Helen Keller: Tuscumbia, Anne Sullivan, and a Political Life Nobody Taught

Helen Keller was born on June twenty-seventh, eighteen eighty, in a white clapboard farmhouse in Tuscumbia, Alabama. An illness at nineteen months left her deaf and blind and without language. She spent five years in a world with no words, no names for things, no way to tell another person what she needed or felt.

Anne Sullivan arrived from Boston on March third, eighteen eighty-seven. She was twenty years old, partially blind herself, and had studied at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Within weeks, she had broken through. The moment that both women described for the rest of their lives happened at a hand pump in the yard, where Sullivan spelled the word water into Keller's palm while water ran over it. Keller wrote decades later that the world suddenly had meaning, that she understood in that instant that everything had a name.

That story is the one everyone learned in school. What schools dropped was the second half of her biography.

Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe College in nineteen oh four, the first deaf-blind person to earn a college degree in the United States. She then joined the Socialist Party of America, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the women's suffrage movement. She opposed the United States entering the First World War. She supported eugenics, a position that was mainstream in American scientific discourse at the time, writing in nineteen fifteen that doctors should be allowed to deny life saving treatment to infants born with severe disabilities. She supported strikers and union organizers. She corresponded with labor activists around the world. The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained a file on her.

The house where she was born, called Ivy Green, still stands in Tuscumbia. The well pump is still there too.