Helen Adams Keller

Helen Adams Keller died in Easton, Connecticut, on June 1, 1968. She was eighty-seven. Born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, she lost sight and hearing after an illness in infancy, and the world that remained was a dark, soundless house until Anne Sullivan spelled w-a-t-e-r into a child's palm at the yard pump. Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia, still keeps that pump. She learned to read and write, to speak, and to argue. Radcliffe gave her a degree. The rest of her life was not a miracle play. She wrote, traveled for the American Foundation for the Blind, stood with labor, and pressed for a franchise wider than the one that had applauded her as a girl. Presidents answered her letters. She answered back. She asked to be taken as a citizen with opinions, not as a symbol dusted for company. Tuscumbia is where the work began. Her ashes rest in the columbarium of Washington National Cathedral.