                    WALKING ALONE AND MARCHING TOGETHER

As Monitor readers know, we introduced this summer at the Fiftieth
Anniversary convention of the National Federation of the Blind in Dallas a
history of the organized blind movement in the United States from 1940 to
1990. The author, Dr. Floyd Matson, was present and autographed copies of
the book which were bought at the convention. We have now prepared a flier
giving information about the book and are sending an initial mailing of
65,000 copies to libraries, colleges, universities, and high schools
throughout the country.  Here is what the flier says:

                   WALKING ALONE AND MARCHING TOGETHER:
                 A HISTORY OF THE ORGANIZED BLIND MOVEMENT
                      IN THE UNITED STATES, 1940-1990
                              by Floyd Matson
 
A Story Never Told
 
This book tells a story--as true as it is dramatic--that has never been
told before. It is a story of the epochal struggle and ultimate triumph of
a singular American social movement, that of the organized blind, which
evolved over the space of half a century from a small vanguard of visionary
men and women, no more than a handful in a scattering of states, into a
nationwide community of fifty thousand members--recognized throughout the
world as a major force in the field of blindness and civil rights.

Unlike previous histories of blindness and the blind, which have dealt
almost entirely with the work of benefactors and agencies for the blind,
this magisterial study by a distinguished cultural historian--Floyd Matson-
-breaks new ground in focusing upon the actions and aspirations of the
organized blind themselves. It follows the progress of the movement from
its historical origins in the remote past to the pioneering adventure of
its founding in 1940, then through the early years of lonely struggle for
the right of the blind to organize (indelibly associated with the name of
John F. Kennedy). Then we see the turmoil of "civil war," followed by
renewed harmony, and explosive growth in both size and stature--as
symbolized by the multi-faceted National Center for the Blind.
 
1990, 1116 pages
ISBN 0-9624122-1-X
$30.00

Black and White Photographs, Index, Bibliographies, Biographies.
 
FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE STRUGGLES OF THE BLIND AS AN EMERGING MINORITY IN
THE UNITED STATES--IN THEIR WORDS AND FROM THEIR VIEWPOINT....

"A landmark publication? Absolutely! I recommend this text for all
university or high school level teachers or libraries concerned with
American history, post-war politics, social studies, minority rights,
affirmative action philosophy, or `the handicapped.' Full of useful
supplementary material!"
--Allen Harris, Chairman, Social Studies Department and Chairman,
Curriculum Council, Edsel Ford High School, Dearborn, Michigan
 
"...a fascinating story of the rise of one segment of American society to
first-class citizenship based on its own grassroots efforts."
--John Halverson, Program Division Director, Federal Office for Civil
Rights, Region VII

"Eye care professionals, researchers, and rehabilitation specialists
serving individuals facing vision loss will gain essential insight and
perspective...."
--Eileen Rivera, Administrative Director, Wilmer Vision Research and
Rehabilitation Center, Johns Hopkins University
 
FOR TRAINING TODAY'S PROFESSIONALS....

"This book is an important tool for training professionals who work with
minority groups or disabled persons.  Every educator who has responsibility
for designing and implementing programs to bring minority groups or
disabled students into the mainstream should know this story, and no
teacher of the disabled should enter a classroom without understanding the
aspirations of the blind told in this book."
--Homer Page, Ph.D., Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education,
University of Colorado at Boulder

Floyd Matson has lectured and written widely in the fields of minority
rights, social thought, and political action. He is the author or editor of
eleven books and is the co-author with Jacobus tenBroek of Hope Deferred:
Public Welfare and the Blind (1959). He also collaborated with tenBroek on
the award-winning Prejudice, War, and the Constitution (1954), detailing
the constitutional implications of the evacuation of Japanese-Americans
from the West Coast during World War II. Professor Matson teaches American
Studies at the University of Hawaii.

