                          Restoration: 
      The Beginning Years of the Second Jernigan Presidency

     A National Convention which would later be designated by its
key figure as  one of the finest episodes in our history  took
place in the sunshine of Miami Beach during the summer of 1979 when
over one thousand members of the National Federation of the Blind
gathered in a mood compounded of excitement and determination to
dispatch the sowers of internal discord, to map the strategies of
a dozen external campaigns, to celebrate a return to solvency, and
to reassure each other that old acquaintances were not forgot.

     Kenneth Jernigan, who had been restored to the presidency by
acclamation only the year before, was to say of this Miami
convention that  it was one of our very best. There was a mood of
closeness and harmony which probably surpassed anything we have
ever had.  And Ramona Walhof, the national leader who wrote the
Monitor's convention roundup, called it  a tremendous experience
exciting, informative, uplifting, and spiritually rewarding. 

     What was remarkable about these accolades, in retrospect, was
that they were uttered in reference to a convention which was
compelled to deal with an organized campaign by dissident members
to take over the Federation and reduce it to the impotence of a
loose confederation of autonomous state groups. It might have been
an ugly scene; but as it turned out the threat was summarily
dispatched by the delegates through a series of decisive actions
(to be described below) which left no doubt as to the feelings of
the membership and the direction of the movement.

     Scarcely less remarkable than the convention's dispatch of the
internal quarrel was its general equanimity in the face of greater
and more concerted attacks from without than the organized blind
movement had known since the distant days of the civil war in the
late fifties. That prevailing mood of confidence and quiet strength
found eloquent expression in the banquet speech which President
Jernigan delivered at the Miami convention. Addressing the theme 
That's How It Is At The Top of the Stairs,  Jernigan pointed out
that the Federation's rapid growth in power and stature had brought
with it, as a natural consequence, a rising tide of opposition
amounting to a backlash:  No group ever goes from second-class
status to first-class citizenship without passing through a period
of hostility,  he said.  Several years ago I made the statement
that we had not even come far enough up the staircase of
independence for anybody to hate us. I believe I can safely say
that that problem has now been solved. We have enemies enough to
satisfy even the most militant among us. We have actually
progressed to the point of creating a backlash. 

     He went on to point out that the hardening of opposition and
the widening of attacks upon the organized blind movement were
cause not for dismay but for satisfaction as graphic evidence of
the Federation's ascent to the higher reaches of the stairway: 
This is our challenge and our confrontation. It is also the
strongest possible proof of how far we have come. For the first
time in history, the choice is ours. As other minorities have
discovered, the final steps are the hardest. 

     Here is the complete text of the Miami address:

      BLINDNESS: THAT'S HOW IT IS AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

      The noted British historian Arnold Toynbee has a sweeping
theory of human development called  The Cycle of Challenge and
Response.  According to this theory every civilization faces a
constant succession of challenges and confrontations, and its
viability and soundness can be measured by the vigor and nature of
the response. It may meet the challenge head on, emerging stronger
and healthier for the encounter; it may react defensively,
desperately, leaving the struggle exhausted; or it may, at the
first sign of threat, simply lie down and die. As it is with
civilizations, so it may be with movements. For that matter, so it
may be with individuals. Our vitality, our spirit, and our very
capacity for survival can likely be measured not only by the vigor
of our response to challenge and confrontation but also by the
pattern and the nature of that response.

      When the National Federation of the Blind came into being in
1940, there were certainly both challenge and confrontation; but
neither the professionals in the field nor the public-at-large
understood the full implications of the challenge or anticipated
the ultimate fury of the coming confrontation. 1940 was another
time and a different climate. Barely a scattering had the faith to
believe and the courage to hope. They were the founders of the
National Federation of the Blind. Those original Federationists
were not the powerful force of concerted action which we know
today, not the united voice of the nation's blind. All of that was
still a generation ahead, in the promise of the future and the
fullness of the years.

      It is only when we look back that we realize how far we have
come. In 1940 the blind were universally regarded as inferiors, and
there was a general feeling that it was inappropriate for them to
organize and take a hand in their own affairs. It was an atmosphere
which broke the spirit and quenched the hope and killed the dream.
But the resistance to the notion that the blind should organize
(the challenges and the confrontations) did not, for the most part,
come from hatred or viciousness or a wish to hurt. It came,
instead, from pity, misunderstanding, misplaced kindness, or (at
worst) apathy and a desire to maintain the status quo.

      That was 1940. This is 1979. What has happened to us in the
intervening years? What challenges and confrontations do we face
today? How do these challenges and confrontations differ from those
of 1940? In short, as a movement and a people, where are we and
where are we going?

      In broad outline the story of the past four decades is easy
to read and quickly told. At first the Federation was small and
largely ignored. It had few members and little influence. The
governmental and private agencies tried to treat it as if it were
not unique at all but simply another provider of services (one
among many), a miniature duplicate of what already was in other
words, a newcomer but one of themselves. The public (to the extent
that the public knew about the Federation at all) took its lead
from the professionals.

      But the blind knew otherwise. They knew of the need which
only the Federation could fill. They knew it in the yearning for
freedom, in the lack of opportunity, in the rejection by society,
and in the exclusion from the rights and privileges of full
participation and equal status. They knew that the Federation was
theirs. For whatever successes it might achieve or whatever
failures it might make, it was theirs. Its primary purpose was not
to provide services but to monitor and hold to account those who
did provide services. And there were other purposes: to change
social attitudes, fight discrimination, eliminate prejudice, create
self-awareness, instill hope, touch the conscience, and (above all)
establish a means by which the blind could discuss common problems,
reach decisions, and make their voices heard. The Federation was
unique. It was (and is) the collective voice of the nation's blind
the blind thinking for themselves, speaking for themselves, and
acting for themselves.

      Our battle for freedom and recognition parallels to a
striking degree that experienced by the blacks, for we are (in
every modern sense of that term) a minority. We have our ghettos,
our unemployment, our underemployment, and our Uncle Toms. We have
our establishment (composed of society as a whole and,
particularly, of many of the professionals in the governmental and
private agencies). That establishment condescendingly loves us if
we stay in our places, and bitterly resents us if we strive for
equality. Above all (through our own organization, the National
Federation of the Blind) we have discovered our collective
conscience and found our true identity. We have learned that it is
not our blindness which has put us down and kept us out, but what
we and others have  thought  about our blindness. Yet, they tell us
that there is no discrimination and that we are not a minority. We
want no strife or confrontation, but we will do what we have to do.
We are simply no longer willing to be second-class citizens. We
have said it before, and we say it again: We know who we are, and
we will never go back!

      No group ever goes from second-class status to first-class
citizenship without passing through a period of hostility. Several
years ago I made the statement that we had not even come far enough
up the stairway of independence for anybody to hate us. I believe
I can safely say that that problem has now been solved. We have
enemies enough to satisfy even the most militant among us. We have
actually progressed to the point of creating a backlash.

      However, we must see the situation in perspective. The
hostility and backlash which we are experiencing are not due to
mistakes on our part or to radical behavior or to over
aggressiveness or to any of the other trumped-up charges which have
been made against us. Just as with the black civil rights movement
and Martin Luther King, the hostile reactions and backlash are an
inevitable step on the stairs which lead from the depths of
rejection and custody to the upper level of freedom and first-class
status. The bottom steps of that stairway are often paved with
condescension and pity; the middle steps are sometimes paved with
goodwill and the beginnings of acceptance; but the top steps are
always paved with resentment and fear. We have come a long way up.
We are approaching the top of the stairs, and we are experiencing
our full measure of fear and resentment.

      The fear and resentment come from those who have a vested
interest in keeping us down: the sheltered shops, with their
subminimum wages, which were the subject of the recent  Wall Street
Journal  articles1; the New York agencies, which we have helped
expose through damning audits; the National Accreditation Council
for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped (NAC),
which we oppose for its phony standards, its meaningless
accreditation, its lust to manage our lives, and its desperate
effort to gain public support and respectability; the Cleveland
Society for the Blind, which we have taken to court because of its
wrongful seizure of the earnings of blind food service operators
and its attempt to control the smallest details of their daily
existence; the American Foundation for the Blind, which we call to
task for its drippy publicity and pseudo-professionalism; the
insurance companies, which (by court action and administrative
regulation) we seek to prevent from charging us extra rates and
denying us coverage; the airlines, against whom we demonstrate for
trying to tell us where we can sit, that we cannot keep our canes
during flight, that we must travel with an attendant, and sometimes
that we cannot even board the plane at all; and all of those other
public officials and private individuals who have an economic
interest in keeping us from achieving independence or who boost
their egos and show their insecurity by the need to feel superior,
to custodialize, to condescend, and to treat us as wards.

      Whether we finish the climb up the stairway to freedom and
social acceptance (leaving behind the hostility and backlash) will
be determined not by the actions of others but by our own behavior.
This is our challenge and our confrontation. It is also the
strongest possible proof of how far we have come. For the first
time in history, the choice is ours. As other minorities have
discovered, the final steps are the hardest.

      There are several reasons why this is so: For one thing, the
degradations and deprivations at the bottom of the stairs are (once
they are pointed out and clearly delineated) so obvious and unjust
that they are easily understood; and large groups of the general
public can be touched in their conscience and enlisted to help,
still keeping intact their sense of superior worth and special
status. The minority is a long way down and poses no apparent
threat, even by climbing a few steps up. At the top of the stairs
things are different. The discrimination is more complex and
subtle, the prejudice less obvious, the threat to vested interest
more real, and the violations of tradition more imminent.

      There is also the fact that the members of the minority group
are part of the larger society. They tend to see themselves as
others see them. They tend to accept the false views of their
limitations and, thus, do much to make those limitations a reality.

      I can offer a personal example. On February 11, 1979, an
article written by R. H. Gardner appeared in the  Baltimore Sun .
It was headlined:  `Ice Castles' a little hard to swallow,  and
this is what it said:

      Several years ago, I was at a party when a friend, for
reasons I cannot recall, bet me I could not stand on one foot 15
seconds with my eyes closed. I had been quite an athlete in my
youth (10 years old), during which period I could stand on
practically any part of my anatomy head, hands, ears or toes for an
indefinite length of time. I accepted the bet.

      To my astonishment, at the count of five I began to waver. At
seven, the waver turned into a stagger; and at ten I was lost. It
was a great shock for a former athlete (even a 10-year-old one),
and I have never forgotten it. For something happens to your
balance when you close your eyes. And how much worse it must be if
you're blind!

      Being blind, a scientist-friend once pointed out to me,
cannot be compared to closing your eyes. When you close your eyes,
you still see. You see the undersides of the lids with the light
behind them. But what you see when you're blind is what you see out
of the back of your head. There is neither light nor sight of any
kind. I was reminded of all this while watching `Ice Castles,' a
film about a blind figureskater. I'm told there is a blind
figureskater upon whose career the film is loosely based. But it's
hard to believe, in view of my experience trying to stand on one
leg.

      When I read that article I pooh-poohed it and laughed it to
scorn. So did one of my sighted associates. Then, just to show how
silly it was, she closed her eyes and stood on one foot. But the
laughter stopped, for she wobbled and fell. Then, she opened her
eyes and tried it again. There was no problem. She kept her balance
without difficulty.

       Nonsense!  I said.  Let me show you  whereupon, I stood on
one foot and immediately lost my balance. That was three months
ago. Was I shaken? I certainly was.

      Then, I began doing some thinking. We know that the tests
which are made by blindfolding sighted people to determine what the
blind can do are totally invalid. I have been among the most vocal
in pointing that out. I knew (or, at least I thought I knew) that
balance is a matter of the inner ear, not the eye. Why, then, did
my associate fall when her eyes were closed but keep her balance
when they were open? Perhaps the fact that she was accustomed to
seeing things around her as part of her daily life made the
difference, or perhaps (even though she is well versed in our
philosophy) the matter went deeper. Perhaps (reacting to social
conditioning) she subconsciously expected to fall and was tense. I
suggested that she practice a few times with her eyes closed. And
what do you know? It worked. In four or five times she could stand
on one foot as easily with her eyes closed as open.

      But what about me? I have never had any problem with balance.
So I tried it again and I could do it with perfect ease. If anybody
doubts it, I will be glad to demonstrate. Then why did I fall the
first time? I reluctantly conclude that (despite all of my
philosophy and knowledge to the contrary, despite all of my
experience with this very sort of situation dressed out in other
forms) I fell into the trap of social conditioning. I hope I won't
do it again, but I can't be sure. There is probably not a blind
person alive in the world today who has not, at one time or
another, sold himself or herself short and accepted the public
misconceptions, usually without ever knowing it. Prejudice is
subtle, and tradition runs deep. That's how it is at the top of the
stairs.

      Which brings me back to Mr. Gardner and his newspaper
article. He was not trying to hurt us, but just make a living.
Nevertheless, based on his single, false experience as a simulated
blind man, he makes sweeping generalizations about our lacks and
losses. Do you think he would believe we are capable of equality
that we can travel alone, get off an airplane in time of emergency,
or compete with others for a regular job that we deserve insurance
at the same rate as the sighted that we are capable of full and
normal lives? Of course not. And his opinions count. He is a member
of the press, a molder of thought. And how do you think he will
react if one of us brings all of this to his attention?

      Probably with defensiveness and resentment probably as part
of the backlash. Perhaps he will even help stimulate unfavorable
publicity against us, not realizing or admitting why he is doing it
or even, for that matter, that he  is  doing it. But we have no
choice. The alternative is to slide back toward the bottom of the
stairs. We will say it as gently and as courteously as we can but
we will say it. We want no strife or confrontation, but we are
simply no longer willing to be second-class citizens. We will do
what we have to do. We intend to take the final step on the stairs.

      You will remember that Ralph Sanders in his banquet speech2
last year quoted as follows from a gimmicky ad by a company
employing blind persons to smell its perfumes:  Why,  the ad asks, 
do people close their eyes when they kiss? Because by cutting off
one sense, they heighten the other four. They are completely
immersed in the taste, smell, sound, and touch of the kiss. 

      Blind people have the  most highly attuned sense of smell
possessed by man.  What an ad! Such beliefs are widely held, but
even a moment's reflection will demonstrate their absolute
insanity. If a kiss is really made better by closing the eyes,
think what a charge you could get if you put corks in your nose and
plugs in your ears. The taste would go all the way to your toes,
and the touch would drive you right up the wall. I would not expect
the perfume company to appreciate our objection to its ad, but that
will not keep us from objecting. That's how it is at the top of the
stairs.

      Sometimes the public misconceptions about blindness are used
as a shield to avoid responsibility or hide from punishment.
Consider, for instance, an article which appeared in the March 8,
1979,  Minneapolis Star . It reads:

      Jerome M. Bach, Minneapolis psychiatrist and a founder of the
Bach Institute, a psychotherapy center, has been placed on
probation by the Minnesota Board of Medical Examiners for engaging
in sexual activities with four of his female patients. 

      The board's ruling reversed the finding of a state hearing
examiner, Howard L. Kaibel, Jr. Kaibel recommended no action be
taken against the doctor.

      Bach, who suffers from tunnel vision from a degenerative
condition of the retina, is legally blind. Because of this, Kaibel
said, Bach  depends on physical contact as an additional means of
communication and of obtaining information about his patients.  

      Bach had become widely known among patients and other
therapists for an unusual ability to diagnose emotional problems
and for his use of physical contact in therapy.

      According to Kaibel's findings, Bach's use of  physical
psychotherapeutic intervention is widely known, accepted by
literally hundreds of his colleagues and even coveted by some who
are unable to utilize them as effectively.

      That is what the article says and the mind is boggled at the
madness. Did Dr. Kaibel really mean it? Dr. Bach had never
identified with the blind before, and so far as anybody knows, he
has never done so since; but when the heat was on, he tried to hide
behind the stereotypes. For once, we did not speak out alone. The
medical profession, the women's movement, and others joined with
us. We did what we could to make something positive out of the
situation attempting to educate the public and show unaligned blind
persons why they should join us. Constant vigil, battle, hostility,
and backlash but also growing efforts to inform the public, achieve
concerted action, and heighten self awareness. That's how it is at
the top of the stairs.

      Blind vendors and food service operators constitute one of
the largest groups of the employed blind. They work for their money
and earn what they get, but some of them fail to recognize their
common bond with the rest of us, their need for the organized blind
movement. Those who have such attitudes should read a novel3 about
the CIA published in 1978. It is called  Ballet! , and it is
written by Tom Murphy. Although it speaks directly to blind
vendors, it speaks just as falsely and just as insultingly to all
of the rest of us. The following passage occurs on page 51 and
introduces chapter three:

      Dave Loughlin had the rough bulk of a longshoreman and the
ambling shuffle of a geriatric bear. Dave was thirty pounds heavier
and more than thirty years older than he'd been in the Army OSS
days, the last happy time he could remember. And now, as Dave made
his way down the long green-asphalt-tiled corridor that always
reminded him of a hospital, of death, he felt every minute of those
years, and every extra ounce weighing on him like an unserved
sentence. And he felt the effects of last night's boozing, which
didn't help any either. He passed the blind lunch counter and
shuddered, even though he'd known it would be there, creepy as
ever, even if it was the Old Man's idea, even if it did make some
kind of perverted sense.

      Where else in the world would you have blind men and women
cheerfully handing out wrapped sandwiches and cartons of coffee so
bad it could have been made only by the blind? Where else but in
the ever-vigilant atmosphere of CIA headquarters out in dear old
Langley, Virginia?

      That book is circulating by the tens of thousands throughout
the nation. It approaches genius in its ability to malign and
misstate. It manages to lump almost all of the stereotypes into a
couple of sentences. The blind are cheerful. We are creepy. It's
perverted to have us about. We can't make sandwiches but must get
them prewrapped. We can't even make a decent cup of coffee. Here is
no kindness (or even condescending pity) only meanness and
contemptuous dismissal. Each one of us (vendor and non-vendor
alike) should think carefully about this book and the others like
it which blight our opportunities and poison the public mind. We
have no choice. The alternative is to slide back toward the bottom
of the stairs. We will say it as gently and as courteously as we
can but we will say it. We intend to take the final step on the
stairs, and we must take it together. We know who we are, and we
will never go back!

