Helen Keller -- labor, socialist and disability rights activist

Friday's Labor Folklore

Helen Keller

Labor, socialist and disability rights activist

Helen Keller (1880-1968) is perhaps the most recognized symbol of the disability community -- a powerful representative of a person overcoming almost insurmountable obstacles. Yet the now-mythic story of Keller as a deaf-blind child learning to communicate with her teacher has overshadowed the complex story of the mature advocate, activist, lecturer and author who honed her intellect and leveraged her celebrity to side with the disadvantaged the world over -- especially in defense of the American working classes.

Born in Alabama to a wealthy family, she lost her sight and hearing as an infant as a result of illness.
In 1887, the teacher Anne Sullivan came to help with her education, leading to the breakthrough dramatized in the play and the 1962 motion picture "The Miracle Worker."
Educated at the Perkins School for the Blind outside Boston, in 1904 Keller was the first deaf-blind person to earn a college degree.
In 1903, at the age of 22, she published the first installment of her autobiography "The Story of My Life," which became a bestseller and brought her worldwide fame.
In 1908 Keller joined the American Socialist Party (SP) and the Women's Suffrage movement.
In 1912, she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), noting in her lectures that many forms of blindness prevalent in the U.S. were traceable to industrial working conditions.
In 1912 she supported Margaret Sanger in her fight for women's legal access to birth control.
Keller participated in a 1914 peace-for-Europe demonstration with the Women's Peace Party, afterward giving a speech at Carnegie Hall. She campaigned against America's entry into the First World War.
During her life, she counted among her friends and acquaintances prominent American activists and radicals such as John Reed, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Langston Hughes, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Anna Strunsky, William "Big Bill" Haywood, and W.E.B. Du Bois
IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn credited Keller as playing an important role in the development of her own socialist politics.

Keller was an outspoken supporter of the NAACP.
In 1920, she was a founder and board member of the ACLU and publicly defended in letters and essays many Americans accused of treason and sedition.
Helen Keller's books were banned and burned by the Nazis. In 1938, she wrote a letter to the New York Times criticizing the American press for ignoring the plight of people with disabilities in Germany. At the time, persons with disabilities (labeled "defectives") were explicitly prohibited from immigrating to most Western nations, including the U.S.
The FBI maintained a file on Keller. Undaunted, at the height of the Cold War in 1950s, Keller publicly declared that she would never renounce her socialist politics.

President Eisenhower and Helen Keller

Journalists, interviewers and editors frequently redacted, edited or outright censored her comments to fit the sensibilities of the times. Keller herself noted the contradiction in the way her life and ideas were treated -- how the iconic story of the disabled child cast a long shadow over her own mature ideas and activism. In the second installment of her autobiography in 1929, she reflected:

"So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind they

compliment me extravagantly . . . but when it comes to discussion of a burning social or political issue, especially if I happen to be, as I so often am, on the unpopular side, the tone changes completely. They are grieved because they imagine I am in the hands of unscrupulous persons who take advantage of my afflictions to make me a mouthpiece for their own ideas.

I like frank debate, and I do not object to harsh criticism so long as I am treated like a human being with a mind of her own."

"There is but one kind of preparedness -- that children should be rightly educated. Women know life in terms of suffering even as the best of men cannot understand it, and it is to their interest and duty to teach children to refuse to fight at the command of their rulers."

After a debilitating series of strokes in the early 1960s, Keller retreated from public view. She died in 1968, just a few weeks before her 88th birthday. Her remains were interred in the Crypt of the National Cathedral, in Washington DC, alongside those of her beloved companion Anne Sullivan.

-- by David Alberto Fernández. David is a Cuban American poet and foreign language librarian at the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Washington, DC. In 2025 he was appointed Takoma Park Poet Laureate by the City Council of Takoma Park, Maryland.

Helen Keller noticed the close relationship between

disability and poverty, and blamed capitalism

and poor industrial conditions for both.

-- "Helen Keller's Forgotten Radicalism" by Sascha Cohen,

Time [online], 6/26/2015

Workin' on a World

(3.45 min. with lyrics)

Iris DeMent

Friday's Labor Folklore

Saul Schniderman, editor