NOW AVAILABLE

HANDBOOK FOR ITINERANT AND RESOURCE TEACHERS OF BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED
STUDENTS

by D. Willoughby and S. Duffy
(c)1989, 533 pages
Soft cover, photos, bibliography, appendices.
$20.00
 
...LEARN HOW TO COPE WITH EVERY TYPE OF TRAVEL PROBLEM... 45 PAGES ON
TEACHING BRAILLE...TIPS FOR EVERY SCHOOL SUBJECT... ADVICE FOR THE NEW
TEACHER... UNDERSTANDING MEDICAL ASSESSMENTS... APPENDIX ON THE NEMETH CODE
AND THE ABACUS...

"The largest, most practical handbook yet written on the subject."
--Patricia Munson, President, National Association of Blind Educators

                                 ORDER FORM

You may use credit card, institutional purchase order, or check made
payable in full to: NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND, 1800 Johnson Street,
Baltimore, Maryland 21230; Telephone (301)659- 9314.

Check or money order enclosed
__Charge to credit card as follows:
__VISA          __Master Card
__Discover Card __Diners Club
Card # ______________ Expires:_________
Authorized signature:__________________
Mail to:
Name_______________________________
Organization_________________________
Address:_____________________________
City, State_________________ ZIP_______
Telephone___________________________

Send __ copy/copies Walking Alone and Marching Together @ $30.00 each plus
$3.00 each for shipping
Send __ copy/copies Handbook for Itinerant and Resource Teachers of Blind
and Visually Impaired Students @ $20.00 each plus $3.00 each for shipping.
Total $__
____________________

Copies of this flier are available in quantity from the National Office of
the Federation. Every local chapter and state affiliate (in fact, every
individual member of the Federation) should get the flier and take
responsibility for its distribution. We should see that Walking Alone and
Marching Together is in every library in the country--and we should not
just try to buy it and give it to the libraries but persuade them to buy
it. After all, libraries have budgets for this purpose. We should also
inform those in special education, social science, political science, civil
rights, and other programs of the contents and availability of Walking
Alone and Marching Together.

This means that we ourselves must become knowledgeable about the book. It
is being produced on cassette and in Braille by the National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and should be ready in
these formats in a few months. Meanwhile we have the print edition, and we
should get the needed information from it. But whatever we do and however
we do it, we must scatter this book throughout the length and breadth of
the nation. It tells the story of the blind as it really was and is, and it
is up to us to see that that story is widely known. The flier gives the
overall picture, but here for further detail is the Introduction:
 
                                INTRODUCTION
 
                The Dark Ages--And the Dawn of Organization

The year 1990 holds extraordinary significance for blind Americans. It
marks the golden anniversary of the National Federation of the Blind--and
so memorializes the first half-century of collective self-organization by
the blind people of the United States. This book is the story of those
fifty years of Federationism in America: the history of a unique social
revolution, democratic and nonviolent but not always peaceful; the drama of
an irresistible force--some call it "blind force"--colliding again and
again with the seemingly immovable objects of supervision and superstition;
and the narrative of a minority group--once powerless, scattered, and
impoverished--coming together as a people and forging an independent
movement, gaining self-expression and learning self-direction, proclaiming
normality and demanding equality.

The story begins, officially, with the establishment of the National
Federation of the Blind in 1940. But the historic significance of that
event can be fully understood only against the background of earlier
attempts to improve the dependent status of the blind through
self-organization and self-help. It is a little-known fact that
organizations of the blind have existed in one form or another for many
hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. The earliest record of their
existence comes, perhaps surprisingly, from China--where blind paupers
(most of them apparently beggars like others of the disabled) banded
together for mutual protection nearly a millennium ago, giving rise to
numbers of guilds and associations (composed entirely of blind people)
which were able in time to achieve full legal and social status. The
extraordinary self-determining and self-sufficient character of these
pre-modern Chinese associations has been described by a blind sociologist,
C. Edwin Vaughan, writing in the Braille Monitor (April, 1988): 

In Medieval China for at least 1,000 years guilds of craftsmen, workers,
and merchants were common. Their purpose was to prevent exploitation from
government officials and to provide internal regulation of trade and craft
areas of employment. There was in Beijing, formerly Peking, a guild
comprised of blind persons who made a career of singing, entertaining, and
storytelling. Parents would seek to place a young blind son into this guild
so that he might learn a trade for his future lifelong employment. As he
succeeded in the required skills, he would rise in status in the guild to
the level of master. 