      The meanness of the Murphy novel is by no means universal,
but it is certainly a sign of the times an evidence of backlash and
a proof that we are close to the top of the stairs. Southwest
Airlines, which proudly proclaims that it spreads  love around
Texas,  recently initiated a policy of refusing to transport the
blind or the mentally retarded unless they are accompanied by an
attendant; and a Southwest official a few months ago wrote the
following bit of disgusting gibberish to our Texas president, Glenn
Crosby:  In regard to your question about canes being taken away
from passengers, this is a security measure. Obviously, we have no
way of knowing what a passenger will do with such an object;
therefore, as a precaution, all such articles are taken away during
flight. 

      Not much love in that, is there? Nor are the Southwest
officials likely to feel any kindness toward the Federation
especially since we are picketing their counters and exposing their
behavior to the public. Backlash, yes. But also (hopefully)
breakthroughs to reason and public understanding. That's how it is
at the top of the stairs, and (regardless of the cost) we intend to
take those final steps.

      In Iowa (where the progress has probably been greatest and
the backlash strongest) not only have we suffered sustained,
vicious, unfounded, and unscrupulous attacks from the Des Moines
newspaper; but we are also engaged in a battle in the courts. As
the blind of the nation know, Herbert Anderson (Iowa's enlightened
Insurance Commissioner) ruled a couple of years ago that insurance
companies could not discriminate against the blind in rates or
coverage. As could have been predicted, the insurance companies
(even those which had always claimed that they were, as they put
it, most  sympathetic to the blind ) suddenly turned hostile. When
one of them (Federal Kemper) was fined a thousand dollars and
ordered to mend its ways, it decided that the blind were ungrateful
and unreasonable and took the matter to court.

      On March 23, 1979, Judge Theodore Miller, who will not be
remembered as one of the more enlightened spirits of the age,
stated as follows in his  Findings of Fact :

      9. The Court takes  judicial  notice of the fact that the
blind have only four of the five senses, consisting of sight,
hearing, taste, smell and touch. Common knowledge provides that one
with less than all the common senses operates at a disadvantage and
is more susceptible to be unable to function as an able-bodied
person than one with all his senses. Federal statutes recognize by
implication the disabilities which blind people suffer and have
provided tax exemptions for them.

      When you sort out the garbled language, the Judge is clearly
saying that no proof is necessary that the blind can't  cut-it  on
terms of equality with others. It is a matter of  common knowledge. 
In number 17 of his  conclusions  Judge Miller takes the astounding
position that if blind persons are denied insurance, no
discrimination has occurred since they have all been denied to the
same degree and, therefore, have received equal treatment. Not much
love in that and not much intelligence either. But that's how it is
when you deal with vested interest, threats to tradition, and
backlash. Commissioner Anderson and we are appealing this case to
the Iowa Supreme Court. Whatever the cost or the backlash, we
intend to take those final steps. That's how it is at the top of
the stairs.

      Today I have said very little about the professionals in the
field of work with the blind, but the picture would not be complete
without their inclusion. Increasing numbers of them are working
with us and taking joy in our progress. But there are others: NAC4,
the American Foundation for the Blind, and their allies have
tremendous wealth and broad contacts. They could do much, if they
chose, to hasten the day of the liberation of the blind, but they
seem to feel that they have a vested interest in our continued
dependence and subjugation. Perhaps Louis Rives (blind himself and
the President of the National Accreditation Council for Agencies
Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped) has summed up the
philosophy of inferiority and defeatism as well as it has ever been
put. It is certainly the opposite of everything we believe and have
experienced. Last year at the NAC meeting he said that there are
only two ways of making the blind and the sighted equal: either the
blind can regain their sight, or the sighted can have their eyes
plucked out. With such  professionals  in the field is it any
wonder that the public is not yet informed? But (with or without
the NAC professionals) we will take the final steps. We will reach
the top of the stairs.

      As President of the Federation I receive many letters. Some
are encouraging; others heart-rending. But I think I have never
received a more expressive and revealing letter than the one I am
about to share with you. It was written by Edgar Sammons, who lives
in Mountain City, Tennessee, and speaks with the language and the
clarity of Elizabethan prose. I have never met Edgar Sammons, but
I have thought long about his letter and have come to feel a deep
affection and a high respect for him. He is not a complainer, not
a whiner but he has known custody, terrible loneliness, blighted
hope, and real deprivation. Yet, he has made a life for himself.
His letter is as significant for what it does not say as for what
it says. I have his permission to use it. Otherwise, I would not do
it. Here it is:

      I thought I would try to give you a little history of my
life. I was born October 30, 1913. They said I lost my sight at
three weeks old. I grew just like the rest of them. I think a blind
person should be brought up just like a sighted person but most of
them are not. Most of them would learn a lot more if they would let
them. We just had an old boat house and a little land. Not enough
to make a living on. My father always rented corn ground for half
of it. My mother put up a lot of stuff, and we always had plenty to
eat.

      My father worked on the first highway that came through here.
They blacktopped it in 1924. [I interrupt the letter to point out
that he is now eleven years old, and this is the first thing that
has happened to him that he feels worth noting. But let me
continue]:

      My father rented a little farm, and we moved to it. It was
not very far from here. We lived there a year and moved back. My
mother always wanted to send me to school, but my father never
would give up for it. My grandmother and my mother and little baby
sister all died in 1924. There were five of us children left. Some
people wanted to put us in a home. We had a hard time, but we made
out. If the family could have had their way I don't guess I would
have been allowed to get off of the place without some of them with
me. They couldn't watch me all of the time.

      My grandmother Sammons was still living and they would send
me down there when they would go to work in the corn. That suited
me just fine. My grandmother would be doing her housework, and I
would go down the road about half a mile to my aunt's and stay a
while. Sometimes some of them would find it out and tell on me, but
I didn't care what they done about it. I would run off every chance
I got. There was just mud roads, but I got along. They would take
me places with them at night. They went a lot of places at that
that I would have like to have went, but they left me at my
grandmother's. I think the blind should be allowed to get out and
learn to get around just like the sighted when they are growing up.
A lot of us don't have that chance. My brother and father went to
work in a cotton mill at Johnson City, and we moved down there in
1927. [He was born in 1913, so he is now fourteen years old.] The
mill closed down in 1928, and we moved back. [Now, he's fifteen.]
In 1933 [He's now twenty.] all of the children got off over at
Asheville, North Carolina, and got jobs. [You notice that  he 
didn't get a job.] My father married again in 1933. I stayed at
home most of the time. After that my job in the summertime was
pasturing the cows in the road. I had bells on them so I could tell
where they was at. I set on the banks with the cows, wondering how
I could get a little money to get me some tobacco. I was a young
man then.

      The welfare started in 1937. [He's now twenty-four.] I got a
little. A lot of the blind didn't get any. There wasn't very much
work for the blind then. I would go to Asheville and stay a while
and come back here and stay a while.

      In 1944 [He's now thirty-one.] I went to Asheville and got me
a job sorting mica. [Remember: This is his first job. It was the
Second World War, and manpower was scarce. But back to his letter]:
They said we could do that job better than the sighted people. I
just got to work nine weeks, and our part of the job closed down.
I stayed a while longer over there to see if it would start back
up, but it never did.

      That was a good job, but in one way I didn't like it. I
stayed with my sister and her husband. They was as good to me as
they could be, but they wanted me with them all the time. They
would come after me at night and take me to work in the morning. I
didn't want that. I wanted out on my own like other people. I
wanted to get out and get me a girl just like other people.

      Well, I come back home and stayed around here most of the
time. My stepmother died in 1951. [Now, he's thirty-eight.] Grady
Weaver started teaching me to read and write Braille in 1951. I
can't spell very good, but that helped some. I stayed at home with
my father until 1957. [His life is passing. He's now forty-four.]
My father got so bad sick that they had to put him in a rest home,
and I went to Morristown and got me a job in the sheltered
workshop. Mattie Ruth was working there at that time. She told
someone,  the Sammons has come; the bass will be here next.  Sure
enough in a few days a man did come by the name of Bass. Just a
little while after I went to work, Mattie Ruth got sick and went
home. She like to have died. She didn't come back any more for
about three years. She worked for a while, and her father got sick
and she went home to take care of him. He died in 1962. [Now, he's
forty-nine.]

      After that, I went up and got Mattie Ruth. Her mother said
she ought to have run me off the first time I ever come up there.
She said I took the last girl she had.

      I was forty-three years old before I got out on my own, but
it has been the best part of my life. If I had stayed with my
people, I don't guess I would have been living by now. I didn't
have anything to live for.

      That is the letter. It requires no comment, and it tells us
what we have to do. In a very real sense Edgar Sammons speaks for
us all. The imprisonment and lack of opportunity were just as cruel
as if they had been deliberately imposed. They were just as
degrading, just as blighting, and just as painful.

      We must see that it never happens again. That is why we have
to strengthen the Federation, why we have to speak out, and why we
have to disregard the hostility and backlash.

      Our climb up the stairs to freedom has been slow and
difficult, but we are nearing the top. We carry with us a trust for
Dr. tenBroek, for Edgar Sammons, and for all of the others who went
before us. We also carry a trust for those who will follow for the
blind of the decades ahead. Yesterday and tomorrow meet in this
present time, and we are the ones who have the responsibility. Our
final climb up the stairs will not be easy, but we must make it.
The stakes are too high and the alternatives too terrible to allow
it to be otherwise. If we fail to meet the challenge or dishonor
our trust, we will fall far down the stairs, and the journey back
up will be long and painful probably as much as another generation.

      But, of course, we will not fail. We will continue to climb.
Our heritage demands it; our faith confirms it; our humanity
requires it. Whatever the sacrifice, we will make it. Whatever the
price, we will pay it. Seen from this perspective, the hostility
and backlash (the challenges and confrontations) are hardly worth
noticing. They are only an irritant.

      My brothers and my sisters, the future is ours. Come! Join me
on the stairs, and we will finish the journey.

FOOTNOTES

      1. Jonathan Kwitny and Jerry Landauer,  Sheltered Shops: Pay
of the Blind Often Trails Minimum Wage At Charity Workrooms,   The
Wall Street Journal , January 24, 1979, pp. 1 and 35 and  Sheltered
Shops: How a Blind Worker Gets $1.85 an Hour After 20 Years on Job, 
 The Wall Street Journal , January 25, 1979, pp. 1 and 31.

      2. Ralph Sanders,  The Continuing Challenge of Change,  
Braille Monitor , October, 1978.

      3. Tom Murphy,  Ballet!  (A Signet Book, New American
Library, 1978), p. 51.

      4. National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the
Blind and Visually Handicapped. NAC was the successor to and was
appointed by the Commission on Standards and Accreditation.
COMSTAC, in turn, was appointed by the American Foundation for the
Blind, which has always provided more than one-half the budget
first for COMSTAC and now for NAC. In other words the so-called
objective  Accreditation Council  is owned by the American
Foundation for the Blind.

                    The Civil War That Wasn't

     A second  time of troubles  for the organized blind
reminiscent on a minor scale of the internal struggle that had
wracked the movement two decades before descended upon the National
Federation in the waning years of the seventies. Like the earlier
episode, the new push for power by a dissident faction of the
membership which was quickly to prove abortive grew out of a
combination of adverse factors and events, some interconnected and
others merely coincidental. But, unlike the earlier episode, this
mini-rebellion barely rippled the surface of a united organization
and left it stronger, closer-knit, and more mature than ever.

     There were other differences between the two periods of
stress. The civil war of the fifties had been fought over issues of
some consequence (as well as others of merely personal ambition and
spite); its effect was to settle in principle the question of NFB's
identity and character, establishing the fact that it was not a
loose confederation but a unitary national organization with
authority to supervise its constituent local and state affiliates.
Unfortunately what was established  de facto  was not reinforced
and nailed down  de jure , in the formalities of legal and
constitutional procedure; the Federation's members had neither the
stomach nor the energy, after their years of civil ordeal, to fight
on further in the courts and the convention for what seemed already
plainly settled and agreed upon. It was precisely that
legal-procedural imprimatur, however, which was the significant
achievement of the attempted mutiny of the late seventies. The
issue was conclusively resolved in two venues: it was decided in
the courts with victorious lawsuits against the dissidents in
California, Washington, and Iowa respectively; and it was settled
in the convention through constitutional amendments, resolutions,
and other democratic decisions.

     The most conspicuous difference between the two internal
episodes was one of scale. The earlier episode of the fifties
deserved the title of civil war, in terms of both size and
duration; it involved real numbers, it spread through much of the
country, and it sustained heavy casualties in the form of fallen
chapters and split affiliates. The later insurrection broke out in
two states California and Washington and when it had done its worst
and played itself out it could claim but a handful of defectors in
a single additional state, that of Iowa. It was for this reason
that, for years thereafter, the entire episode would be widely
known in the movement as  the civil war that wasn't. 

     The first of the factors which combined to precipitate the new
squabble was the 1977 resignation of President Jernigan for reasons
of ill health. Inadvertently, but perhaps inevitably, that
development sent a signal to anti-Federationists without and to
dissident members within that a  window of vulnerability  had been
opened and with it an opportunity for mischief and maneuver. To
understand the internal side of this scenario it is important to
recall the extraordinary growth enjoyed by the Federation during
the seventies, which brought new members and chapters into the
movement in numbers too great to be easily or quickly assimilated
into the Federation community. Added to this, not incidentally,
were the economic factors which had transformed the movement in a
decade or two from a comfortable  primary group  in which everyone
knew everyone into a far-flung network of affiliated groups and
individuals. Despite this expansion there was, as we have seen, a
countervailing force of community and family bonding; but not
everyone in the nationwide network could be readily brought into
the family circle. There were bound to be some who still felt
alienated and at odds with the mainstream of the organized blind
movement; and there would also be others who, alienated or not,
misperceived the Federation community as a competitive scramble no
different from the cut-throat enterprises of their own experience.
In the two far western states of California and Washington
encouraged by their geographic distance from the center, emboldened
by the strength of their two affiliates, and enticed by the size of
their state treasuries two overambitious leaders in particular
(Robert Acosta and Sue Ammeter) conspired to carve out independent
territories of their own, without regard for the limitations and
constraints imposed by membership in the National Federation.

     It should be noted that, while these internal power plays were
going on, parallel forces outside the movement in particular some
elements in the professional blindness system long opposed to the
Federation had also been stirred into renewed agitation by the
resignation of President Jernigan and the impression of weakness
which that conveyed. The main journalistic conduit for their
efforts to sabotage the NFB and its leadership became the  Des
Moines Register , a newspaper whose statewide circulation could be
deployed to discredit Jernigan as Director of the Iowa Commission
for the Blind as well as to malign the Federation itself with its
national headquarters situated in Des Moines. Significantly the
same paper had for nearly twenty years supported Jernigan and the
Commission with uniform enthusiasm an attitude exemplified by a
1968 editorial on Jernigan, typical of numerous other articles over
the years.

     Here is the  Register 's editorial:

      If a person must be blind, it is better to be blind in Iowa
than anywhere else in the nation or the world.  So said Harold
Russell, chairman of the President's Committee on the Handicapped
in awarding a presidential citation to Kenneth Jernigan and it's
true.

      More than that, the major reason it is true is that for ten
years Kenneth Jernigan has been director of the Iowa Commission for
the Blind.

      Before coming here, Jernigan had sold insurance, taught in a
teachers college, worked in a rehabilitation program for the blind
in Tennessee, and then been psychologist and counselor at the
California Rehabilitation Center for the Blind at Oakland.

      He was brought here by Mrs. Alvin Kirsner, who had known him
for years. She headed a volunteer group at B'nai Jeshurun's Temple
Sisterhood which had turned a needed textbook into Braille the
raised type which blind can read by touch for Jernigan when he was
teaching in Nashville. By 1958 she was chairman of the Iowa
Commission for the Blind, which at long last had a program and had
talked the Iowa legislature into putting up some money for it.

      Bringing Jernigan here to head it was a brilliant stroke.
Jernigan is a dynamo. From one of the worst in the country, Iowa's
rehabilitation program for the blind became one of the best in the
country.

      The money was essential, but even more important was the
spirit Jernigan managed to infuse into it.

      You can see it in the spirited swing of those long fiberglass
canes the blind trainees use around Des Moines as they begin to
acquire some confidence in the newly learned skill of  traveling 
making their way around without help.

      You can see it in the record his trainees have made, and in
the growing acceptance of his work by the legislature and the
public.

      By public, we mean not just the people of Iowa. Among the
center's trainees was a woman physician from Pakistan, who went
back there to start a similar center. The Iowa program attracts
visitors from all over the U.S. and the world.

      The presidential award to Jernigan was richly deserved. All
Iowans can be proud they have him in their midst.

     That sweepingly positive attitude on the part of the  Des
Moines Register  shifted abruptly to one of implacable hostility
shortly after the Jernigan resignation from the NFB presidency.
Various plausible explanations might be offered for this
precipitous editorial mood swing. One was that the newspaper,
afflicted with falling circulation and reduced revenues, needed a
scapegoat and a burning cause around which to rebuild its
reputation for  investigative journalism  a concept which had
lately come into great popularity with the daily press and its
readers as a result of the famous Woodward-Bernstein exposes during
what were known as the Watergate scandals. Here in the newspaper's
own back yard, in the person of Kenneth Jernigan, was a local
figure with the highest name-recognition quotient across the state
of any public official possibly excepting the governor.

     The  Register 's campaign was also evidently linked (through
personal connections) to a recent legal victory of the Federation
and its Minnesota affiliate over the Minneapolis Society for the
Blind in a landmark case which had featured key testimony by
Kenneth Jernigan.  Certain facts are known,  as Jernigan himself
was later to write.  We know, for instance, that Jesse Rosten
became head of the Minneapolis Society for the Blind in the early
1970s and that the blind of Minnesota have been engaged in a bitter
struggle with the Society for a decade. We know that Gil Cranberg
is now head of the editorial section of the  Des Moines Register 
and that he has been a power at the newspaper for more than twenty
years. Rosten has bragged that Cranberg was his college roommate
and that he could get at Jernigan through Cranberg. 

     Whatever the source of its motivation, the  Register  launched
a flurry of attacks against the Iowa Commission and its director
which, before the campaign finally subsided two years later,
amounted to a total of more than 200 separate articles. All that
needs to be said about these attacks by the Des Moines newspaper is
that despite all of the headlines, the hype, and the promises of
juicy exposure, no formal charges were ever brought, no accusations
ever substantiated, and in fact the  Register 's allegations were
discredited one after the other until nothing was left of the
affair but the disgust of the thinking public in Iowa who had
rightly felt pride in the programs for the blind administered
through two decades by Kenneth Jernigan. (Officials of the
Minneapolis Star and Tribune, which was part of the corporate
structure that owned the  Des Moines Register , were on the board
of the Minneapolis Society for the Blind and apparently deeply
resented Jernigan's involvement in the case that exposed the
Minneapolis Society's violation of state law and attempted the
suppression of rights of the blind of Minnesota. It was widely felt
that the attacks by the  Des Moines Register  were at least in
part, the result of corporate pique.) There was also evidence that
the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind
and Visually Handicapped and other regressive agencies in the
country made a concerted effort to plant stories in the  Register
, which they could then circulate to divert attention from their
poor performance when Federationists called them to account for
their program deficiencies and custodialism.

