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| Helen Keller |
Helen Keller was born on
June 27, 1880 in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama. In 1882 when she was 18 months old, she fell ill and
was struck blind, deaf and mute. Beginning in 1887, she made incredible progress
with her ability to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan.
Keller went on to college, graduating in 1904. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts
degree. In 1915 she founded, with George Kessler, the Helen Keller International (HKI)
organization, which is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In
1920, Keller helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She became a world-renowned author and
speaker. She was a radical in her time - a socialist, a pacifist, a women’s rights activist,
an early supporter of the NAACP, and an advocate for free availability of birth
control. She
was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in
1971.
Americans
learned in May 1933 that students in German universities planned to burn a long
list of books deemed “un-German.” Finding out her books were among those to be
burned, Helen Keller wrote this open letter to the students.
Transcript of letter, as it was published by the Associated Press on May 9, 1933:
"To the student body of Germany:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.
You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.
I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.
Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.
Helen Keller"
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