Blind guild members in China were self-governing. The guild was governed by
a board of forty-eight members of whom forty-seven were blind. The
secretary was the only sighted person. The guild governed itself with
regard to membership, including the discipline of members, the charges for
services, and the recruitment of new members into the guild. The guild met
twice each year, and the meetings lasted until 5:00 a.m.

But it was in Europe, during the Middle Ages, that independent guilds and
brotherhoods of the blind came to be most highly organized and successful
in their purpose. One of the most impressive of these self-contained groups
was known as the "Congregation and House of the Three Hundred," which
flourished in Paris in the thirteenth century. In this remarkable
congregation lived several hundred blind men and women who successfully
governed themselves through a popular assembly and were, within the severe
monastic limits of the enterprise, entirely self-sufficient. In time,
however, the suspicions and stereotypes of the wider society worked against
this extraordinary experiment in self-government by the sightless. "Both
the administration and the statutes of the congregation," as an historian
tells us, "underwent in the course of time a number of changes, with a
considerable loss to the blind of their original rights and a corresponding
increase of the influence of the sighted."

Still other "free brotherhoods of the blind," as they were called,
flourished throughout Europe during medieval times. Most of them were in
the form of guilds, and it is worth noting briefly the character and
function which these voluntary associations embodied. First of all, of
course, they were a means of mutual protection--at a time when blindness
was regarded either as a communicable disease or as punishment for sins,
and when the sightless might be cruelly punished or put to death with
impunity. But the blind brotherhoods also had a positive role to play; they
were a vehicle of self-expression and representation for the blind in the
affairs of the community. In that respect they were a force, not for
segregation, but for integration of the blind into the carefully
articulated society of the period. For these guilds of the blind were not
unique in the age of feudalism; they coexisted with a wide variety of other
specialized associations, each with its particular rights and status, which
together made up the medieval community. Through such groups, largely
voluntary, the blind and others of the disabled gained a collective
identity and a degree of security which was otherwise denied them. Indeed,
group membership was essential to all men and women as a source of
recognition and identification. "The unattached person during the Middle
Ages," as the historian Lewis Mumford has written, "was one either
condemned to exile or doomed to death; if alive, he immediately sought to
attach himself, at least to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong
to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no
security except in association, and no freedom that did not recognize the
obligations of a corporate life."

What was true for the prosperous and able-bodied--"there was no security
except in association"--was more profoundly true for the blind; and it is
likely that they enjoyed a greater measure of physical and economic
security within the corporative, guild-oriented society of the Middle Ages
than in any previous period of history--certainly more than in the
so-called "golden age" of classical antiquity, when the common fate of
blind males was to be sold into galley slavery and that of blind females to
be sold into "white slavery." Nor would the first centuries of the modern
era compare favorably with the medieval situation. For the blind, as for
others of the disabled, the breakup of the feudal order and the emergence
of the modern world were in crucial respects not progress but retreat. The
movement from group status to individual contract--and more specifically
the enactment of the infamous Elizabethan Poor Laws--not merely deprived
the blind of their fraternal guilds but left them scattered, alienated, and
utterly dependent upon the charitable impulses of a new society indifferent
at best and frequently cruel in its treatment of the handicapped. In this
atmosphere it is not surprising that organizations of the blind, like trade
unions and other independent associations of the poor, were actively
discouraged and discredited. Within the various separate institutions that
grew up to take care of them--the almshouses and workhouses and
subsequently the schools, homes, lighthouses, and sheltered workshops--the
blind were in effect segregated not only from normal society but also from
each other.