     Many if not most of these journalistic assaults had been
inspired or fed by the custodial agencies, both national and local,
which had persistently warred with the organized blind among them
the American Foundation for the Blind and its notorious offspring,
NAC, and a number of state and municipal agencies which had been
targeted by the NFB for exploitive labor practices (e.g., the
Societies for the Blind in Minneapolis and Cleveland). There was
also the  company union  of blindness, the American Council of the
Blind, which had become almost abjectly dependent upon NAC and the
American Foundation for financial support and accordingly toed the
company line and carried out company wishes with respect to the
independent blind of the National Federation (although as a
dissident splinter group from an earlier era the ACB bore its own
bitter grudge against its parent Federation). These and other
agency-oriented groups were clearly instrumental in fomenting and
sustaining the two-year vendetta waged by the  Des Moines Register 
thereby providing what one blind person called  immoral support  to
the new dissidents from California and Washington within the NFB.

     In the aftermath of Kenneth Jernigan's resignation from the
presidency in 1977 and at the same time as the newspaper attacks
commenced in Iowa a dissident faction began to take shape in two of
the Federation's state affiliates: those of California and
Washington. The coincidence of these three events suggests that the
dissidents thought to see a weakness in the structure of the
Federation enabling them to exploit the situation for their own
personal ambitions or at the least to spread confusion and disrupt
the movement.

     In these purposes, however, they were to be thoroughly
disappointed. As indicated earlier, the membership of the
Federation closed ranks swiftly behind its elective leaders at the
1979 convention in Miami Beach following repeated futile efforts to
settle the issue by discussion and negotiation, notably at a
special meeting in California of the National Board of Directors in
September, 1978, during which a full hearing was afforded the
dissident faction. The 1979 convention voted overwhelmingly (46 to
3) to expel the faction and proceeded to bestow new charters upon
reorganized state affiliates in California and Washington. (It
might be added that both of these reconstructed groups were shortly
to become among the most vigorous and effective in the movement.)

     Despite the decisive action of the convention and the
unmistakable repudiation by the membership as a whole, the
frustrated dissidents continued to agitate and to insist on their
right to be called Federationists. That issue was not finally
settled in the courts until January of 1983, when the California
Court of Appeal  dismissed with prejudice  the last appeal of the
California dissidents and brought an end to the entire episode of
misguided ambition and personal spite. (Parallel court cases in
Washington and Iowa were also settled in favor of the NFB, as was
a peripheral episode in Hawaii which resulted in a reorganized
affiliate.)

     In the end the mini-rebellion was a sadly abortive affair
which reminded some observers of a question asked in a different
context:  What if they gave a war and nobody came?  The small band
of dissidents in California and Washington, when they left in
disgrace, took no affiliates with them not even their own. They had
failed to shake the movement or stir the membership. One member
said of them that they were like Shakespearean characters who strut
and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more their
play only a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

     The long-range effect of the abortive civil war was summarized
by Kenneth Jernigan in a 1983  Monitor  report on the episode:

      Whereas the NFB Civil War in the late 1950s divided and
weakened us, the California situation drew us closer together and
brought harmony and increased determination. We are now stronger
than we have ever been. We have more momentum, more legislative
influence, more sense of organizational purpose, more dedicated
members, more love and understanding, and more care and concern for
each other. The future looks better than it has ever looked, and
tomorrow is bright with promise.

      Back to the Future

     In the year of its fortieth anniversary, 1980, the movement of
the organized blind found itself embarked upon a new and portentous
phase of its career. It had successfully maneuvered the difficult
physical transition from the Middle West (Des Moines) to the
Eastern Seaboard (Baltimore) in the process purchasing a vast
complex of buildings, creating the National Center for the Blind,
and multiplying its output of materials. It had also defended
itself successfully not to say spectacularly against the
journalistic assault in Iowa with the publication and mass
statewide distribution of an extraordinary  Special Edition  of the 
Braille Monitor  (February, 1980) labeled  The Bizarre World of the
Des Moines Register: Malicious and Reckless Disregard of the Truth
. (Following that publication, for whatever reason, the  Register 
suddenly ceased its drumbeat of critical attacks against Jernigan
and the Commission.) At the same time the Federation was launching
new campaigns and reinvigorating older ones in a host of areas
where blind people were ill-used and poorly treated in the 
unfriendly skies  of major airlines, in the underpaid and
oversheltered workshops, in the conclaves and machinations of the 
NAC Pack  and everywhere that their civil rights were denied or
their dignity assailed.

     The sense of motion and change, of transition amounting to
transformation, and above all of renewed commitment to the
objectives of Federationism pervaded the atmosphere of the
Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis during convention week, 1980, where
some two thousand blind Americans were assembled for the
anniversary occasion. Apart from being the largest convention in
Federation history, the event epitomized the spirit and character
of the NFB's annual meetings during this volatile era; something
was happening at every moment day or night throughout the week
something epochal, edifying, or at least engaging. A subsequent
report in the  Monitor  summarized:

      The tone, the incredibly vast amount of information, the
timeliness and variety of the resolutions, the enthusiasm, the
Monday press conference, the march to the Minneapolis Society for
the Blind, the events surrounding the meeting of the Kiwanis Club,
the panels, the reports, the speakers, and the give-and-take of the
jammed convention hall made this occasion what it was a vital,
dynamic, action-packed, dramatic experience: one which will have a
lasting and unforgettable impact upon those who were there, and,
indeed, upon all of the blind everywhere.

     The reference in that report to the march on the Minneapolis
Society for the Blind points to a remarkable action taken by the
convention as a whole to demonstrate peaceably but unmistakably the
discontent of the organized blind with the exploitive labor
practices of the Society's sheltered workshop, in which blind
employees were forced to work at less (sometimes much less) than
the minimum wage. The NFB's dispute with this workshop agency had
persisted for nearly a decade, both in the press and in the courts.
Convening in Minneapolis the home of the Society and its workshop
the Federation decided to adjourn the convention for several hours
one day in order to demonstrate its case en masse against the
Minneapolis Society. This is how the  Monitor  later described the 
Minneapolis March :

      More than 2,000 conventioneers left the hall in an orderly
fashion, collected signs outside the hotel, and began to march
through the streets toward the Minneapolis Society for the Blind
chanting and singing as they went:

       50,000 blind guys can't be wrong!  We'll speak for
ourselves!  NAC, NAC get off our back!  MSB hurts the blind! 

      Federationists who could not walk traveled to the Minneapolis
Society on the bus and joined in the demonstration. Marchers
traveled along Hennepin Avenue for several blocks before reaching
the Minneapolis Society building. Windows along the way were
crowded with curious onlookers. Pedestrians in the streets seemed
surprised and interested in reading the signs.

      When we reached the Minneapolis Society for the Blind
headquarters, the press was waiting to meet us. Some of the
reporters were standing with cameras on the roof; others held
microphones in the streets; all were anxious to talk to
Federationists, anyone who would answer questions. Of course, some
of the reporters marched the entire route with us. As the marchers
arrived, Dr. Jernigan and Joyce Scanlan began to tell our story
once again only this time to the public in the city of Minneapolis
over the loud speaker.

      Dr. Jernigan said:  We're here to speak to the Minneapolis
Society for the Blind. Since they won't speak to us around the
conference table, we have to speak to them in the great outdoors
before the public and everybody. By the thousands and the tens of
thousands the blind of this nation have rejected what the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind stands for. Remember the workshop
song. It is truly a folk song that comes from the people:  I've
been workin' in the workshop all the livelong day, and with the
wages that they pay me it's just to pass my time away. 

       Here, look out of your doors, see from behind your walls
what the blind of the nation think of you. Look at us and see if
you think there are just a few of us as you have said. We're going
to show you what the blind are like in our thousands and remember
there are tens of thousands of us back in our home communities
throughout this country. The days of exploitation are coming to an
end.

       The public of this nation will not stand for what you have
done once they know it, and we're going to let them know it! Our
line of march stretches back for blocks. We'll be here, all of us
to see you. 

      The crowd chanted together,  NAC, NAC get off our back. NAC,
NAC get off our back.  And we sang the workshop song, thousands of
people singing together.

      Joyce Scanlan came to the microphone and said:  Hello,
Minneapolis Society for the Blind. The blind of the nation have
come here  en masse  today to speak to you, to tell you that we are
fed up with your paternalism, your custodialism, your lies, your
hypocrisy, and the arrogant, aristocratic way in which you have
treated the blind so condescendingly. We will no longer tolerate
it. We are here to tell you and the public that we will no longer
put up with it. We will go back to court to see the proxies that
you have not allowed us to see up to this point. We will fight you
for violating the court order. We will gain our freedom. We will no
longer be slaves of the Minneapolis Society for the Blind and the
National Accreditation Council. 

      The crowd chanted:  We speak for ourselves. We speak for
ourselves. 

      Dr. Jernigan:  Minneapolis Society, in the name of the blind
of the nation, I speak to you. We have come to the outer walls of
the Minneapolis Society for the Blind. We have come from our farms,
our businesses, our workshops, and our agencies. We have come so
that we might demonstrate our determination to be free. For four
long decades we have struggled to throw off the yoke of bondage
which has made us slaves to subminimum wages and substandard lives.
We have battled the broom shops, mastered the mattress shops, and
rejected the sweat shops. Through our sacrifices, our turmoil, and
our scars, we have climbed close to the final plateau on the
stairway to freedom. We have rejected the workshop tyranny,
repudiated the workshop system, and refused to obey our workshop
bosses. We are confident, self-reliant individuals willing to give
as well as receive.

       Through our trials we have learned the value of freedom. We
have paid the price for first-class citizenship, and we're not
willing to settle for second-class status under control of
third-class masters. We have come today from throughout this nation
to sustain our march toward freedom, to renew our climb up the
stairway to first-class citizenship. We are here by the thousands
representing the tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands,
to reject the custodial, repressive attitudes and programs of the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind.

       Our message is clear and unmistakable. It is directed to the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind. It is intended as a response to
the National Accreditation Council (NAC)- American Foundation for
the Blind (AFB)-American Council of the Blind (ACB) combine. You
have declared war on the blind of this nation. You have rejected
reason. You have determined that character assassination is your
only alternative to partnership and participation with the blind in
society. Your time is past; your present is perplexed; and our
future is not in your hands.

       The top level of the stairway to freedom is just ahead of
us. We say to the Minneapolis Society for the Blind: You can
neither stop us nor dull our momentum. We have come to your gates
to tell you this: We are simply no longer willing to  be 
second-class citizens. We have said it to you before. You wouldn't
listen to us. We tried to talk to you. You wouldn't talk to us. We
are now here today to tell you as forcefully as we can: We do know
who we are, and we will never go back. This is the message we leave
with you, Minneapolis Society. Think about it, and see where you
get with the public in this community from now on. Also talk to
your colleagues in NAC throughout the country and the American
Foundation for the Blind, and let us know how you fare in the war
you have declared on the blind. We would've chosen peace, but you
wouldn't have it that way. Very well, we are prepared on your terms
to come forth and tell you we stand forth to meet you. We want good
will, and we want no strife and confrontation, but we're not going
to be second-class, and you can't make us be. That is the message
we have to bring to you and the only message we have to bring to
you. 

      This statement was interrupted repeatedly and loudly with
prolonged cheers.

      As Federationists returned to the meeting hall, we were
tired, hot, and hungry. We knew we had accomplished something very
important and very worthwhile and hardly noticed how we felt.
President Jernigan and Ralph Sanders told the convention that all
four TV stations had covered the march and many radio stations had
been there as well. Joyce Scanlan said that she hoped we had taught
the Society something of the truth of our statements about
blindness.

      She said:  Jesse Rosten expresses his philosophy on blindness
something like this: They say that blindness is only a
characteristic, well here are the keys to my car, now give me a
ride home.  President Jernigan asked if he is sighted, and Joyce
answered that he is. Apparently Jesse Rosten thinks driving is the
only way to get anywhere.

      President Jernigan said:  My answer to that is: Here's my
Braillewriter, write me a speech. (Loud cheering from the
audience.) It may be easier to get a driver for the car than a
writer for a speech. 

      Joyce Scanlan continued:  I want to tell you about something
that the Minneapolis Society brags about that I think you'll like
to hear. The State Services for the Blind here contracts with the
Society for the rehab services that we all get. State rehab pays
75% of the cost of those programs. The Society has to make up the
rest of the cost from some other program. They brag that in the
workshop they have between 26 and 27% profit, and they boast that
that profit is used for subsidizing the rehab program. Yet, they
cannot pay their blind workers the minimum wage. 

      The fortieth annual convention of the National Federation of
the Blind will be remembered by those who attended for the
demonstration at the Minneapolis Society for the Blind. Someone
raised the question: How can it be militant to do something so
productive and really constructive? We knew we were fighting, but
no blood was shed. We knew we had won the battle in Minneapolis on
July 1 and 2. If what we did was militant, so be it. It was
necessary, and victory sounded in the voices of the marchers.

     The marchers in that purposeful parade felt that they were
making history; the Federationists attending the fortieth
anniversary convention felt that they were witnessing history; and
the delegates and guests at the convention banquet felt that they
were a part of history. Their President himself a figure of
historic proportions, a mover and shaker of such undeniable impact
as to have become a legend in his time fully understood the
historicity of the moment and made it the subject of his banquet
address:  Blindness: The Lessons of History.  As he had done in
other presidential orations, Jernigan recalled the background of
powerlessness and poverty from which the movement had sprung forty
years before, and compared it with the affluence and influence of
the present day emphasizing that the history of the organized blind
was not something that happened to them but something that they 
made  happen. But he also pointed out that their positive action
upon the world was bringing about an equal and opposite reaction of
negativity in the form of a concerted combination of hostile agency
forces dedicated to the sabotage and ultimate demolition of the
organized blind movement.  Led by the American Foundation for the
Blind,  he said,  this alliance consists of NAC; our breakaway
splinter group, the American Council of the Blind; the Affiliated
Leadership League of and for the Blind; and a handful of other
would-be custodians and keepers. They have interlocked their
boards, concerted their actions, pooled their hundreds of millions
of dollars of publicly contributed funds and tax money, and
undertaken the deliberate and calculated destruction of independent
organization and self-expression on the part of the blind. 

     But Jernigan expressed confidence that the organized blind
would prevail again as they had overcome before against the massed
hosts of repression, reaction, and regression:  We shall prevail
against NAC and the other custodial agencies; we shall prevail
against social exclusion and discrimination; and we shall prevail
against those few in our own movement who would destroy it with
bitterness and strife. We are stronger and more determined than we
have ever been, and we have learned well the lessons of history. 

     The full text of the 1980 banquet address follows:

                BLINDNESS: THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

      Napoleon, in one of his more expansive moments, is said to
have quipped:  History is merely a legend agreed upon.  Queen
Elizabeth I, reportedly squelched Mary Queen of Scots with the
regal comment:  No, history will  not  vindicate you, for I will
write it.  In other words, according to this view, history is only
a myth and a fable.

      But there are those who think otherwise. A time-honored
cliche proclaims, with almost mystic authority:  History repeats
itself, and those who do not learn it are doomed to relive it.  The
very qualities which make this pronouncement so attractive are also
the ones which make it so dangerous as a standard of conduct. Its
slick phraseology and apparent logic divert attention from its
oversimplification. History does, indeed, repeat itself but never
precisely, and never exactly. There is always a new twist, a
different nuance, an added element. For one thing, the past event
itself (the one which is currently in the process of being
repeated) is now a factor. Its former occurrence is part of the
pattern. It has left its mark and skewed the picture. Those who
fail to recognize this truth can never effectively learn the
lessons of history. History can give us a sense of heritage and
broaden our perspective; it can help us understand and cope with
the present; and it can assist us in predicting the future.

      Tonight (in July of 1980) we stand at the threshold of the
fifth decade of our organization. As we look back to the past and
call up our heritage so that we may deal with the present and plan
for the future, let us bear in mind what the poet Tennyson said in
the middle of the nineteenth century:  I am a part of all that I
have met.  Let us also remember that history has its cycles, its
not quite repetitions, and its patterns and lessons for those who
can read and understand.

      When the blind came to organize in 1940, the situation was as
bleak as it could possibly be. It was bright enough to create hope
and dark enough to make that hope seem impossible. Dr. Jacobus
tenBroek, the brilliant scholar and constitutional lawyer who
founded our movement and led it for the first quarter century,
summed up the early years as only he could have done it:

      The paramount problems of our first decade, the 1940s, [he
said] were not so much qualitative as quantitative: we had the
philosophy and the programs, but we lacked the membership and the
means. The workers were few and the cupboard was bare.

      Each month as we received our none-too-bountiful salary as a
young instructor at the University of Chicago Law School, Hazel and
I would distribute it among the necessaries of life: food,
clothing, rent, Federation stamps, mimeograph paper, ink, and other
supplies. So did we share our one-room apartment. The mimeograph
paper took far more space in our closet than did our clothes. We
had to move the mimeograph machine before we could let down the
wall bed to retire at night. If on a Sunday we walked along
Chicago's lake front for an hour, four or five fewer letters were
written, dropping our output for that day to fewer than
twenty-five.

     The decade of the forties was a time of building: and build we
did, from a scattering of seven state affiliates at our first
convention to more than four times that number in 1950. In the
decade of the forties we proved our organizational capacity,
established our representative character, initiated legislative
programs on the state and national levels, and spoke with the
authority and voice of the blind speaking for themselves.1

      This is the way Dr. tenBroek summed up the first decade. The
second decade, the 1950s, was a time of both triumph and trouble.
It began with hope and momentum. It ended with internal strife and
a civil war. By the mid-fifties we had forty- seven state
affiliates, money in the treasury, and power in the halls of
Congress. In the fifties we established our magazine, the  Braille
Monitor , and began to outline to ourselves and to others the
distinctive nature of what we were and what we intended to be. By
the end of the decade we were so divided and demoralized that our
very existence as a continuing and viable movement seemed highly
doubtful.

