Max Wallace - After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of Helen Keller

I n February 1959, four months shy of her seventy-ninth birthday, Helen Keller received a letter from a civil rights activist named George Houser. He was writing to enlist her support for a cause that he knew she held dear. During a predawn raid three years earlier, South African authorities had rounded up scores of dissidents organizing against the brutal apartheid regime that saw millions of non-white citizens oppressed by a dominant white minority. Among the figures charged with high treasonand now facing the death penaltywas an activist named Nelson Mandela, a man still largely unknown even in his own country.

Years later, the fight against apartheid would emerge as a liberal cause clbre, which saw an array of high-profile figures speak out against the racist system. But in 1959, much of the world was still firmly mired in the Cold War, and the South Africa Treason Trial was inextricably tied to an ideology that had served as a political bogeyman for most of the past decade. Mandela and the other defendants had been charged under the Suppression of Communism Act, and many Americans were still afraid to associate themselves with any progressive causelet alone one that carried the explicit taint of Communism.

In fact, Helen herself had publicly stood up to the Red-baiting tactics of Joseph McCarthy a few years earlier and subsequently faced intense pressure from her longtime employer, the American Foundation for the Blind, who suggested that her outspoken political beliefs were jeopardizing her reputation and endangering the cause that she had worked for all her life.

Now, the South African legal defense committee was running out of the funds it desperately needed to fight the case, and Houser believed an endorsement from one of the worlds most admired women could provide a much-needed boost. She was still haunted by the nearly three months she had spent in South Africa eight years earlier, where she had been horrified at the squalor and segregation that painfully reminded her of the Jim Crow system that was still very much alive in her home state of Alabama.

By this time, most Americans had forgotten that Helen was once a radical socialist firebrand who had used her celebrity to crusade against the oppression of women, the exploitation of workers, the crimes of Nazi Germany, and the indignities of Jim Crow while extolling the merits of revolution. Many preferred to think of her as the inspirational six-year-old deafblind girl who had learned to communicate thanks to a miraculous teacher. If Helen acceded to the committees request and agreed to lend her name to a cause explicitly linked with Communism, there was a very real risk that the saintly image those around her had worked so hard to cultivate could be shattered. It could perhaps even derail the ongoing negotiations around a dramatization of her life called The Miracle Worker.

But Helen had once before chosen pragmatism over principle in an episode involving racial discrimination, and she had regretted it ever since. When the Defense Trial Bulletin appeared a month later, it carried an appeal for funds and a poignant statement from one of the worlds most beloved icons:

Freedom-loving, law-abiding men and women should unite throughout the world to uphold those who are denied their rights to advancement and education and shall never cease until all lands are purged from the poison of racism and oppression.

It was one more chapter of her extraordinary life destined to be ignored or forgotten in favor of a more familiar narrative.