By GINA NEUNZIG
Staff Writer
Helen Keller was a woman with many disabilities and was still able to be a very respected person. She faced many obstacles during her lifetime that most people will never fully understand how troubling it was for her.
Helen was born June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia Alabama. At 19 months she became very ill with what is now known as Scarlet fever or Meningitis, something that is easily treated nowadays but at the time it was a severe sickness. Slowly her mom started to notice that Helen stopped responding to calls or things in front of her. That was when her mother realized that her daughter was deaf and blind. As she got older she realized that other people were having conversations and soon she became very frustrated that she wasn’t able to communicate with them. She was a very angry child and had many outbursts daily. At age 7 she met Anne Sulivin.
Sullivan taught Helen how to finger spell and that is when Helen said that she believed her life truly began. She was now able to communicate with other people and she became less angry. In 1900, Helen was the first person who was blind and deaf to graduate and earn a college degree. By 1904 she had written her first autobiography and later wrote many books about her life afterwards. Helen became an activist and gave speeches about socialism, suffrage, disability rights and even was a co-founder for ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
There were many people in her time that suffered from the same condition but she never let that stop her from achieving her goals. She was a leader and a strong woman who inspires people to this day. She accomplished the impossible, she was expected to fail but she still pushed forward. To this day her legend lives on and has made her mark on the world.