      Dr. tenBroek recognized, as did the rest of us in that corps
of leaders he trained in the fifties, that it was no mere accident
or coincidence that our growing independence and influence were
followed by furious attacks from without by the agencies, and
defections and strife from within by people who had been our
colleagues in the movement. The governmental and private agencies
(the American Foundation for the Blind, the sheltered shops, and
the rehabilitation and social work establishment) had money and
position and prestige. They used these resources lavishly not as
instruments to aid the blind but as weapons to fight us and to
protect their vested interests. They intimidated, offered jobs and
positions to our potential leaders, promised services and rewards,
threatened reprisals, and did everything else in their power to
break our spirit and crush our determination. They complained to
the post office and tried to discredit our mailings and fund
appeals. They exploited the vulnerability of blind vendors and
sheltered shop workers. They coerced and promised and rewarded. The
purpose was clear: It was nothing less than the complete and total
destruction of the National Federation of the Blind. In the face of
such pressure it is not surprising that strains developed from
within that what might, in normal times, have been minor problems
of thwarted ambition or temperamental difference became major
conflict and civil war.

      That first tide of Federationism and independence (which,
during the fifties, lapped higher and higher up the walls of the
agency establishment and the bastions of custodialism and
exclusion) fell back upon itself at the end of the decade, spent
and exhausted.

      But the Federation did not die. The movement did not
disintegrate. Too much was at stake. Too many lives had been
touched. The blind had, for the first time in their existence,
sensed the possibility of first-class status and they would simply
not be denied. We knew (all of us not just the leaders but also the
rank-and-file: the old, the young; the educated, the uneducated
every one of us) that what we had so painfully achieved must not be
surrendered, that self-organization (once lost) might not come
again for a generation or a century. Those of us who were left in
the movement closed ranks, fought where we could, encouraged each
other, remembered our heritage, and marched toward the future. We
understood from first-hand experience what the black demonstrators
meant when they surrounded the factory gates and shouted with
mingled hope and desperation:

      I go to my grave; Before I be a slave.

      The decade of the sixties was almost the exact reverse of the
fifties. It began in despair and ended in triumph. The Federation
drew itself together, shook off the civil war, and began to
rebuild. It was during the sixties that we lost our great leader,
Dr. tenBroek, but he had done his work well. The progress
continued. By the end of the decade we were bigger, stronger,
better financed, and more united than we had ever been.

      Perhaps the sixties can best be capsulized by the opening
verse of our  Battle Song,  which was composed in 1964. It is known
by every Federationist:

      Blind eyes have seen the vision of the Federation way; New
White Cane legislation brings the dawn of a new day; Right of the
blind to organize is truly here to stay; Our cause goes marching
on.

      And our cause did go marching on, swinging into the
seventies. And what a decade it was! At the beginning of the
seventies we were saying to the world,  We know who we are ; and by
the end we were confidently adding,  And we will never go back!  In
the seventies the tide of Federationism rose higher than it had
ever reached before far beyond the peak of the fifties. It was
during this decade that we completed the transition from a
scattered confederacy to a single, united national movement
powerful, self-assured, and full of destiny. We knew that whatever
happened to the blind in the years ahead, the responsibility was
ours. Our future, for the first time in history, was in our own
hands. Despite the odds, we could do with it what we would. If we
had the intelligence and the guts, we could win first-class status
and the full rights of citizenship. We did not shrink from the
challenge. We welcomed it. In fact, we demanded it. Our declaration
of independence and purpose left no doubt as to the course we
intended to follow.  We want no strife or confrontation,  we said, 
but we will do what we have to do. We are simply no longer willing
to be second-class citizens. They tell us that there is no
discrimination and that the blind are not a minority; but we know
who we are, and we will never go back! 

      More and more in the seventies we discovered the truth about
our heritage and history, and drew strength and pride from what we
learned. Our annual conventions were the largest meetings of blind
persons ever held anywhere in the world, and (with affiliates in
every state in the nation) we came universally to be recognized as
the strongest force in the field of work with the blind.

      Then, the cycles of history began to assume familiar
patterns. Superficially viewed, it was a second run of the 1950s.
As our voice grew louder and our strength increased, so did the
antagonism and fear on the part of the custodial agencies. As early
as the mid-1960s, there were hints and signs of what was to come.
The American Foundation for the Blind, seeing its influence
diminishing, undertook a new tactic to tighten its loosening grip
on the lives of the blind. It announced that it was establishing a
so-called  independent  accrediting system for all groups doing
work with the blind. As a first step, the Foundation appointed what
it called the Commission on Standards and Accreditation of Services
for the Blind (COMSTAC). The Commission was to hold meetings,
appoint subcommittees, and arrive at a  consensus  for the entire
field. Certain blind people (mostly agency officials or persons who
were, as the saying goes,  unaffiliated  and, therefore, largely
uninformed) were brought to the meetings; but tight control was
carefully maintained.

      When COMSTAC had finished its work and written its documents,
it appointed NAC (the National Accreditation Council for Agencies
Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped). The accreditation was,
of course, to be purely voluntary and altogether impartial. The
American Foundation for the Blind provided NAC's first executive
director, gave most of the money, prepared to control our lives for
at least the rest of the century, declared the whole process
democratic, and said it was all very  professional  as, indeed, in
a way it was.

      By the middle of the seventies it was clear that the
principal issues of the fifties were again to be put to the test.
It was the old question: Did we have the right to run our own
lives, or did the agencies have the right to do it for us? As the
decade advanced, the struggle exceeded in bitterness anything which
had ever before been seen in the field of work with the blind. Many
of the agencies worked with us and shared our aspirations, but
others (the reactionary custodians in the American Foundation-NAC
combine) abandoned all but the shallowest pretense of dignity and
so-called  professionalism  and tried by brute force to beat the
blind into line. Especially did they concentrate their hatred upon
the National Federation of the Blind and its leaders.

      But the 1970s were not the 1950s, and 1980 is not 1960. The
custodial agencies we face today are not the agencies of twenty
years ago, nor are we the blind of that generation. We are stronger
and more knowledgeable than we were then, and the agencies which
oppose us (of course, many do not) are more desperate, more
frightened, and more shaken in their confidence. Even the most
reactionary are now forced to give at least lip service to consumer
participation and the rights of the blind.

      1960 and 1980 have many similarities, but they also have
distinct and significant differences. For one thing, the forces
which oppose us today have (probably because of our greater
strength and their greater desperation) combined in a closer
alliance than was the case twenty years ago. Led by the American
Foundation for the Blind, this alliance consists of NAC; our
break-away splinter group, the American Council of the Blind; the
Affiliated Leadership League of and for the Blind; and a handful of
other would-be custodians and keepers. They have interlocked their
boards, concerted their actions, pooled their hundreds of millions
of dollars of publicly contributed funds and tax money, and
undertaken the deliberate and calculated destruction of 
independent  organization and self- expression on the part of the
blind.

      If what I say seems exaggerated, consider a prime example
right here in this city where we are meeting. Consider the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind and its president, Dick
Johnstone. The Minneapolis Society for the Blind accepts federal
and state funds and solicits charitable contributions from the
public-at-large all in the name of helping the blind. Mr. Johnstone
(the Society's president) supposedly serves without any
compensation whatsoever, purely as a matter of public service and
civic duty. Yet, last fall at the NAC meeting in Oklahoma City Mr.
Johnstone made a speech about the National Federation of the Blind
(the largest organization of blind people in this country a group
one would think he would particularly love and cherish since his
purpose is to help the blind and promote our interests). Here are
some of the things Mr. Johnstone said:

      All NAC needs now is a few more teeth and the money to apply
them. Money can come to NAC the same way it was lost: with 
pressure!  NAC has a policy right now, in hand, ready to go. They
can help you in any problems with the NFB without board action. Dr.
Bleeker [NAC's executive director] has that authority, right now,
unlike other agencies who have had to fiddle around and go to their
boards. Believe me, the Minneapolis Society for the Blind is going
to have a policy the same way: any help you need, you'll get it out
of us. Anything we needed [from NAC] we got. One thing we did
learn, and we have researched this a little; and I hope you will,
too, to prove it to yourselves: fight! Negotiate? Never! The only
thing the National Federation of the Blind respects is strength.
The power is with us right now, if we will use our heads and use
it. If we unite and help one another, as you united to help us, we
can't lose. It's time we go on the offensive, quit hiding our heads
in the sand. Programs and agencies banding together in strength can
only secure success for NAC and all other legitimate agencies. The
National Federation of the Blind is going to come back and fight
harder than ever, now. The pressure is on us, the legitimate blind,
to counter the new attacks that are sure to come.

      How does one account for this bitter tirade? Is this the talk
of a dedicated volunteer working devotedly for a  professional 
service agency, which has only the well-being of the blind at
heart? And what does he mean by the  legitimate blind?  Is Mr.
Johnstone (in addition to damning our morals and denying our right
to exist) also questioning our paternity? This is not the language
of service and love, but of slander and war. It smacks of dark
alleys, black-jacks, and hoodlumism. Why?

      Perhaps the answer is not so difficult after all. Possibly
there is a perfectly plausible explanation, one which may explain
not only the conduct of Mr. Johnstone and the Minneapolis Society
for the Blind but also the behavior of many of the others who
attack and condemn us with such spleen and irrational hatred.

      First, let us consider Mr. Johnstone personally this
dedicated, unpaid volunteer. He has been president of the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind for many years. The  Minneapolis
Daily American  in its June 2, 1972, edition carried an article
headlined:  Charity Group Refuses To Talk/Blind Are Being Kept In
The Dark/President Of Non-Profit Society Given Whopping Contract. 
The article says in part:

      The Minneapolis Society for the Blind has refused to answer
questions regarding bids on a federally assisted construction
project.

      The question arose when the  Daily American  learned that
Richard Johnstone, president of the Society, also is president of
the South Side Plumbing and Heating Company, which has the
mechanical contract on the project. Frank A. Church, a U.S.
official in the Chicago office of the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare said that  special problems  are raised if a
member of the board bids on such a contract.

      Perhaps the fact that we of the National Federation of the
Blind exposed and publicized this situation helps explain Mr.
Johnstone's attitude toward us. Some professionalism! Some
volunteer! It may also help explain the attitude of the Minneapolis
Society in general. But there is more: In the early 1970s the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind had a thirty-member board of
directors, none of whom was blind. According to the by-laws anybody
who made a cash contribution was, thereby, a member. When the blind
tried to become members, the Board of the Society declared that 
all  members were expelled and that, in the future, nobody would be
considered a member except those on the Board. As Federationists
know, we took the matter to court in the early 1970s; and after
some seven years of battle and delay, we forced the Minneapolis
Society to abide by the state law and honor the provisions of its
own articles of incorporation. The courts made the Society accept
blind members and hold an election. The issue is still not finished
and awaits further action by the courts. Is it surprising that Mr.
Johnstone and the Minneapolis Society hate us and wish we would
cease to exist? Not really.

      But there is still more. There is the Kettner case. Lawrence
Kettner was  evaluated  so that the Society could get an exemption
and wiggle out of paying him the federal minimum wage. To say the
least, the  evaluation  was unusual. Kettner was evaluated over a
period of fourteen days, but the studies of his work were made only
on the third, fourth, sixth, and eighth days. His duties were
changed; the equipment was faulty; and there were delays in
bringing him supplies. Even so, Kettner's productivity increased
markedly (from 49% of normal production to 79%), showing the
unfairness of not giving him time studies after the eighth day of
the fourteen day period. He says he was called into the director's
office and badgered into signing a statement that he was capable of
only 75% of normal production. He says he was told he would not be
paid for the work he had done if he did not sign. He needed the
money. He signed. Even as this was happening, he secured a job in
private industry at a rate above the minimum wage.

      We publicized the Kettner case far and wide, and we told the
Department of Labor about it. Yes, I think I can understand why Mr.
Johnstone and the Minneapolis Society for the Blind hate the
organized blind movement and it has nothing to do with so-called
high-toned  professionalism.  It is a matter of money and cover-up
and exploitation. It is as simple and as despicable as that.

      As to Mr. Johnstone's statement concerning the  legitimate
blind,  I would say this: He is not blind, so I do not see how that
part applies; and as to the question of legitimacy, I would think
(in the circumstances) the Minneapolis Society for the Blind would
not want to discuss it. The matter of unblemished paternity is a
sensitive issue. So much, then, for Mr. Johnstone and his talk
about the  legitimate blind. 

      But what about the others who attack us, the others in the
American Foundation for the Blind-NAC combine? Are their reasons
for hating us similar to those of Mr. Johnstone and his Minneapolis
Society? Let us call them off and examine their  legitimacy. 
First, the Cleveland Society for the Blind. It is locked in a
battle with blind snack bar operators. In 1972 the director of the
Society told the blind operators that they must contribute
specified amounts to the United Torch Campaign or face dismissal.
Under the Federal Randolph-Sheppard Program, Ohio was authorized to
take as a service charge no more than three percent from the gross
earnings of operators, but the Cleveland Society was taking eight
percent. This could amount to as much as half of the net earnings
of an operator. Moreover, as a condition of employment each blind
operator was forced to sign an agreement giving the Cleveland
Society unbelievable power over his or her personal life. The
operator had to agree (and I quote) to:  have an annual physical
check-up; eat a balanced diet; obtain adequate rest commensurate
with the hours to be worked at a snack bar; bathe daily; shampoo
frequently; use appropriate deodorants; wear clean underclothing;
and wear comfortable shoes. 

      We in the Federation (at least, most of us do) believe in
regular bathing and good personal hygiene, but we are not willing
(as a condition of employment) to have somebody cram it down our
throats tell us how much rest to get, what kind of food to eat,
what kind of deodorants to use, and when to change our underwear.
In the newspapers the director of the Cleveland Society defended
his rules by saying that  Blind people have to be especially
careful. 

      And, of course, he is right. We do have to be careful of
people like him. We (you and I, the National Federation of the
Blind) took this director and his custodial agency to court and
publicized what he was doing. The battle still continues. Is it any
wonder that the Cleveland Society for the Blind and its director
hate the organized blind movement and wish we would cease to exist?
Not really. Yet, they tell us that there is no discrimination and
that the blind are not a minority; but we know who we are, and we
will never go back.

      The Cincinnati Association for the Blind and the Houston
Light-house for the Blind have refused to comply with orders from
the National Labor Relations Board that they permit their blind
workers to organize. We stimulated those organizing efforts and are
now fighting these two agencies in the Federal courts. Is it
surprising that they hate us and brand us as  militants  and 
trouble-makers?  Not at all. How could it be otherwise?

      The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind used every tactic it
could (including the firing of blind organizers) to prevent blind
employees from forming a union. We took the matter to the National
Labor Relations Board, and we picketed. It is hardly necessary to
add that the Chicago Lighthouse is a principal leader in the
combine which attacks us. We picketed the Evansville Association
for the Blind and told the public what the Association was doing
(all in the name of charity, and with publicly contributed funds)
to exploit and hurt blind people. We picketed the Columbia
Lighthouse for the Blind in Washington, D.C., when it was having a
gala charity ball attended by leading socialites. We told these
socialites and the public-at-large how the Lighthouse  really 
operates, and what it is doing to the lives of blind people. Agency
officials in Florida and Alabama have been criminally indicted. All
of these groups (the Minneapolis Society for the Blind, the
Cleveland Society, the Cincinnati Association, the Houston
Lighthouse, the Chicago Lighthouse, the Association, the Columbia
Lighthouse, and the Alabama and Florida agencies) have two things
in common: They exploit the blind, and they are all accredited by
NAC.

      Then there is New York New York, the home territory and the
special turf of the American Foundation for the Blind and NAC. In
1978 there was a state audit of Industries for the Blind of New
York, Inc. The audit showed that this organization (which was the
principal governmental procurement agency for blind-made products
in the state) spent its money on liquor and lavish parties and
expensive cars and high salaries and God knows what else which the
average human being would consider to be totally unrelated to the
welfare of the blind. And what is Industries for the Blind of New
York, Inc.? Well, it is a board consisting of the representatives
of ten agencies,  seven of which are accredited by NAC . They are
flagships in the NAC fleet. Wesley Sprague, director of the New
York Association for the Blind, is (of all things) the long-time
chairman of NAC's Commission on Standards. Joseph Larkin, director
of the Industrial Home for the Blind of Brooklyn, is a NAC board
member. Peter Salmon, the Industrial Home's former director, is
NAC's past president.

      There are some five hundred organizations and groups in this
country which might conceivably choose to be accredited by NAC.
Yet, by January of 1980 (a decade and a half after its formation)
NAC was forced to admit that it had only seventy-nine agencies in
its fold. But let me hasten to add that these are very special
agencies. Our best information indicates that they probably have a
total combined wealth of somewhere in the neighborhood of a half a 
billion  dollars. Think about it! half a  billion  dollars! A few
of them may truly be service-oriented and dedicated to high
standards and the best interests of the blind but there are the
others, the ones that Mr. Johnstone would presumably call the 
legitimate blind.  I have detailed for you the conduct of sixteen
of these. Sixteen! More than twenty percent of NAC's entire
membership. And there is evidence which could be brought against
many of the rest.

      NAC: What a sorry, miserable spectacle! It is not a concern
for  professionalism  which is the bur under the saddle of some of
these people. It is the fear that we may expose their real
concerns: the making of money, the lapping of liquor, the lust for
luxury, and the push for power.

      No, it is not surprising that the American Foundation for the
Blind-NAC combine hates us and that they are determined to destroy
the National Federation of the Blind. We are the principal threat
to their master plan their effort to gain complete control over the
lives of every blind man, woman, and child in this nation their
hope to live happily in luxury ever after. To speak of  legitimacy 
in the same breath with NAC is reminiscent of what Franklin
Roosevelt said in 1936 about mentioning the Depression in the
presence of the Republican Party. It is like showing a rope to the
family of a man who has been hanged.

      As I have already said, there are both similarities and
differences between the 1950s and the 1970s between 1960 and 1980.
In the fifties the external attacks brought severe internal
conflict. In the late seventies we saw some of the same tendencies
but even though the pressures have been greater this time around,
the dissension among us has been minimal, giving testimony to our
increased strength and maturity as a movement. We are a part of all
that we met in the 1950s. We learned and history does not quite
repeat itself.

