Dear AccessWorld Readers,
AFB is now 100 years old! On September 23rd, 1921, AFB was founded by a group of educators and rehabilitation professionals with the help of a man named M.C. Migel. At the time of its founding, AFB was built around the following core missions:
- provide a national clearinghouse for information about vision loss
- create a forum for blindness service professionals
- generate new directions for research
- represent the needs of people with vision loss in the creation of public policy
These days, the first two items are being spearheaded by other organizations like the American Printing House for the Blind and AER, but AFB has been involved in both policy and research for as long as I have been with the organization. In particular, we have stepped up our research considerably in the past several years and we have produced a good deal of valuable information in that time. If you are interested, you can find information on the research AFB has done here—it is quite fascinating!
Helen Keller began working at AFB in 1924 and would continue to do so until just before her death in 1968. She served as AFB's counselor on national and international relations, but, as you might imagine, she had a much greater impact on the development of rights for people with vision loss.
Helen transferred a massive collection of her personal possessions to AFB, along with other items such as newspaper articles that she collected during her lifetime. The collection itself is now housed with APH, but over the past several years we have produced a fully accessible digital museum that provides online access to the collection. The Helen Keller Digital Archive contains a wealth of information on Helen that you won't find anywhere else, and also provides valuable context for the attitudes and type of world people who were blind or visually impaired experienced in the first half of the 20th century. If you are interested in Helen or on this period in general, you will find the archive fascinating. I know I can easily get lost reading through letters and articles in the archive; the period around World War II and the years proceeding it can be particularly interesting. For example, in this letter from AFB's executive director to Helen in 1939 we learn that a bill regarding the Works Progress Administration (WPA) would have excluded people who were blind from taking part in the employment opportunities available through the administration. Thanks in part to the work of Helen Keller and AFB, this part of the bill was removed.
The archive also sheds light on Helen as a person, outside of the popular image that focuses on her deaf-blindness. For example, did you know that Helen was a socialist? She discusses her support of Russia in this letter. More chilling is a letter from a German man expressing his support for Hitler, written in response to what I believe was this letter. These letters were sent in 1934 and 1933 respectively, and give a picture of Helen's political positions as well as the type of response her often impassioned writing could prompt. The part of the respondent's letter explaining that he didn't believe Germany would attack any of its neighbors is particularly ironic in light of what happened 5 years later.
Most items in the archive, including those that are handwritten, have transcripts that are accessible to people with vision loss. Note that not all transcriptions have been reviewed by a human reader so may have errors, but it is possible to sort by complete transcription if you would like.
If you are interested in the life of Helen Keller, the evolution of rights for people who are blind or visually impaired, the blindness industry, or simply the history of the early to mid-20th century, I encourage you to take a look through the archive.
Sincerely,
Aaron Preece
AccessWorld Editor-in-Chief
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
