March 3, 1887
The first day that Anne Sullivan was introduced to Helen Keller.
As a young boy, one of my all-time favorite movie memories was watching the Academy Award-winning movie “The Miracle Worker” (based on Helen Keller's autobiography "The Story of My Life"...required reading when I was in junior high). The movie portrays the story of Anne Sullivan, a visually impaired 21-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, teaching a deaf and blind 7-year-old Keller about language. The scene of Helen holding her hands under a water pump, feeling the water and exclaiming, “Wa! Wa!” (when she understood for the first time the meaning of language) is forever etched into my memory.
Watch the "Water Scene"...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUV65sV8nu0
Helen Keller is an inspirational role model for all of us -- not just as a young girl who overcomes her disabilities...but as a woman who worked for justice for everyone. A 1904 Radcliffe College graduate and staunch pacifist...she wrote 14 books, met with 12 presidents, supported the NAACP, fought for union worker rights, joined the Socialist Party, helped start the ACLU and was considered radical enough that the FBI considered her a "person of interest" with a sizable file. She fought against war, disability-ism, sexism, racism, poverty, large corporations, and corrupt government officials.
Helen Keller (1880-1968)
“My sympathies are with all who struggle for justice.”
Helen had a difficult time being taken seriously when she protested and wrote against injustice...
"When I wrote about my disabilities people called me wonder woman,” Keller said, "but when I spoke out against racism and poverty, they claimed I was a poor, helpless creature.”
Unfortunately, the all-time classic book and movie have been virtually forgotten in the schools, where students once read it, and where it ought to be read! Sadly, the only thing most students can recall about Helen Keller today are the tasteless and insensitive Helen Keller "jokes" that fill the Internet. "The Story of My Life", published in 1903 was extremely popular well into the 1970s, when Gallup polls consistently showed Helen to be one of the most admired women in America. Mark Twain compared her to Shakespeare. Winston Churchill called her “the greatest woman of our age.”
Watch rare footage of Helen and Anne...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv1uLfF35Uw
"It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision."
-Helen Keller
Let us not allow Helen Keller and her vision for a better America fade from our memories...
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