      There is also a new element, one which was not present twenty
years ago. In the fifties we had not yet become strong enough to
get very many of our own people appointed to positions of
leadership in the agencies. By the seventies the situation was
different. In 1976 and 1977 we came within a vote or two of having
a majority in the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind.
A number of our own members had been named as state directors, and
many of the other state directors were and are supportive of our
cause.

      However, there was a problem, one from which we must learn.
Just because an individual calls himself or herself a
Federationist, that does not necessarily mean that he or she is
immune to the temptations of agency power the ability to control
lives and the urge to equate one's own interests with those of the
blind consumers. Increasingly in the seventies we became strong
enough to bring reform to a growing number of agencies and to play
a deciding role in determining who their directors would be. Quite
naturally, our people (having suffered so grievously from the poor
service and custodial treatment dished out by the agencies) wanted
to have Federationists as directors. Sometimes we made bad choices.
It was almost as if, out of reaction to the miserable service we
had received, we said:  Give us a Federationist any Federationist
just so long as we can throw off the yoke of what we have had.  It
was a mistake one for which we are now paying.

      Some of these so-called Federationists had hardly been
appointed to office before they tried to take over the affiliates
in their states and make them mere auxiliaries and fronts for their
own vested interests. They put aside their loyalties and principles
and seemed to forget that they had obtained their jobs as part of
a national movement the overall struggle of the blind as a people
to be free. They forgot (if, indeed, they had ever truly believed)
what it is that has brought us as far as we have come on the road
to first-class status and the full rights of citizenship. No
individual or state organization no local group or single person
could have done it alone. It required the combined effort of us
all. It still requires that combined effort if we are to finish the
journey. In its absence none of us (not a single blind human being)
will go the rest of the way to equality and freedom. We should have
been more selective in supporting candidates for agency leadership
but we are a part of all that we have met. We have learned.
Fortunately we are strong enough to absorb the shock of the lesson.


      We will not make the same mistake again. In the future the
primary test of whether we will support an individual for a
position of leadership in an agency will not be whether that person
is called a Federationist but what kind of philosophy and
commitment the individual demonstrates. Of course, this has always
been our concern, but the emphasis is now different and the care
more thorough. Better a neutral (one with the basics of a good
philosophy, who is willing to work with us in partnership to win
our support) than a Federationist in name only (one who takes it
for granted that, because of his or her reputation as a
Federationist even a strong Federationist we will automatically be
supportive, regardless of the agency's conduct or behavior). We
have come too far on the road of liberation to turn back now. We
are not willing to exchange one master for another, even if the new
would-be custodian has been our colleague or uses the name 
Federationist.  We will say it as often as we must: We want no
strife or confrontation, but we will do what we have to do. They
tell us that the blind are not a minority and that there is no
discrimination; but we know who we are, and we will never go back.

      As Federationists know, I get a constant stream of letters
from blind people from all over the country. Some of these letters
are highly literate. Others are not. Taken together, they show the
pattern and give the details of what it is like to be blind in
America today. They tell of the hopes and aspirations and problems
which the blind confront. I want to share with you a brief passage
from one of these letters. It is from a woman in her early fifties.
In page after page she cries out with the heartache of a life of
frustration. Here is part of what she says:

      I went to the state rehabilitation agency because I was
seeking employment. I believe I was referred there by the
employment service. I couldn't understand why no one wanted to hire
me. The reason given most frequently was lack of experience. But I
was young.  How does one get that experience?  I kept asking
myself. And the rehabilitation agency could do nothing to help me.
I am sure that each employer I saw felt that I should get my
experience some place else.

      This part of her letter refers to her early twenties. When
she comes to the present (the time of her early fifties) she says:

      The rehabilitation agency can still do nothing to help me. My
efforts to obtain employment are the same continuing story. I won't
drag it out any further except to say that I have met with repeated
failure. I haven't enough skill to get a typing job, and apparently
I haven't the training or skill (or is it that I can't get the
opportunity?) to do anything else. I never have enough experience
to compete, but as was the case when I was young, how can I get
that experience if no one will give me a chance to try? And (now
that I am in my fifties) who is going to give me the chance to try
with my lack of experience?

      I feel already as though I am in forced retirement. I shudder
to think how the actual retirement years will be. I am not sure
where to go from here whether I should try to change my life, or
merely be resigned to the fact that this is probably how it will be
from now on.

      I am sure that my story is not new to you. You must hear
something like it almost every day. Perhaps you can measure my
despair by the number of pages in this letter. I see my life ebbing
away and I have yet to find my niche to occupy. This inactivity and
lack of a life's work is not how I would choose to spend what is
left of my productive years. I dreamed of the future when I was
young. Now, I look around me sometimes and say,  Dear God, this is
the future.  I'm living it now. Perhaps it is the only future I
will ever have.

      How can I answer such a letter? What can I say to ease the
burden or lighten the load? Day by day the hope has been killed,
the spirit has been crushed, and the dream destroyed. Yet, NAC and
Mr. Johnstone tell us that all will be well if we will only leave
it to them and their agencies. All they need, they say, is a few
more teeth and enough money to crush the NFB. How twisted! How
pathetic! In their luxury and so-called  professionalism  they do
not even know of the existence of the deprivation and the misery of
the daily struggles and problems of the ordinary blind individual.

      As we stand at the door of the fifth decade of our
organization, we must thoroughly understand the lessons of history,
for the eighties will be a time of trial and decision. They will
require all that we have in the way of ability and devotion and
courage. We must work not only for ourselves but also for the blind
of the next generation, for they are our children. If not
biologically, they are surely morally our children, and we must
make certain that they have the chance for better lives and fuller
opportunities than we have had.

      When we talk of history, we usually think of the past but
what will future historians say of us of you and me of the National
Federation of the Blind in 1980? What will they say of our struggle
for freedom and our battle with NAC, the American Foundation for
the Blind, and the other custodial agencies? As I said in 1973,
future historians can only record the events which we make come
true.

      They can help us be remembered, but they cannot help us
dream. That we must do for ourselves. They can give us acclaim, but
not guts and courage. They can give us recognition and
appreciation, but not determination or compassion or good judgment.
We must either find those things for ourselves or not have them at
all.

      We have come a long way together in this movement. Some of us
are veterans, going back to the forties; others are new recruits,
fresh to the ranks. Some are young; some are old. Some are
educated, others not. It makes no difference. In everything that
matters we are one; we are the movement; we are the blind. 

      If we falter or dishonor our heritage, we will betray not
only ourselves but those who went before us and those who come
after. But, of course, we will not fail. Whatever the cost, we
shall pay it. Whatever the sacrifice, we shall make it. We cannot
turn back or stand still. Instead, we must go forward.2

      We shall prevail against NAC and the other custodial
agencies; we shall prevail against social exclusion and
discrimination; and we shall prevail against those few in our own
movement who would destroy it with bitterness and strife. We are
stronger and more determined now than we have ever been, and we
have learned well the lessons of history. My brothers and my
sisters, the future is ours. Come! Join me in the battle line, and
we will make it all come true.

FOOTNOTES

      1. Dr. Jacobus tenBroek,  The Federation at Twenty-Five:
Postview and Preview,  August, 1965,  Braille Monitor , pp. 87 and
88.

      2. Dr. Kenneth Jernigan,  Blindness: Is History Against Us? 
September, 1973,  Braille Monitor , pp. 10 and 11.

      Turning the Corner

     The opening years of the decade of the eighties, which were
also the early years of the second Jernigan presidency, might be
characterized as the  Era of Rising Expectations  among the blind
of the country. No longer was it sufficient merely to have a job if
that job was in a sheltered workshop. No longer was it good enough
just to receive vocational training if that training was in  blind
trades  like basket weaving, chair caning, and broom making. No
longer could the airlines arbitrarily prohibit blind passengers
from sitting in the designated rows; the blind would not be moved.
No longer could the entertainment media casually portray blind
persons as bungling, confused, and ridiculous; they could try, but
they would regret it. These were only a few of the practices whose
prejudicial character had been exposed and their practitioners
called to account. But it was not the agencies and professional
elites of the blindness system who had rung the bell and sent the
message. It was the organized blind, the members of the National
Federation, who dared to disturb the universe dared to talk plainly
in polite company (such as conventions, government hearings, and
NAC meetings) dared to risk displeasure, verbal abuse, and physical
intimidation dared, in short, to take the heat. Only the organized
blind had the nerve (the unmitigated gall) to picket and march and
demonstrate on the public streets, to shout their grievances from
the housetops, to say again and again, in one idiom or another:  We
know who we are, and we will never go back!  or:  We  are  the
blind. We  are  the people. We speak for ourselves! 

     It was not that way always, of course. In fact it had not been
that way very long. Even after the founding of the National
Federation in 1940, the lives of blind men and women were still
ringed around with insecurity, their movements tentative, their
brains washed. But the coming of the NFB had opened the door and
let in the air of freedom the breath of opportunity the impossible
dream of equality. The new age had begun, as Kenneth Jernigan was
to say, and the blind had turned a corner of time. After that they
would never turn back.

     That was part of the message President Jernigan delivered to
the Federation and to the world in 1981 at the National Convention
in Baltimore. He called his speech  Blindness: The Corner of Time, 
and he spoke of critical junctures and turning points in the
history of the organized blind.  At first the Federation was small
and ignored,  he said.  Most of the agencies tried to deny its
difference, pretending that it was simply another of themselves,
one among many. In some parts of the country our chapters were weak
and our purpose blurred. Sometimes the agencies took control of our
affiliates, bought off the leaders or bribed and threatened.

      But the direction was certain and the trend unmistakable, 
Jernigan declared.  The blind kept joining first by the thousands,
then by the tens of thousands. In the beginning we were weak and
divided. Then came accelerating power and unity. Ultimately we were
fifty thousand members clear in our mission, sure in our purpose,
and firm in our unity: the strongest force in the affairs of the
blind. 

     The organized blind, he said, had turned the corner of time.
But the problem was that not many others in the field had kept pace
with them in their progress and transition; the most reactionary of
the agencies (those that turned back at the corner of time) even
joined forces and pooled their efforts back in the fifties to
resist the organizing efforts of the blind:  Hard though it is to
comprehend or believe, their purpose (which became a veritable
obsession and a principal endeavor) was to make war upon the blind,
the very people they were pledged to serve. Not all of the blind
not the meek or the passive or the ones they could control: these
were needed for show and fundraising. Only the troublemakers the
independents the members of the National Federation of the Blind.
Above everything else, they wanted to destroy the National
Federation of the Blind and its leaders. 

     The NFB's President went on to observe that, when those
destructive efforts failed and the organized blind grew too
powerful to crush, attitudes softened in the blindness system and
numbers of agencies summoned the will and the sensibility to
approach the present and turn the corner of time. These had become
partners and allies of the organized blind, prepared to walk with
them (if not to march with them) and to turn the next corner of
time without looking back. Lagging behind them, he said, were other
agencies with good intentions but poor understanding of the new
reality and the new world; for these there was hope, and toward
these there should be toleration.  But what about the others?  he
went on.  What about NAC and its principal allies? They are not
misinformed or confused, and they are not motivated by good
intentions. They know exactly what they are doing. They have
deliberately and cold-bloodedly set out to ruin our movement and
destroy the reputations and careers of our leaders. 

     Jernigan thereupon proceeded to document and itemize an
incredible succession of accusations, insults, physical assaults,
break-ins, and other episodes of  hooliganism and harassment 
directed against leaders of the organized blind movement at various
levels throughout the country during the years just past incidents
which he charged had all the earmarks of an orchestrated campaign.
But he leveled a blunt warning to all those still filled with hate
and still dwelling mentally amid the straw and broomcorn of the
workhouse, that their time was fast running out:  They will either
learn to respect us and treat us as equal human beings, or they
will go out of business. It is that simple, that definite, and that
final.  And he concluded with these ringing words:

      Upon the rock of Federationism we have built our movement,
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it! For the first
time in history we can play a decisive role in determining our own
destiny. What we in the Federation do during the next decade may
well determine the fate of the blind for a century to come. We have
turned the corner of time, and we live in a newness. My brothers
and my sisters, the future is ours! Come! Join me on the barricades
and we will make it all come true.

     Following is the complete text of the 1981 convention banquet
speech:

                  BLINDNESS: THE CORNER OF TIME
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

      The man was old and senile, and he ate without manners or
grace. His daughter was ashamed and ordered him to eat in a corner
apart from the others. There came a day when he broke his plate,
and the daughter was angry.  My son shall not see such disgusting
behavior,  she said.  Since you eat like a pig, you shall be
treated like a pig. In the future you shall eat in the yard from a
trough.  Her son was five, the thing in life she loved most. He
asked for a hammer and boards.

       For what purpose?  she asked.

       To build you a trough, he said, so that I may feed you when
you are old. 

      So it has been through the generations, each teaching the
next and then doubling back on itself for reinforcement change
coming slow and learning difficult. Yet, there come bends in the
road, shifts in direction. It is not inevitable that each
generation take hammer and boards to build troughs for the next.
Among times there is a time that turns a corner, and everything
this side of it is new. Times do not go backward.1 For the blind
the corner has been turned, and the time is now.

      When the National Federation of the Blind came into being in
1940, its means were limited, but its mission was clear. There were
already many organizations and groups in the field (residential
schools, Braille and talking book libraries, sheltered shops, and
governmental and private agencies) and some of them had blind
directors. But their mission was not our mission; their purpose was
not our purpose.

      The National Federation of the Blind was altogether
different. It did not operate service programs or provide training.
It served as a monitor for those who did. It was a check and
balance, a watchdog. And it was something more: It was a means
whereby the blind could come together in local chapters, state
assemblies, and National Convention to discuss problems and take
concerted action. Underlying everything else was a single,
overriding article of faith and belief, so compelling as to focus
our purpose and cement our unity. It was this: We as blind people
have the right (even if we make mistakes) to speak for ourselves;
and no other group or individual no governmental agency, no private
service organization, no charitable foundation has the right to do
it for us.

      The founders of our movement recognized that our principal
problem was not the loss of eyesight not blindness but what people 
thought  about blindness. In other words, the problem was not
physical but social. It manifested itself in the misconceptions and
mistaken ideas of the general public, and since the professionals
in the agencies were part of the public, it manifested itself in
their behavior, as well. The blind, also, were part of the public;
and they, too, were affected. They saw themselves as others saw
them, They tended to accept the public view of their limitations,
and thus did much to make those limitations a reality. The problems
envisioned by the founders of our movement are still very much with
us. But we have turned a corner of time, and there is a newness.

      Last year the California Franchise Tax Board (the arm of
government which deals with state income tax filings) rejected the
forms of many blind taxpayers. Sharon Gold, our California
president, demanded an explanation. She was first told that the
form had been changed and that many sighted people had checked the
wrong box. The blind of California (as is true in many parts of the
country) receive an extra state income tax exemption. Whether this
is good or bad, it is the law, and there is a box on the form for
appropriate checking. The Tax Board officials said that the boxes
had been shifted and that the sighted had not been observant.

      As Sharon probed further, the explanations became less and
less satisfying. When she told the Board that it did not seem
reasonable to reject the tax forms of the blind because of the
carelessness of the sighted, the officials explained that they had
done nothing of the sort. They had, as they put it, used care and 
logic.  They had examined the face sheet of each tax form on which
blindness was checked and had rejected only those showing an
occupation or profession which would obviously be impossible for
the blind. In cases of doubt (and presumably these were few) they
had applied still further  logic.  They had, as a board official
put it, checked the signature to see  if it appeared to have been
signed by a blind person  whatever that may mean.

      Whether Sharon's form was rejected because she is a teacher
(one of the impossible professions) or because she cannot legibly
write her name, the board did not say. Whichever it was, it had
about the same effect. Although we who are blind do not insist on
having our cake and eating it too, we are not willing to go to the
other extreme and pay for our cake and then not have it. If we must
suffer damage to our image (and many feel that we do) because of
the millions of tax forms which proclaim that we need an extra
exemption simply because we are blind, that should be enough. We
should not have to go further and be illegally denied the right to
take the exemption, be charged interest for claiming it, and then
have to submit to false and demeaning statements about us in the
press into the bargain.

      Sharon protested to the Tax Board and the newspapers, and we
took the matter to court, where it is still being litigated and is
now on appeal. Some will say that we are  quibbling ; others that
we are overreacting; and still others that we are militant and
radical. Well, let them. If it is true that the road to hell is
paved with good intentions, it is equally true that the beginning
of that road is usually paved with what are called quibbly
incidents. The big ones come later when the direction is clear, the
pattern well established, and the highway broad and irreversible.
We have turned the corner of time, and we are simply no longer
willing for our road to hell to be paved with other people's good
intentions. The days of second-class status are behind us.

      The California Tax Board's notion that the signature of a
blind person is different from the signature of a sighted person
(and presumably less legible) is widely held. Probably most people
(including many in this room) would accept it without question,
simply as a matter of common sense. Not long ago I stood at a
counter in a bank. I signed a document. My sighted associate said
to the teller,  Maybe I had better print his name below the
signature, so that you can read it.  Then, my associate put her
signature on the document. After a moment of embarrassed
hesitation, the teller said,  Perhaps you wouldn't mind printing
your name, too. I can't read your signature any better than his. 
My associate has perfect eyesight. If she had been blind, her
unreadable signature would have been attributed to blindness. Mine
might have been due to haste, lack of attention, poor training, or
any of a dozen other things, but it was automatically chalked up to
blindness. Moreover, the bank teller probably surrounded the
incident with connotations of inferiority, and I doubt that she
changed her opinion because of the actions of my associate or, for
that matter, even remarked or remembered them. Blind people cannot
write legibly. Sighted people must print their names for them. She
has proof.

      Under date of May 22, 1980, the  Des Moines Register  printed
an article captioned,  Woman Opens Cut, Bleeds to Death.  The
article says:  A 59-year-old woman bled to death in her home
Wednesday after she accidentally reopened an incision she received
while undergoing kidney dialysis. Polk County Medical Examiner Dr.
R.C. Wooters said she did not realize how much blood she was losing
because she was nearly blind.  The human body contains several
quarts of blood. Do you really think an individual (sighted or
blind) would bleed quart after quart and not know it because of
blindness?