It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that voluntary
associations of blind people began again to take shape, initially in the
form of local and specialized groups. One of the first on record was the
Friedlander Union of Philadelphia, organized in 1871; six years later came
the New York Blind Aid Association, also composed predominantly of
sightless members. By the 1890s there were a number of such groups across
the country, many of them composed of alumni of the state schools for the
blind. These alumni associations, representing as they did the educated
minority of the blind population, tended to take a limited view of their
responsibilities and interests, rather than seeking to represent the blind
generally. They were the forerunners, but not yet the pathfinders or
trailblazers, of the twentieth-century movement of the organized blind.
Like the medieval blind guilds, the early alumni associations were largely
defensive in character, for the primary stimulus to their organization came
from the tragic failure of the special schools for the blind to attain the
great objective which had been the dream of the pioneer educators (such men
as Valentin Hauy of France, Johann Klein of Austria, and America's Samuel
Gridley Howe), namely, the goal of economic integration of the educated
blind into the mainstream of society. 
Before resuming our narrative of self-organization, it is worth recalling
this misadventure of the schools and the shock of recognition which it
provided. From their beginnings toward the middle of the nineteenth
century, American residential schools for the blind followed the model of
the European schools in placing their main curricular emphasis upon
vocational training--which chiefly meant instruction in the skills of
weaving, knitting, basketry and chair-caning, plus music and other arts. It
was the conviction of the early schoolmasters that once their blind wards
had shown the ability to master these trades they would be embraced
forthwith by a tolerant and receptive society. "It is confidently
believed," said one school official in 1854, "that the blind, with proper
instruction, will be able to maintain themselves free of charge from their
friends or the state. There will be as few exceptions among this class,
according to their numbers, as among those who have sight."

In their idealism, these early schoolmen showed themselves to be true heirs
of the Enlightenment. Like their counterparts in general education, as well
as in social and penal reform, they believed that it was necessary only to
strike the chains from their wards in order to make them at once free and
self-sufficient. But it was not long before they discovered their error--
which was that while the blind were being prepared to enter society,
nothing was being done to prepare society to receive them. The old
prejudices and aversions of employers and the general public remained
intact; the newly trained graduates of the schools were given little or no
chance to prove their abilities, but instead found all doors closed against
them. "Our graduates began to return to us," according to a school
official, "representing the embarrassment of their condition abroad, and
soliciting employment at our hands."

The response of the schools to this rebuff was perhaps only natural, but it
was also unfortunately defeatist. Instead of undertaking programs of public
education, selective placement and the like in order to break down the
occupational barriers against their blind students, the schoolmasters
simply abandoned the goal of normal competitive employment altogether. As a
blind leader of a later era, Jacobus tenBroek, was to write of this
episode: "At the first signs of public resistance, the optimistic
philosophy of the school men crumbled; they conceded in effect that they
had been wrong in believing the blind capable of competition and
self-support; they were prepared to accept as irremovable the prohibitive
stereotypes against which they had formerly ranged themselves, and to
assist in reinforcing the ancient walls of segregation and dependency."

TenBroek's critical words were appropriate to the fact; instead of a place
in the sun, the blind students were offered a shelter in the shade of the
school yard, where they might safely practice what were already known as
the "blind trades" without fear of competition or contamination from the
seeing world. As one report of the period sadly concluded: "The proper
preventive is the establishment of a retreat where their bread can be
earned, their morals protected, and a just estimate put upon their
talents."

That statement might stand as a prophetic description of the sheltered
workshop movement which arose as a result of the bitter experience of the
schools for the blind with vocational training and employment. The role of
the workshops will be discussed in later pages; but it is pertinent here to
note that the blind alumni associations came into being in the wake of this
episode, providing something of a buffer against the total loss of
confidence and self-respect among the educated blind. One such alumni group
was that which was formed in 1895 by graduates of the Missouri School;
within a year of its founding the Missouri group opened its ranks to
graduates of other schools and took on the name of the American Blind
People's Higher Education and General Improvement Association. It drew
support promptly from blind individuals and groups in a dozen states across
the country, and before the turn of the century had held conventions in
Missouri and Kansas. In 1903 the character of the group as an organization
of the blind was abruptly transformed when representatives of several
school administrations appeared at its convention bearing a plan for a
wholly different kind of association to include not only the blind but also
school and program administrators. In 1905 the Association formally
abandoned its old identity altogether and became the American Association
of Workers for the Blind--thus ending the first tentative attempt on the
part of blind Americans to organize independently on a nationwide basis.

