Helen Keller.

Nineteen months after her birth on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Helen Keller contracted scarlet fever, leaving her permanently deaf and blind. Her family lived on the Ivy Green homestead built by her paternal grandfather, Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general. Her father, Arthur Henley Keller, edited the Tuscumbia North Alabamian and had served as a captain in the Confederate Army before losing status after the war. Desperate for help, her parents consulted family friend Alexander Graham Bell, who recommended the Perkins School for the Blind. In 1887, they hired Anne Sullivan, a young teacher who would unlock Helen’s world.

Helen Keller’s breakthrough came when she suddenly understood the word for water spelled into her hand by Anne Sullivan, a moment later dramatized in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker. By age ten, she asked to learn to speak and began formal education at the Perkins School. She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. While still in college, she wrote her first autobiography, The Story of My Life. Keller became a socialist in her early twenties and campaigned for women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, and disability justice. She performed with Sullivan in vaudeville and lectured globally, promoting Braille. In 1928, she founded the John Milton Society for the Blind to provide spiritual guidance. Her life inspired the 1954 documentary The Unconquered and the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, which won Patty Duke an Oscar.

At age 36, Helen Keller fell in love with Peter Fagan, a 29-year-old journalist serving as her temporary secretary. The couple obtained a marriage license for a secret wedding, but when a Boston reporter discovered it, Keller’s mother forbade the marriage and forced Fagan to leave; Keller never saw him again. Her devoted companion through life was Anne Sullivan, who remained by her side until Sullivan’s death in 1936. Keller never married and had no children. She befriended ten U.S. presidents and, during a 1937 speaking tour of Japan, received an Akita dog, the first of its breed in the United States. At age 30, she had her eyes replaced with glass eyes. She died on June 1, 1968, at her home in Easton, Connecticut, and was interred at Washington National Cathedral.

Helen Keller’s legacy is measured by her pioneering achievements and the movements she inspired. In 1955, she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Harvard University. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1973. Her story, as told in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, earned Patty Duke the Best Supporting Actress Oscar at age 16, a record that stood until Tatum O’Neal’s win in 1973. Keller’s efforts helped establish Braille as a standard system and improved access for disabled individuals. The Helen Keller Society, based in the World Trade Center, was lost in the 9/11 attacks, but her legacy continues through institutions like the American Foundation for the Blind. In Japan, blind children affectionately called her Mother as a sign of respect. She remains an enduring symbol of perseverance and social justice.