      Mike Cramer is the president of our Chicago Chapter. On
September 2nd, 1980, he went to work for the Chicago Transit
Authority as a Customer Assistance Coordinator, handling calls and
complaints from the public. On September 4, he received a call from
a woman who said she had a complaint. That morning, while she was
riding the bus, she had observed a blind man standing up. The
driver had not made any of the other passengers get up and give him
a seat. Mike listened until she had finished. Then he told her that
he was the blind man that as a company employee he rode to work on
a pass and could only sit if all of the paying passengers had
seats. This was standard policy and posed no problem for him. The
woman was at first surprised, then indignant. She had no intention
of giving up her image of blindness or her preconceptions.  All
right,  she said.  Then I want to speak to your supervisor. 

      In January of this year the  Christian Science Monitor  News
Service sent out a release deploring the evils of gambling. The
headline was a grabber. Calculated to capture the fancy and stir
the imagination, it read:  Now, Braille Slot Machines for Blind
Gamblers.  The article (complete with facts and statistics) is a
rather standard piece, indicating that the nation in general and
gamblers in particular are going to hell in a hand basket. Despite
the titillating headline, the only mention of blindness comes in
the last two sentences, which read:  At one Atlantic City casino,
slot machines are coded in Braille for the blind gambler. Is there
a dreadful symbolism here for all of us?  Yes, there is a  dreadful
symbolism,  but it is not in the slot machines. It is in the
mistaken notions and false assumptions of the author and his
readers.

      On May 13, 1980, the  National Enquirer  carried the
headline:  Because Both Mom and Dad are Blind, Five-Year-Old Angel
Is Raising Her Baby Brother.  The article is a drippy account of a
brave and wonderful little girl who gives up normal play and almost
all other activities of childhood life to raise baby brother
everything from diapers to feeding. Mommy and Daddy are blind. The
blind couple (who, incidentally, are members of this organization)
were furious. The article, they say, was a total distortion and a
misrepresentation. With devastating logic, they ask:  Who the hell
do they think raised the five-year-old? 

      And where does all of this nonsense come from this drivel
about angel sisters, rejected tax forms, Braille slot machines,
blind bus passengers, and the rest? Of course, much of it comes
from the primitive past when light meant safety and dark meant
danger. Eyesight and light were equated, as were blindness and
darkness. Light was pure and good. Darkness was evil and fear.

      But there is something more, an added element which skews the
picture and poisons the public mind. I speak of the governmental
and private rehabilitation and social service agencies, the
libraries and schools, the lighthouses, the workshops, the dog
guide facilities, and the various other institutions established to
give service to the blind. Not all of them, to be sure, are
negative and bad. In fact, a growing number are turning the corner
of time and working with us in the newness, espousing our cause and
marching with us to freedom and progress. They stand by our sides
as partners and equals.

      Unfortunately such agencies are not in the majority, nor are
they the most powerful or wealthy. Contrary to public belief, most
of the agencies do us more harm than good. Some are a mixed bag,
providing certain helpful services while, at the same time, doing
things which hurt us and hold us back. Others (and it may as well
be bluntly and directly said) are so bad and so destructive that,
regardless of the occasional good they do, the blind would be
better off if they were closed down and put out of business.

      This is hard for the average person to accept or understand.
How can it be? Why? The answer requires perspective. At first the
agencies were few and scattered. They saw their role as one of
benevolence and charity taking care of people who could not do for
themselves giving meager subsistence and a ray of sunshine, adding
a little cheer.

      Then, in the 1930s, the agencies proliferated. They became
big business. The casual volunteer and the friendly visitor began
to be replaced by a burgeoning army of so-called  professionals 
rehabilitation counselors, social workers, directors of development
(a high-toned term for fundraisers), peripatologists, evaluators,
and other such. There were also administrators and a hierarchy of
supervisors. As the staffs and the budgets mushroomed, so did the
feeling of something to protect, the defensiveness about criticism,
the sense of self-importance, and the rationalization of whatever
it took to keep the blind in their places so as to justify the
elaborate bureaucracy, the ballooning expenditures, and the growing
myth of special knowledge and mysterious  professionalism.  The
second-class status and dependency of the blind were absolutely
indispensable to the survival and continued expansion of the
system. It is not hard to see why. If the blind need only correct
information, a brief period of training in techniques, an initial
boost, and a reasonable chance to compete, the agencies (while
performing a useful service) cannot be the center of existence.
Their role is diminished. On the other hand, if blindness is an
unmitigated tragedy (fraught with psychological disturbance and
requiring complex and long- term professional care) the agencies
necessarily become the dominant element in the life of every person
who becomes blind not for just a day or a month or a year, but
forever from the cradle to the grave.

      Seen in this context, the establishment of the National
Federation of the Blind in 1940 was a threat of total disaster. If
the organization flourished and the contagion spread, if the blind
began to act independently and plan their own lives, if they
convinced the public and themselves that they could function as
equals and compete with others, the custodial agencies would be
held in check and viewed without mystery or awe. Their role would
be important, but not godlike. Their power would be limited, not
infinite.

      Real life is not like a textbook, and most events are not
clear-cut or immediate. At first the Federation was small and
ignored. Most of the agencies tried to deny its difference,
pretending that it was simply another of themselves, one among
many. In some parts of the country our chapters were weak and our
purpose blurred. Sometimes the agencies took control of an
affiliate, bought off the leaders or bribed or threatened. There
were partnerships, alliances, joint efforts, confrontations,
maneuverings, and realignments.

      But the direction was certain and the trend unmistakable. The
blind kept joining first by the thousands, then by the tens of
thousands. In the beginning we were weak and divided. Then came
accelerating power and unity. Ultimately we were fifty thousand
members clear in our mission, sure in our purpose, and firm in our
unity: the strongest force in the affairs of the blind.

      Likewise, there was change in the agencies. They began as a
scattering, local in purpose and differing in view. They
constituted no national force. Then, the most reactionary of them
(led by the American Foundation for the Blind and its creature the
National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and
Visually Handicapped, NAC) sought to join forces and pool effort.
Hard though it is to comprehend or believe, their purpose (which
became a veritable obsession and a principal endeavor) was to make
war upon the blind, the very people they were pledged to serve. Not
all of the blind not the meek or the passive or the ones they could
control: these were needed for show and fundraising. Only the
trouble makers the independents the members of the National
Federation of the Blind. Above everything else, they wanted to
destroy the National Federation of the Blind and its leaders.

      Through the years the agencies have become wealthy
tremendously wealthy. Our best information indicates that the top
fifteen or twenty of them have combined resources of more than half
a billion dollars. There are several hundred of them in the
country, and (despite the efforts of NAC and the American
Foundation for the Blind), they are not a monolithic force with a
single purpose. They are diverse and varied in goals, attitudes,
effectiveness, and behavior.

      This brings us to the present, to 1981. As I have already
said, a growing number of the agencies have turned the corner of
time and are sensitively working with us to achieve better lives.
They are partners and allies. Some of the others are not vicious
but only shackled by old ideas.

      Consider, for instance, the Christian Record Braille
Foundation. Many of its projects are worthwhile, and (so far as I
know) its motives are good. Yet, recently it produced a brochure
which (though it may be well-intentioned and excellent for
fundraising) hurts our image and slows our progress. Entitled  At
Ease With A Blind Person,  the brochure says:

      IN TAKING LEAVE: End your conversation in such a manner that
the blind person knows you are leaving. Ask if he needs assistance
to get to his destination, and take him there if possible.

      IN GETTING INTO A CAR:  Susan we're taking you for a drive
into the country. This is the back seat of the car, and you'll be
sitting behind the driver. 

      As you approach the car, tell her whether she will be sitting
in the front or back, or give a choice. When you reach the car,
open the door, place her hand on top of it, allowing her to sit
down by her own efforts. Make sure she is comfortable, with
everything she needs in reach. Make sure your blind passenger is
sitting far enough away from the door so that when you close it, it
will not bump her in any way.

      IN PARTICIPATING IN CHURCH OR COMMUNITY PROJECTS: Give the
blind person some project that will help him feel important such as
being a member of the program committee, or phoning members to
alert them to the next meeting.

      The problem with the brochure is not meanness but
condescension. The blind person is treated like a child or a pet,
not an equal human being. The blind are perceived as passive, with
things being done to them or for them not active or participating
not giving, but only taking.

      Then, there is the newsletter put out last year by the St.
Louis Society for the Blind.2 Again, it is not meant to be harmful
or destructive. Quite the contrary. But it does us real damage and
lessens our opportunities. It says:

      The spring of the year can be extremely depressing and
threatening to those who cannot see.

      This is so because the weather is breaking, travel conditions
are improving, and the people who can see, who have been  locked in 
for the winter with those who cannot see, are now getting out and
moving about independently. This springtime freedom for them leaves
you alone once again. Now you must fend for yourself. It's no
wonder that depression can set in when the spring of the year can
be seen in this light.

      The important thing to bear in mind is that you can and will
make it through this depression. There are those of us out there
who want to see you enjoying the freedom, the warmth and the
loveliness of Springtime in a way that is meaningful to you.

      If you feel a little  down  or  blue  please don't hesitate
to call me so that we can talk over your feelings. Remember, I'm
here if you need me.

      What a distortion! What condescension and misapplied charity!
It is enough to make you ill but it is not vicious or said with
malice. It is meant to be helpful and constructive, but it blights
our chances and limits our opportunities just as much as if it
sprang from evil motives.

      So much for those agencies which have turned the corner of
time and work with us, and for those which mean well but are
misinformed. What about the others? What about the National
Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually
Handicapped (NAC) and its principal allies? They are not
misinformed or confused, and they are not motivated by good
intentions. They know exactly what they are doing. They have
deliberately and cold-bloodedly set out to ruin our movement and
destroy the reputations and careers of our leaders and if they can
get the job done, they will do it.

      I know something about this firsthand, for as far back as
1975 a blind lawyer told me (in the presence of a witness) that he
had been called to New York and offered money by leading agency
officials to embark on a campaign to destroy my reputation and ruin
my career. He repeated the story to Jim Gashel, our Director of
Governmental Affairs. Jim tells me that a sighted lawyer told him
that he had received the same offer. These things are a matter of
public record in testimony before a committee of Congress.

      There is more! As Federationists know, I was director of
Iowa's agency for the blind for twenty years, establishing programs
which brought a special citation from President Lyndon Johnson,
appointments to national committees from President Ford, and a host
of other awards and recognitions: Advisor on matters affecting
blindness to the Federal Commissioner of Rehabilitation, Special
Consultant to the Chairman of the White House Conference on the
Handicapped, Consultant on Blindness to the Smithsonian, recipient
of an award from the American Library Association for building and
directing the biggest and best library for the blind in the nation,
honorary doctorates from Drake and Seton Hall Universities, and a
variety of others.

      Yet, in 1978 and 1979 I found myself under such vicious and
unreasonable attack as to boggle the mind. The  Des Moines Register
, which had always been uniformly supportive, suddenly started a
massive campaign of personal vilification, innuendo, and downright
falsehood, which continued day after day. There were literally
hundreds of articles. The National Federation of the Blind as an
organization and I as an individual were put under investigation by
the federal district attorney. Every record and paper was
subpoenaed and studied, probably at hundreds of thousands of
dollars of cost to the taxpayers. There were no charges from the
federal attorney only hints and silence, followed by scurrilous
articles of innuendo and suggestion in the newspaper. Yet, the
federal attorney did not give back our papers or admit that she had
acted on false information. She simply waited. All of this started
in the spring of 1978. By the fall of 1980 it had long since been
clear that there was nothing to investigate, no basis for charges,
and no possibility of further delay without extreme embarrassment
to the federal officials. The federal attorney quietly wrote a
letter saying that she was closing her file and returning all of
our papers no accusation, no attempt to indict, no slightest
suggestion of any wrongdoing or inappropriate action. Also, of
course, no expression of regret for any damage to reputation or
career. Did the  Des Moines Register  report it all and apologize
for its defamation? Not on your life! It did not make a peep.

      And why do I bring all of this up? We know that NAC was in
contact with the Des Moines newspaper. We know that NAC (using
publicly contributed funds) reprinted the articles and circulated
them by the thousands throughout the country. We know that Dr.
Bleecker, the executive director of NAC, was in touch with the
newspaper when he went to the Federal Department of Labor in his
unsuccessful attempt to destroy our program of Job Opportunities
for the Blind. We know that Dick Johnstone, the president of the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind, publicly boasted that the NAC
forces had participated in the Iowa campaign to try to destroy me
and the Federation only regretting, as he said, that they had  let
the matter die on the vine.  Did NAC and its allies attempt to
incite the federal attorney with false information? We are not
currently prepared to surmise, but under the Freedom of Information
Act we have wrested all relevant documents from the files of the
FBI and other appropriate federal departments. The emerging pattern
is not pleasant.

      If I were the only Federation leader to receive such
treatment, I might chalk it up to fluke or coincidence, but I am
not. Don Capps, our First Vice President, is a respected citizen in
his community. He is a high official at the Colonial Life Insurance
Company, a past president of Rotary, a prominent member of his
church, and a civic leader of statewide note and importance. Yet,
he was subjected to the humiliation of publicly being called a 
paranoid son of a bitch  by the director of the agency for the
blind in his state. When a reporter asked the director if he had
said it, there was no retraction or apology, only the comment that
he believed that he had not called him a  paranoid son of a bitch 
but a  paranoid bastard.  The director in question had concerted
his efforts with the NAC supporters in a variety of battles against
our movement.

      Our Second Vice President, Rami Rabby, is a man of culture
and learning. He holds a graduate degree with honors from Oxford
University. Because he dared express himself at a public meeting,
the director of the American Foundation for the Blind and the head
of NAC wrote letters to Citibank of New York (where he was
employed) and tried to jeopardize his job.

      There is more! Last year there was a break-in at my home.
Silver and other valuables were thrown on the floor and not taken.
Papers had obviously been rifled. Mrs. Anderson, my assistant,
visited her parents in Des Moines last year. That very day there
was a break-in at their home little taken, papers rifled, same
pattern. Ralph Sanders, our immediate past President, has had at
least three break-ins during the past year a suitcase taken on one
occasion and nothing on the others papers rifled, same pattern.
Duane Gerstenberger, our Director of Job Opportunities for the
Blind, and Ramona Walhof, the Assistant Director, have both had
break-ins during the past few months papers rifled, same pattern.
John Cheadle, while doing a tour of duty in the National Office,
and Marc Maurer (another of our leaders) have both had the same
experience. Our Denver office was recently rifled nothing
apparently taken. Harold Snider, who has repeatedly gone to NAC
meetings as our observer, has had two break-ins during the past few
months. Cassettes of NAC meetings and similar items were taken. Our
headquarters building in Baltimore has been broken into, and a
bottle of gasoline containing a wick was found by our boiler room
door. During the past year both Harold Snider and Rami Rabby have
had acid thrown at them on the streets. Recently Rami received in
his mail box a cardboard with his initials formed in Braille dots
made of eight live rifle bullets.

      Is all of this coincidence? Perhaps but I don't think so.
Does that mean that I am accusing NAC or its allies of the illegal
break-ins and the hooliganism? Not at all. But I do say that the
climate of hate and bitterness which they have created can inspire
such actions, and I also say that the rate of attack and harassment
upon Federation leaders far exceeds any reasonable possibility of
happenstance.

      While we are exploring these matters, another question
presents itself. Why would certain agency officials hate the
Federation and wish to destroy us? The answer is not difficult. In
Cleveland we helped blind food service operators bring a lawsuit
for a million dollars against the Cleveland Society for the Blind
and its director for illegally withholding money from the blind
operators and for other acts of repression. In Minnesota we brought
a suit against the Minneapolis Society for the Blind for illegally
excluding blind persons from membership and participation. I
personally testified in that case. We also exposed and publicized
the fact that Dick Johnstone, the so-called volunteer head of the
Society (and the chairman of its Building Committee) was the owner
of a company which received a lucrative plumbing contract for
remodeling the Society's building. In Alabama the former head of
rehabilitation recently went to the federal penitentiary for
extorting public money and automobiles from those receiving grants
from his agency. We helped expose him. A workshop official in
Alabama was also convicted of theft. We helped in that one, too.
The Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind (a NAC-accredited
agency) had a psychologist, one Tandy Culpepper, who double dipped
in his travel expenses early this year and was about to be
permitted quietly to resign. We sniffed the matter out and brought
it to the newspapers. He is now likely on the road to prosecution
and conviction.

      In February of this year our magazine, the  Monitor , exposed
irregularities in the audit of the Utah State Agency for the Blind.
A janitor at the Agency, accompanied by one of the top officials,
came to our Salt Lake City president (who is employed in the agency
workshop) and publicly cursed and abused him. Later that day the
janitor attacked and physically beat him. This was in February. We
immediately sent representatives to protest to the Governor, and we
took the matter to the press. Neither the janitor nor the official
was fired. In March our Salt Lake president (Premo Foianini, who is
in this room tonight) was struck in the back by the janitor with a
broom handle with such force that the handle was broken. He was
compelled to be off work and take treatments for contusions of the
spine. The janitor was brought to court by the Salt Lake City
Attorney and convicted of criminal assault. So far as I know, he
has not been fired but is still employed by the Utah Agency for the
Blind.

      We encouraged the investigative reporting which led to the 
Wall Street Journal  articles exposing abuses of blind employees in
sheltered workshops, and we played the same part in the program
carried by Sixty Minutes. In May of last year at the meeting of
workshops for the blind held in San Diego, Joseph Larkin (one of
the powers in the workshop establishment and a principal leader of
NAC) laid it on the line, whistling to keep up his courage and
belligerently expressing his fear and desperation. Much can be read
between the lines of what he said.

      Can our values ever really flourish, [he asked,] in an arena
where we continue to fight with rear guard actions? The NFB could
become the most powerful force.

      What can we do to move toward a reassessment and reassertion
of our traditional position? The first step is to acknowledge that
we do not have the same ability to influence or control events that
we once had. There is a new set of circumstances; and friends,
foes, and neutrals are all more powerful than they used to be.

      But that does not mean that we must remain deprived of a
fully effective intelligence mechanism or the will to move
aggressively when the need arises or that the NFB must be allowed
to become a dominant power. 

      We and our allies still make up the mightiest assembly of
technological, professional, and economic resources in the delivery
of human services within our field. The idea that we cannot afford
a given amount of defense to meet NFB activity is simply hokum.

      So spoke Joseph Larkin. This is the much vaunted 
professionalism  of the NAC agencies, the dedication to service,
the accountability for the use of publicly contributed funds, and
the concern for the dignity and rights of the blind.

      Yes, I think I know why NAC and certain agencies in the field
hate the Federation and try to discredit its leaders. Yet, some
people tell me that they don't see why we can't all get together.
After all, they say, you are all dealing with blindness, and you
are all working for the same thing. To which I emphatically answer:
No, we are not!