This denouement was not, however, quite as destructive a blow to the
principle of self-organization and self-expression as it would seem. For
one thing the impulse to organize on local and state levels, once set in
motion by the alumni of the schools, grew steadily and soon embraced other
groups of blind persons. At the same time the development of
general-purpose national agencies combining all areas of work for the
blind--agencies such as the AAWB and (later) the American Foundation for
the Blind--represented a forward step toward the professionalization and
modernization of this special (and traditionally backward) field of
services to the blind.

Following its reorganization to include sighted professionals in 1905, the
AAWB soon became what one observer has described as "the N.A.M. (National
Association of Manufacturers) of work for the blind." During the next
decade and a half, the AAWB consolidated its position until it became the
recognized voice of the numerous professional agencies about the country,
not limited to one or two functions but speaking to the needs of the blind
population generally. In 1921 the American Foundation for the Blind was
established, primarily as a research and coordinating arm of the agencies
for the blind; in effect, if the AAWB filled the role of an "N.A.M." in
work with the blind, the Foundation took on the stature of a combined
Dupont-General Motors in the blindness system.

The American Foundation for the Blind provided the framework for the
organizational pattern of the service agencies which was to prevail
undisturbed until the advent of the National Federation of the Blind in
1940. This pattern, carried out by a host of agencies at the state and
community levels, often under the guidance of the AFB, embraced four
distinct areas of endeavor: those of research, resources, services, and
representation. All four of these functions--including even that of
representing, or speaking for, the blind--were, for their time, entirely
legitimate and constructive; indeed, the AFB made great progress over the
years with regard to the first three functions. It initiated the first
substantial and systematic research into blindness and its problems; it
developed and made available for the first time a variety of significant
resources, and it greatly expanded the range and quality of services to the
blind--educational and economic as well as recreational and social. As for
its role in those years as spokesman for the blind, the American Foundation
for the Blind at its worst was better than no spokesman at all and at best
was an effective champion for modernized policies and much-needed
legislation. As Jacobus tenBroek, Kenneth Jernigan, and other leaders of
the organized blind have repeatedly maintained, the agency structure of
work for the blind during the decades prior to 1940-- controlled at the top
as it was by the AFB and the AAWB--resembled nothing so much as a colonial
regime of the nineteenth-century variety imposed, with benevolent purpose
and some constructive effect, upon a dependent and inarticulate people.
Like other colonial administrations, furthermore, the agency system was
destined to give way to a democratic form of self-government when its blind
wards should come to find their own voice and to declare their
independence.

That critical turning point was to come in 1940 as the natural and almost
inevitable climax of the spontaneous urge toward association on the part of
blind people in state after state. Many of these groups were outcroppings
of the school alumni combinations, such as the Alumni Association of the
California School for the Blind--formed by the legendary Newel Perry and a
handful of hardy colleagues before the turn of the century for the
announced purpose of helping blind people (as Dr. Perry declared) "to
escape defeatism and to achieve normal membership in society."  Although it
cannot be said that these early associations among the blind were yet
prepared to demand the full rights of equality and normality, Newel Perry's
declaration set the precedent and pointed the direction in which they were
to evolve. Over the next three decades local organizations of blind men and
women within half a dozen states came together to form statewide
associations. Among them were the Central Committee of the Blind of
Illinois; the Badger Association of the Blind in Wisconsin; the
Pennsylvania Federation of the Blind; the Mutual Federation of the Blind in
Ohio; and the California Council for (later of) the Blind.

The fundamental purposes of the multiplying local and state associations of
the blind during these years were no different from those which had
animated the "free brotherhoods" of the Middle Ages: mutual protection,
group identity, and a measure of self-expression. To these must be added
the more modern urge to demonstrate to the seeing world the capacity of
blind men and women to lead their own lives and govern their own affairs.
Moreover, within these organizations were incubating the more practical
objectives which were to find expression in the national movement of the
blind. Among them were the vision of full and open employment of blind
persons in the mainstream of competitive pursuits, programs of public aid
providing the incentives needed to enable the blind to achieve
self-support, and vocational rehabilitation programs geared to individual
talent and ability rather than to the stereotyped trades of the workhouse
and the workshop.

