Helen spent years travelling the world fundraising for the American Foundation for the Overseas Blind. She visited Japan, Australia, South America, Europe and Africa.
In 1953 a documentary film “The Unconquered” was made about Helen’s life, this was to win an Academy Award as the best feature length documentary .It was at the same time that Helen began work again on her book “Teacher”, some seven years after the original had been destroyed. The book was finally published in 1955.
Helen retires from public life
In October 1961 Helen suffered the first of a series of strokes, and her public life was to draw to a close.
Her last years were not however without excitement, and in 1964 Helen was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, by President Lyndon Johnson. A year later she was elected to the Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair.
On June 1, 1968, at Arcan Ridge, Helen Keller died peacefully in her sleep. Helen was cremated in Bridgeport, Connecticut and a funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington DC where the urn containing her ashes would later be deposited next to those of Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.
“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.”