      Whenever our representatives go to a state legislature or
appear in the halls of Congress, they can almost invariably expect
to be met by agency-inspired attempts at character assassination
and wholesale distribution of the outdated and discredited articles
from the  Des Moines Register . Apparently, this is the only way
the agency officials know to try to divert attention from their
shortcomings and hide their failures. It has happened here in
Maryland. (Ask the Governor and the members of the Legislature.
They can tell you.) We must expect it to happen every time we speak
out and not just here but everywhere in the country. But it is
beginning to wear thin. It is having a reverse effect.

      Where do we go from here? In the climate of block grants,
budget cuts, and pleas from the agencies that (strictly in our own
self-interest, of course) we unconditionally support them, we must
avoid ill-considered actions, hasty judgments, and unwise
commitments. The agencies know our power, so (in their time of
need) they are urging us to make an alliance with them and present
a common front. Regarding this matter, our course is clear. When
the interests of the blind coincide with the interests of the
agencies, we should support them. Otherwise, we should not.

      Some of the agencies have tried to bring us into line by
scare tactics and false information. For instance, when the present
Administration took office, the story circulated that the mailing
of free reading matter for the blind was about to be lost and that,
therefore, we were going to lose our library service. A lot of
blind people were stampeded into writing letters supporting the
agencies. It is now clear that no such thing was ever contemplated,
either by President Reagan or anybody else in a position to count.
On the other hand, there are budget cuts and administrative changes
which can cause harm and do damage.

      We must avoid simplistic solutions. We do not want (and I
doubt that the Administration wants) to eliminate needed services
to the blind or any meaningful program; but more money for an
agency does not necessarily mean more help or a better life for
those who are supposed to be served by that agency. Witness
Alabama, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Utah, and NAC. We should seek
sufficient funding for services to the blind, but we should also
take advantage of the present opportunity to reform, improve, and
restructure the agencies. With a revamped and diminished
bureaucracy (one with enough personnel to carry out legitimate
duties but not enough to conduct wars against the blind) we might
actually get more and better programs with less expenditure.

      Most important of all, we must see our present situation in
perspective. We have come a long way since 1940. We are now united
and powerful, but we are also mature enough to use our power
selectively and responsibly.

      When dealing with the public, we can show muscle when
necessary. Last year, for instance, when a blind mother in
Washington was told that she must give up her children because she
was blind, and this year in Florida when the same thing occurred,
we had the resources and the know-how to put a stop to it. We went
to the courts. Both mothers now have their children and can raise
them in peace.

      But more and more frequently we do not need to use muscle.
Persuasion and discussion are sufficient. The public has great
goodwill toward us, and as they learn of our capacity and
normality, they are not only willing but glad to accept us as
partners and equals. Of course, some are not. But most are and the
number is growing daily.

      As to the agencies, many of them have already turned the
corner of time and are with us in the newness. They believe as
strongly as we that their proper role is partner, not custodian.
They are friends and allies.

      With respect to those other agencies, the ones who still try
to custodialize and control us, their time is fast running out.
They will either learn to respect us and treat us as equal human
beings, or they will go out of business. It is that simple, that
definite, and that final. If they cannot turn the corner of time
and share the newness, they will cease to exist.

      I want to address my final words to the active members of
this organization to the blind, and to our sighted brothers and
sisters who have made our cause their cause. I also want to speak
to those of you who are new to our movement, perhaps with us for
the first time. To all of you I say this: We are not helpless, and
we are not children. We know our problems, and we know how to solve
those problems. The challenge we face is clear, and the means of
meeting that challenge are equally clear. If we fail in courage or
nerve or dedication, we have only ourselves to blame.

      But, of course, we will not fail. The stakes are too high and
the need too great to permit it. To paraphrase the Biblical
statement: Upon the rock of Federationism we have built our
movement, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. For
the first time in history we can play a decisive role in
determining our own destiny. If there was ever a time for
dedication and commitment, that time is now. What we in the
Federation do during the next decade may well determine the fate of
the blind for a century to come. To win through to success will
require all that we have in the way of purpose, dedication,
loyalty, good sense, and guts. It will also require love and an
absence of bitterness. We have turned the corner of time, and we
live in a newness. My brothers and my sisters, the future is ours!
Come! Join me on the barricades and we will make it all come true.

     INSFOOT = FOOTNOTES

      1. C. S. Lewis,  Perelandra , (Macmillan Publishing Co.,
Inc., 1944), p. 62.

      2.  Highlights , (St. Louis Society for the Blind, February,
March, April, 1980), p. 7.

     An underlying theme of Federationist literature and doctrine,
evident from the very outset of the movement and increasingly
prominent over the decades, was that the fundamental problem of
blindness was to be found not in the physical condition but in the
social environment not in anatomy but in attitude. For Kenneth
Jernigan in particular this theme, and variations on the theme,
resounded and re-echoed in his speeches and writings all the way
from, for example,  Blindness: Concepts and Misconceptions  (a
convention address delivered in 1965) through  Blindness: The Myth
and the Image  (1970 banquet address) to  Blindness: Simplicity,
Complexity, and the Public Mind  (1982 banquet address) and beyond.

      The real problem of blindness,  he said in 1965,  is not the
blindness itself not the acquisition of skills or techniques or
competence. The real problem is the lack of understanding and the
misconceptions which exist. The primitive conditions of jungle and
cave are gone, but the primitive attitudes about blindness remain. 
And five years later he sounded the warning note again:  Of all the
roadblocks in the path of the blind today, one rises up more
formidably and threateningly than all others. It is the invisible
barrier of ingrained social attitudes about blindness attitudes
based on suspicion and superstition, on ignorance and error, which
continue to hold sway in men's minds and to keep the blind in
bondage. 

     In 1982, speaking before a banquet audience at the Minneapolis
convention, President Jernigan again struck the same major chord: 
Our basic problem in 1940 was society's misconceptions and
misunderstandings,  he said.  That is still our problem today.  But
then he noted a significant difference between the early days and
the present hour:

      In 1940 we were not organized and had not yet developed our
philosophy, planned our public education campaigns, worked to
eliminate our own false beliefs and misconceptions, or started the
slow process of bringing society to new ways of perceiving and
understanding. For the blind of the country, the greatest single
difference between 1940 and today (and it is a tremendous
difference) is the fact of the National Federation of the Blind our
concerted effort, our carefully thought out philosophy, our mutual
encouragement and assistance, and our absolute determination to
achieve first-class citizenship. Yes, we have learned it the hard
way but we have learned it. We know who we are, and we will never
go back. 

     The President's theme was a new iteration of one which had
been treated before the public mind and its misconceptions and that
provided him with both a subtheme,  Simplicity,  and a contrapuntal
theme,  Complexity.  For the unchanged patterns of the public mind,
the permanence of social attitudes, suggested an underlying
simplicity and sameness; but the changes in the lives of blind
people through four decades, the impact of self-organization, and
the evolution of competence and confidence, was making for a new
complexity in the field of blindness and the affairs of the blind.
All of these were elements (unresolved and mixed together) in the
title of his speech but not without the hope of future synthesis
and balance. The 1982 banquet address one of the best-remembered of
the second Jernigan presidency was entitled  Blindness: Simplicity,
Complexity, and the Public Mind. 

     The full text follows:

     BLINDNESS: SIMPLICITY, COMPLEXITY, AND THE PUBLIC MIND
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

      Not long ago I read a science fiction story which began like
this: The ambassador from the 22nd to the 21st century stood on the
balcony and surveyed the city. His expression seemed to say,  All
things are simple and likely to become more so. 

      The story ended like this: The ambassador from the 23rd to
the 22nd century stood on the balcony and surveyed the city. His
expression seemed to say,  All things are complex and likely to
become more so. 

      Tonight the National Federation of the Blind is forty-two
years old. That is a considerable time in the life of a person or
a movement. It is more than a generation almost half a century. In
the world at large it has brought unbelievable change. In the lives
of the blind it has been the turning point, the pivotal period of
all history. The principal reason (the new element the crucial
factor) has been the National Federation of the Blind.

      When we organized in 1940, our problems were comparatively
simple. Very few blind people had jobs or the means of getting
jobs, and most thought it was fate, not mistaken public attitudes
or lack of opportunity or social conditioning. After all, the
thinking went, common sense is common sense. A blind person (any
blind person) cannot expect to compete for a job (any job) on terms
of equality (real equality) with a sighted person (any sighted
person). It was that inclusive and that bad.

      And as it was with employment so it was with everything else.
We could not participate socially, could not have regular family
life, could not raise children, could not manage our own homes,
could not live alone, could not engage in normal recreation, could
not travel unaccompanied, could not handle money (such of it as we
had), could not eat with grace, could not take part in civic
affairs, could not plan our own activities, and could not govern
our own lives. Things were done to the blind and sometimes for the
blind but rarely ever by the blind. It was not expected or allowed.
The blind, being part of the broader society, tended to see
themselves as others saw them. We tended to accept the public view
of our limitations, and thus did much to make those limitations a
reality.

      When the average member of the public thought about blindness
at all, it was usually with sympathy and pity. Society's
communication link with the blind was the network of governmental
and private sheltered workshops, social service agencies, and
charitable institutions established (as the ordinary person would
have put it)  to take care of the blind.  Neither the federal nor
the state rehabilitation programs regarded us as employable; the
public assistance features of the Social Security Act were still
new and relatively insignificant; and the army of psychologists,
social workers, and technocrats was yet to be created. There were
a few libraries for the blind, a limited number of state-operated
sheltered workshops, and a scattering of private charitable
foundations; but almost without exception these institutions were
custodial in nature, limited in scope, and lacking in concepts of
freedom and human dignity.

      In this atmosphere (in the world of 1940) the prospects were
bleak and uncomplicated; and the problems faced by the founders of
our movement (though monumental in nature) were equally bleak and
uncomplicated: try to get enough for the blind to eat, get people
to recognize us as human beings, and reform the agencies. So it was
in 1940! But never again! No more! We are beyond that! That was
another time and another era. We have learned who we are, and we
will never go back.

      Today (forty-two years later) the world is a different place.
We have organized and are a force in the land, but our problems
(far from being diminished) are multiplied and magnified a sure
sign of our growth and progress. All things are complex and likely
to become more so. The agencies have grown to such numbers and
bigness that they threaten to control not only every aspect of our
lives but also of our thoughts as well. As the National Federation
of the Blind has become more powerful, many of our own have
infiltrated the agency establishment and now often find themselves
tempted to dilute their commitment and avoid the call of
conscience. How much for the freedom of the blind, and how much for
personal advancement and the weekly paycheck? Even more difficult,
how to be certain that the decision is totally honest and free from
rationalization?

      Once the agencies were simple minimal in service and few in
staff. They gave us little: a broom and a brush-off, a sandwich and
a sermon. But that little was at least easy to understand. It was
the handout of the master to the slave.

      The bigness has brought complexity. Many of the agencies have
now acquired vast wealth and have changed their focus from service
(even if only charitable and condescending service) to the
protection of their own vested interests, and growth for the sake
of growth. Whereas, in 1940 they ignored us as unimportant, they
now regard us as dangerous and act accordingly. They try to buy our
most promising leaders, and try to ruin and discredit the ones they
cannot buy.

      But this is only half of the story, only part of the picture;
for as the ambassador from the 23rd century observed,  All things
are complex and likely to become more so.  Not all of the agencies
follow destructive patterns. As a result of our efforts, an
increasing number are responding to the call and working with us.
Many of our members who have joined the agencies have not sold out
but have strengthened their commitment and brought vigor and
newness to the task.

      There is also another element of complexity. It has to do
with the current economic climate and the past behavior of the
agencies. In the 1950s the agency establishment had a good
reputation and high credibility both with Congress and the
Executive Branch of government, but during the past twenty-five
years much of that trust has evaporated. There have been too many
abuses, too many nonservice-related staff members added, too many
unkept promises, too many games played with statistics, too many
dollars spent without results, and too much bigness and arrogance
and failure to respond. With this heritage the agencies have not
fared well under scrutiny in the atmosphere of shrinking dollars
and the economic difficulties of the 1980s.

      Again, though, there is complexity. Some of the agencies have
tightened their belts, looked for ways to increase their
efficiency, and sought partnership with the blind in getting
Congress and the state legislatures to provide needed funds. Others
have tried to continue in the old ways. Instead of partnership they
have tried scare tactics. They have attempted to frighten the blind
into unquestioning and unconditional support no reform, no
distinction between good and bad programs, and no participation in
policy or planning. As I need not remind you, the scare tactics
have not worked. We are neither cattle to be herded nor slaves to
be driven. It will either be partnership as equals and joint
effort, or it will be nothing.

      Once upon a time a horse and a man were both being attacked
by a wolf. The man said to the horse,  I have hands and skill with
weapons. You have speed and strength. Therefore, let us join forces
to rid ourselves of this menace. Of course, I will have to put a
bridle and saddle on you and ride on your back, but if we work
together, we can be free. 

      The horse agreed, and they united and killed the wolf. Then
the horse said,  Now we are free. Take off the saddle and bridle,
and let us rejoice in our liberty. 

      To which (as he drove in the spurs) the man answered,  The
hell you say! Giddyap, Dobbin.  The wolf may stand at the agencies'
doors, but this does not mean that we will allow ourselves to be
bridled and saddled.

      We are not opposed to all agencies, nor do we fail to
understand and appreciate the constructive work which many of them
have done. We are only saying that all things are complex and
likely to become more so. We want partnership and cooperation, not
threats and oppression. We will do what we have to do and take what
risks we have to take to achieve full citizenship and equal status
in society. We have learned our lessons well, and others should
also learn; for we know who we are, and we will never go back.

      The complexity is not merely with the agencies but also with
us. With the strengthening of our movement and growing opportunity
we have followed the path of other minorities. Some of us have
attempted to hide in the larger sighted community, pretending that
we have  made it on our own,  and that we have reaped no benefit
from the movement and, thus, have no obligation to it. Like some of
the blacks of forty years ago, those of us who have taken this road
have (figuratively speaking) tried to straighten our hair and
lighten our skins attempting to cross the color line and deny our
heritage. But it did not work then, and it will not work now.
Either we the blind are equal as a people, or not a single one of
us will cross the line to first-class status. This is the message
and the truth of our movement and it cannot and will not be denied.
We know who we are, and we will never go back.

      Our battle for freedom and recognition parallels to a
striking degree that experienced by the blacks, for we are (in
every modern sense of the term) a minority. We have our ghettos,
our unemployment, our underemployment, and our Uncle Toms. We have
our establishment (composed of society as a whole and,
particularly, of many of the professionals in the governmental and
private agencies). That establishment condescendingly loves us if
we stay in our places, and bitterly resents us if we strive for
equality. Above all (through our own organization, the National
Federation of the Blind) we have discovered our collective
conscience and found our true identity. We have learned that it is
not our blindness which has put us down and kept us out, but what
we and others have thought about our blindness. Yet, they tell us
that there is no discrimination and that we are not a minority. We
want no strife or confrontation, but we will do what we have to do.
We are simply no longer willing to be second-class citizens. We
understand the complexity. We know who we are, and we will never go
back.

      The ambassador from the 23rd century was right: All things
are complex and likely to become more so. But the ambassador from
the 22nd century was also right, for all things are simple and
likely to remain so. Our basic problem in 1940 was society's
misconceptions and misunderstanding.

      That is still our problem today. The agencies, being part of
society, take their attitudes from it (despite their claims of
professionalism to the contrary), and when we have reformed
society, we will also have reformed the agencies. Likewise, our own
attitudes are affected by society but here there is a difference.
In 1940 we were not organized and had not yet developed our
philosophy, planned our public education campaigns, worked to
eliminate our own false beliefs and misconceptions, or started the
slow process of bringing society to new ways of perceiving and
understanding. For the blind of the country, the greatest single
difference between 1940 and today (and it is a tremendous
difference) is the fact of the National Federation of the Blind our
concerted effort, our carefully thought out philosophy, our mutual
encouragement and assistance, and our absolute determination to
achieve first-class citizenship. Yes, we have learned it the hard
way but we have learned it. We know who we are, and we will never
go back.

      With respect to public attitudes we still have a long way to
go. We can begin with things around the house like bathing.
Sometime ago I received a letter which said:

      Your organization has been recommended as one which may be
able to take advantage of a valuable new safety product designed to
improve bathing safety for the blind and the handicapped.

      The Safety Shower Guard and Safety Tub Guard are low- cost,
easily installed products which will stop the flow of water in a
bathing area if the temperature becomes too hot for comfort or
safety. When the temperature returns to a safe level, flow is
automatically allowed to resume.

      These products have received the acceptance of the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development and conform to ASTM
Standard F-444 Consumer Safety Specification for scald- preventing
devices.

      I must confess that it never occurred to me that looking at
the water might keep me from getting burned or that I might have
need of a Scald-Preventing Device. I had always thought that when
the burned child feared the fire, it was because of touch, not
sight.

      But let us leave the tub and go to the washing machine. A
recent publication of the Maytag Corporation tells of the  advances 
the company is making to change their appliances so that, as they
put it, their products  can be used by visually disabled persons. 
The trouble here is the emphasis. I have never in my life known a
single blind person who could not learn to use an ordinary washing
machine with a minimal amount of effort, and surely it is no great 
advance  (worthy of a special announcement) to add a few markings
to the dials or the buttons.

      But Sears goes Maytag one better. In the summer of 1981 it
distributed a colorful flyer with this grabber as a headline:  So
the Blind May See.  The text that follows is equally dramatic. It
reads like this:

      To many people, doing the laundry is a boring chore. And for
millions of sight-impaired people operating a washing machine,
adjusting an air conditioner, or cooking in a microwave oven can be
a difficult chore. This fall, Sears will offer Braille overlays for
the controls of several Kenmore appliances, opening new worlds to
those with vision impairments.

      Again, the problem is with the emphasis and the implication.
Braille overlays (which we can easily make for ourselves if we want
them) may offer some negligible convenience, but surely they do not
open up  new worlds to those with visual impairments.  If so, our
scope is limited, indeed.

      In April of this year the Oster Division of the Sunbeam
Corporation wrote me to ask whether it would be (as they put it) 
safe  to permit their materials to be transcribed into Braille for
use by the blind. Here is what they said:

      Oster, Division of Sunbeam Corporation, manufactures
household appliances. We occasionally receive requests from
libraries for permission to transcribe our instruction literature
into Braille.

      We would be pleased to comply with these requests, but we are
concerned that a direct transcription of the text may not meet the
specific needs of a blind user.

      Since we lack the expertise to make this judgment, we are
asking you to review several of our instruction booklets. In
determining if the instructions are adequately organized and
sufficiently detailed to teach a blind person to safely operate the
appliance, please assume that the Braille copy would be a literal
transcription of the original.

      I responded that blind people throughout the country use
power blenders every day without hazard and that it would be
perfectly safe to transcribe the instructions (unaltered) into
Braille. So far as I know, that settled the weighty matter, and
even now the Brailling may be in process.

      The public misconceptions about blindness are so bizarre and
so much at variance with common sense that they would be laughable
if they were not so damaging. Several months ago the Italian Trade
Commissioner to this country sent me a press release:  ITALIAN
HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE MADE FOR THE BLIND  it proclaimed.  A leading
Italian appliance manufacturer has announced that it has initiated
the production of a completely automatic dishwasher and stove
specially made for the blind. These appliances are equipped with
special devices and acoustic signals which allow the blind to
control the machine at any particular moment. 

      In an accompanying letter the Trade Commissioner said:  We
would appreciate receiving a copy of any coverage that will
eventually be published in your magazine.  Since blind people can
use ordinary stoves and dishwashers without difficulty (their only
problem usually being having the money to buy such items, a problem
partially caused by the false image created by the very kind of
press release I have just read), and since I intend to print these
remarks in the  Monitor , I wonder whether the Trade Commissioner
would really like to have them. Or would he simply be amazed,
angry, and bewildered by it all?

      As the ambassador from the 23rd century said,  All things are
complex and likely to become more so ; but as the ambassador from
the 22nd century observed,  All things are simple.  Either way you
take it, we know how to operate dishwashers and stoves, and we know
how to avoid being scalded or cut by the blender. We also know that
eyesight and intelligence have nothing to do with each other, but
(unbelievable though it sounds) there are those who apparently do
not.

      On December 12, 1981, the  Portland  (Oregon)  Daily Journal
of Commerce  carried an article headlined  Optometric Business
Broadens Its Vision.  In view of the text of the article the
headline is particularly ironic. The Northwest Congress of
Optometry was meeting in Portland, and one of their featured
speakers was a man named Allen Pyeatt. This Dr. Pyeatt is clearly
no run-of-the-mill person. As the newspaper quotes him:  We're not
just people interested in examining eyes and selling glasses. 

      Well, then, what is he interested in? We are not left in
doubt. Under the subheadline  Intellectual Correlation  he tells
us:

      In a more general sense, Pyeatt is also involved with the
performance of children. But he focuses on recently- formulated
premises in the fields of optometry and education that optimal
vision capacity is directly related to optimal intellectual
capacity.

      Pyeatt explains the developments historically covering the
evolution of psychological research on intelligence. As the
psychological community began to abandon the Stanford-Binet
measurement of a presumably constant, unalterable intelligence
quotient, the idea that intelligence can be developed and changed
emerged.

      With that new premise, optometry began to assert its role. 
We know vision can be trained,  says Pyeatt.  If a person has a
vision problem and we improve his vision, it will help him function
better intellectually. 

      The scientific support of such an idea is in the fact that
training of any kind increases brain weight. Thus, eye training
will generally affect brain capacity, Pyeatt explains.

       It's sort of like weight lifting,  Pyeatt says.  You start
small and work up. 

      Broadened vision, indeed! This pseudo-professional double
talk is not science but old-fashioned witchcraft straight out of
the Middle Ages. All I know to say to it is this: Let Dr. Pyeatt
pick a hundred people from his convention, and we will pick a
hundred from ours. Then, let the two groups stand head to head in
mental contest and intellectual agility, and I think the
optometrists will get a new vision. Or, we might simply say to Dr.
Pyeatt:  The same to you, brother. 

      With such misinformation being dispensed in the name of
science, it is no wonder that the blind face discrimination in
employment. Mary Ann Overbey is a blind teacher with a master's
degree in child development. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. In
1979 she applied for a position in a preschool day care center
operated by the Boulder YWCA. The State Department of Social
Services indicated that they would not license the center if Miss
Overbey was employed.

      At this stage the Boulder Chapter of the Federation helped
Miss Overbey find a lawyer and began to ask questions. As might
have been expected, the Department of Social Services (when called
to task) tried to shift the blame. They called on the fire
department.

      And what, one may ask, does the fire department have to do
with it? Well, apparently a great deal. Under date of August 13,
1979, Clifford S. Harvey (Assistant Chief of the Boulder Fire
Department) wrote to Miss Overbey's lawyer as follows:

      This letter is to acknowledge that there are, to the best of
my knowledge, no Fire Department policies, Life Safety Code, or
Fire Prevention Code requirements prohibiting or restricting the
employment of a blind teacher in a day care facility. The concern
of the Fire Department is with the adequacy of the structure and
associated and/or necessary equipment for a special purpose or
occupancy. Any suggestion by this Department that we would take
action against a day care center for whomever they employed would
have been in error.

      However, all involved should understand that, although there
is no direct reference in our codes to a blind person being unable
to perform a job as a teacher in a day care facility, the Life
Safety Code does express concern with exit signs being  readily
visible,   distinctive color,   contrast with decorations ; the
size of the exit sign  not less than 6 inches high with the
principal strokes of letters not less than 3/4 inch wide,  and the
illumination of the sign  by a reliable light source giving a value
of not less than 5 foot candles on the illuminated surface. 
Emergency lighting is required when the area used is subject to
loss of natural and artificial light during hours of supervision.
All these requirements are obviously aimed at people who are able
to use their sight/vision to react to any emergency.

      What a letter! As Alice said in her trip through Wonderland,
it all gets curiouser and curiouser. According to the logic of Mr.
Harvey blind persons would be prohibited from crossing streets,
because the signs and lights are obviously meant for the sighted.
Likewise, blind persons could not work in lighted factories, attend
lighted schools, or (for that matter) even live in their own homes
assuming that their homes are lighted, which is probably a building
code requirement in most localities.

      No review of the present condition of the blind would be
complete without some discussion of the airlines. Twenty years ago
there were relatively few blind passengers, but there were also
virtually no problems. Blind people were treated like everybody
else. They sat where they chose, kept their canes with them if they
liked, and generally traveled without incident.

      Then, as an increasing number of us began to find employment
and self-confidence, more of us began to travel on airplanes and
otherwise participate in the mainstream of daily life. As always
happens when a minority moves from dependence toward first-class
citizenship, we experienced a certain amount of hostility and
resentment. The problem was augmented by the fact that other
handicapped groups and minorities were also striving and seeking
advancement. Suddenly the airlines became very much aware of the
disabled not just the blind or some other group but all of the
disabled. And they went about it in the worst possible way. They
seemingly took all of the problems which they conceived each group
of the disabled to have and attributed all of them to each of us.
The resulting picture was a helpless, pitiable monstrosity.

      Seven or eight years ago the Federal Aviation Administration
decided to make special rules for us limiting the number of blind
persons who could travel on a single flight, providing that we must
sit in certain segregated sections of the plane, and generally
restricting our freedom of movement. By letters to Congress,
confrontations at airports, and testimony at public hearings
throughout the country we opposed these regulations, and they were
never put into effect. However, by the late 1970s all sorts of
restrictive measures were being  undertaken  by the airlines. It
started with insistence that we give up our canes during flight,
and it went from there to the bizarre and the ridiculous. Only now
are we beginning to prevail in the struggle, but some of the
madness still lingers.

      In February of this year Frontier Airlines publicly
humiliated and verbally abused our Colorado President, Diane
McGeorge, because she did not want to move from her assigned seat
to the bulkhead area where, they said, she and her dog Pony would
be  more comfortable.  They relented only after asking the other
passengers in the row whether they objected to having Diane sit by
them. In response to a letter from our attorney, Frontier took an
injured tone and said that they had led the way in promoting the
rights of the blind. They even claimed to have been the ones
responsible for getting the Federal Aviation Administration to
repeal its regulation prohibiting us from keeping our canes with us
at our seats during flight. The way I remember it, we of the
National Federation of the Blind filed the lawsuit.

      As conclusive proof of their respect for our rights, Frontier
pointed to a Braille flight information brochure which they have
prepared for blind passengers. The brochure is, indeed, conclusive,
but not in the way that Frontier imagines. It says in part:

      You have been seated in an area that will help us make a safe
and rapid evacuation. We ask that you  remain seated until the
initial flow of passengers has passed you . By permitting other
passengers to evacuate first, we will be in a better position to
help you, if necessary.

      (Let me interrupt to say that I, for one, don't buy it. If I
happen to be on an airplane in time of emergency, I have no
intention of sitting there passively until everybody else has left
the plane and Frontier's flight personnel have come back to get me.
How do I know that they will not panic in the turmoil and give
first priority to looking out for themselves or even if they don't
that it won't be too late by the time everybody else is off? If
there is an emergency, I will take my chance with the rest of the
passengers. That is why I keep both my cane and my wits with me
when I fly.)

      But back to the Frontier brochure. It goes on to say:

      If you have chosen not to fly with your own escort, please
understand that the flight attendants are not obligated to extend
services beyond that required by all other passengers. In addition,
you are responsible for your own lavatory needs; flight attendants
are not able to assist.

      Welcome aboard and have a pleasant flight.

      What do you suppose they have in mind with respect to
assisting with our lavatory needs? As the ambassador from the 23rd
century said: All things are complex and likely to become more so.

      Southwest Airlines recently issued a  Clarification of
Passenger Tariff Rule 10 Refusal To Transport,  which says in part:

      Mental or physical conditions such as deaf, blind, mute, or
retarded renders [sic] the individual incapable of caring for
himself without assistance enroute and definitely would require
further attention or assistance from employees of carrier such as,
blind could not read instructions, fasten seat belts, signs, change
planes unassisted, or help himself in an emergency. Any one of or
combination of the above certainly could involve risk to himself or
to other persons or to property in the event of any non-routine
situation if he became frightened. All personnel must be alert to
these situations and use good judgement and tact when having to
decline acceptance of these people.

      The Station Counter Manual for Pacific Southwest says:

      When accepting unaccompanied blind persons for passage, every
effort should be made to determine tactfully the extent of the
passenger's helplessness. If the passenger is completely helpless,
it should be recommended that he not travel alone. On the other
hand, if the passenger seems well-adjusted and experienced in
taking care of himself, traveling alone will not be too difficult.

      Arrangements should be made to assist the blind passenger in
boarding the airplane, and ensuring that he is seated next to a
person of the same sex to take advantage of the latter person's
probably voluntary efforts to assist the blind person.

      What do you think they expect the person of the same sex to
assist the blind person in doing? If they intend for it to stop at
the lavatory door, it really won't matter which sex is helping will
it? As the ambassador from the 22nd century said, All things are
simple and likely to become more so.

      To top it all, an Eastern Airlines Flight Attendant named
Claudia recently decided not to bother trying to get the blind
passenger to the lavatory at all. She insisted that he sit on a
blanket because, as she put it, it is a federal regulation that
blind persons have to sit on blankets because they cannot control
their bladders. Of course, the blind person refused and pointed out
that there is not (and never has been) any such federal regulation,
but there was a scene involving public humiliation and
embarrassment. There was also the likelihood of a lawsuit. All one
can say to such insanity is: Welcome aboard, Claudia, and have a
pleasant flight.

      And then there is sex. The Andrew Clinic in New York has sent
me a letter saying that it provides specialized sex therapy for a
number of groups, including the blind, the amputee, and the obese.
I often wonder how some of these classifications get made.

      At any rate, the letter from the Andrew Clinic begins by
saying:  Dear Director of the Federation; Please feel free to
disseminate this announcement.  Well, all right, let's disseminate
it. It says in part:

      Therapy is conducted either in our OFFICE or at HOME. Therapy
modality: empirical. Fees: $250 for 12 sessions for 2 people, $150
for 12 sessions for singles without surrogate, $300 for 12 sessions
for singles with an assigned surrogate. Please write or call for
detailed information about qualifications, co-therapists, available
consultants, or the rules about the assignment of a surrogate.
Hoping to hear from you, I remain Cordially yours; Adalbert B.
Vajay, M.D. Ph.D.

      It has been my observation that we do not need professional
therapists to teach us about the basics or, for that matter, to
help us enjoy them So welcome aboard Adalbert, and have a pleasant
flight.

      Where does all of this leave us? For one thing (although we
treat it with derision) it is not funny. It blights our lives,
limits our opportunities, and kills our dreams. It depicts a social
climate and a public attitude which bring misery and suffering. It
bars us from regular employment and forces us to the degradation
and poverty of subminimum wages and sheltered shops.

      The state of Utah runs such a shop, and it is notorious. On
July 27, 1981, a blind woman wrote to the director of Utah's
Services for the Blind:

      Dear Dr. Langford: I am writing this letter in protest to
tell my complaint about the workshop. At the time I was working
there, I was transferred from one job to another from day to day
without any explanation as to why, and therefore, I could not pick
up good speed.

      At the time of my dismissal, Mr. May told me I could work for
thirty-eight cents a day. I was deeply hurt and very upset, and I
went home and cried for several hours.

      The following day my counselor, Dianne Alexander, told me
that I could go to ReWall [ReWall is a training facility] on July
6, 1981, for re-evaluation. I did go there. I cooperated on
everything they asked me to do, EXCEPT I would not answer one
certain question dealing with my SEX LIFE.

      While at ReWall, Diane, Richard, and Bill told me I could
work for sixty-eight cents a day. Dianne Alexander Rehab.
Counselor, Bill ReWall Counselor, Richard ReWall Instructor.

      The next day I confronted Mr. May with this message of
working for sixty-eight cents a day. He just stood there and said
nothing. I asked him then if I could return to work. He told me
that they were not hiring anybody. Again, I became more upset than
ever. I went home and cried and cried and cried. I did not know
what to do or who to turn to.

      Finally I decided to call my Counselor, Dianne Alexander. I
told her what Mr. May had said. She told me to report to work on
Monday and Tuesday, July 27 and 28, 1981, at 9:00 a.m. for a period
of six weeks, at a $1.55 per hour. I was very grateful to hear this
good news, as it will be of some help for our family.

      Dr. Langford, I would like to tell you about one of the worst
things going on at the Utah Workshop, the foulest language!! The
lead man sits there and converses with others in very foul
language, where everyone must sit and listen to it. He calls the
workers' children  little bastards.  When called down on it by the
workers, he told us if we didn't like it, we could leave. While I
was at ReWall, Bill told me that I would have to put up with it and
not let it bother me. But it does bother me.

      While working in the broom shop I sorted better than 200
pounds of corn per day.

      Dr. Langford, I would like to know why I have been dismissed.
There are several others that were hired after I was, and they are
still working there. Dr. Langford, I was at work every day on time
and never late.

      My husband and I have 2 small dependent children of school
age. Without me working full time, I don't know how we can make it
with the high cost of living these days.

      Dr. Langford, knowing your position, you might be able to
help me get my job back. I would appreciate hearing from you.

      Pain and agony come from every line of that letter. It speaks
of hurt and misery that cannot be described but only experienced.
She is grateful for a $1.55 per hour and is so desperate for help
that she begs to be allowed to return to a place where she must
constantly hear her two small children referred to as  little
bastards.  If this were an isolated instance, it would be bad
enough, but it is not. It is commonplace repeated over and over
throughout the country. It is no exaggeration to say that many of
the blind today live in what can only be called slavery.

      But we have learned to fight back, and we are making
progress. As a result of our efforts an increasing number of the
agencies are adopting new ways and responding to us positively, and
so are the members of the public-at-large. It is true that the
conditions in the sheltered shops are still unbelievably bad, but
it is also true that we have succeeded in getting the National
Labor Relations Board to take jurisdiction over the shops and
affirm the right of blind workers to organize and bargain
collectively. When the Cincinnati Association for the Blind (one of
the worst sheltered shops in the country) appealed the NLRB ruling,
the federal Court decided in our favor. The Court decision (which
was handed down only a few months ago) is as much a testimonial to
how far we have come in reforming public attitudes and how
successful our educational campaigns have been as it is to the
provisions of the law and the enlightenment of the judges. The
Cincinnati Association has indicated that it will carry the matter
to the Supreme Court of the United States, and it certainly has the
money to do it money wrung from the sweat of exploited blind
workers; money extracted from a charitable public, which is only
beginning to understand; money gleaned from tax exemptions and
federal subsidies. However, even if we should lose the next round
of appeals, the fact still remains that even ten years ago the NLRB
and federal Court rulings would have been impossible. In a single
decade we have made more progress than in all previous history.

      Between February and June of this year our Job Opportunities
for the Blind program assisted more than fifty people in finding
competitive employment at a rate above the minimum wage, and this
was done at a time when unemployment among the general public was
running at record levels. It is no exaggeration to say that today
more blind people are employed at higher wages than ever before in
human experience.

      And it is not just in employment that we are making gains,
but in other areas as well. The airlines are a good example. Bad as
the situation is, there are definite signs of progress. Last fall
I went to Atlanta at the invitation of Delta to make a training
film for its employees, and United (which four or five years ago
was one of the most insensitive) recently removed objectionable
advertising from radio and television because we asked them to do
it.

      In every area we are gaining momentum, and tomorrow is bright
with promise. As the sighted learn who we are, what we have
endured, what we are achieving, and what we can do, they are
standing with us in growing numbers. We are capable of living with
the sighted, working with the sighted, playing with the sighted,
and competing with the sighted on terms of full equality; and the
sighted are capable of reciprocating and understanding.

      Most important of all, we have found our collective identity
and understood what it means to work together as a  movement. We
have made our Federation the strongest force which has ever existed
to improve the lot of the blind. Today not only our own members but
all of the blind (those who are not part of us, those who have
never heard of us, and even those who dislike us) are living better
lives and reaching for higher goals than ever before and they are
doing it because of the National Federation of the Blind. No force
in the world can now stop our advance to freedom. We understand our
heritage, and it gives us strength for the battles ahead. We fight
for those who went before us and for those who come after for the
founders of our movement and for the children of the next
generation. We also fight for ourselves for our right to full
citizenship and human dignity, for our right to equality under the
law, and for our right to work with others and do for ourselves.

      My brothers and my sisters, the future is ours. It only
remains for us to do the work and make the sacrifice and show the
courage to win it. Come! Join me on the barricades, and we will
make it all come true!

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