These were, of course, barely imagined vistas of possibility in the period
prior to the Great Depression and the New Deal of the 1930s. Social
provisions for the blind were traditionally limited to state and county
programs, in accordance with the ancient customs of the Poor Law. But with
the vast increase of poverty and unemployment during the Depression--and
notably with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935--public welfare
and job opportunity became a national concern, and with it the particular
needs and problems of blind Americans.

The growth of a national consciousness and a sense of solidarity on the
part of blind Americans corresponded with this broader public awareness of
the need for national (or federal) solutions to the problems of
disadvantaged groups. But the assumption of federal responsibility for
public welfare and Social Security was far from being an unmixed blessing.
While the Social Security Act injected new energies and revenues into the
old aid programs, it also introduced a battery of conditions and
requirements which often bound the blind recipient more tightly than ever
in dependency and red tape. In short, as Jacobus tenBroek pointed out, the
expansion of public aid from the states to the national level did not
eliminate the evils of the traditional system--it only made them national.

The negative side of the federal assumption of responsibility for welfare
came to be felt most sharply under the 1939 amendments to the Social
Security Act. These changes required that under any state program for the
blind to which federal funds were contributed all the income and resources
of the blind recipient must be counted in fixing the amount of the aid
grant, if any. What this meant, in fact, was that a basic goal for which
the blind had been striving--the exemption of reasonable amounts of income
as an incentive to self-support--was to be eliminated by federal edict.

In various ways during the depression years the center of gravity in public
welfare was shifting rapidly from the state capitals to Washington. It was
now Congress, along with the White House, which took the decisive steps
forward or backward in the fields of welfare aid, vocational
rehabilitation, public health, disability insurance, sheltered workshops,
and a host of related services directly affecting the lives and livelihoods
of blind men and women.

Inevitably, the nationalizing of welfare led to the nationalizing of the
organized blind movement. Various factors, internal and external to the
movement, combined in this preliminary period to nourish a growing sense of
brotherhood, of common needs and aspirations, both among blind students
mingling in their residential state schools and among blind workers meeting
and sharing grievances in their all-too-sheltered workshops. A powerful
rallying cry emerged during the course of the Depression decade in the form
of the struggle to "save Social Security from the Social Security Board"--
that is, to protect blind recipients of aid from the means test and other
onerous conditions newly imposed by the federal agency. The campaign to
salvage and reform the program of aid to the blind, and in so doing to
transform relief into rehabilitation, was to dominate the agenda of the
National Federation of the Blind at its founding convention and to remain a
guiding theme through its first decade.

Newel Perry summed up the nature and trend of the evolving national
movement in a 1940 editorial. During the last forty years, he wrote, "a
growing group consciousness has been noticeable among the blind of our
country. Practically every state and large city now has an active
organization with a membership composed exclusively of blind persons. These
clubs seek to improve the economic conditions of the blind through the
enactment of legislation and through other means. The dream of a national
organization is now to be realized."

                                 FOOTNOTES

1. Richard S. French in From Homer to Helen Keller (New York: American
Foundation for the Blind, 1932).
2. Quoted in Harry Best, Blindness and the Blind in the UnitedStates (New
York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 474.
3. Ibid., p. 476.
4. Jacobus tenBroek and Floyd Matson, Hope Deferred: Public Welfare and the
Blind (Berkeley: University of California, 1959), p. 251.
5. Quoted in Best, op. cit., p. 476.
____________________

With this information from the flier and the Introduction all of us should
be able to talk knowledgeably about Walking Alone and Marching Together. It
is our book, and we must see that no college or university, no public
library or high school is without it. We should also try to get it reviewed
in magazines and newspapers, and we should buy it and give it to our
families and friends--or, better still, let them buy it for themselves and
purchase other copies for those who won't. Remember that a book sells best
during the year of publication--not necessarily the calendar year but the
ensuing twelve months. In short, let us spread the message and carry the
word. The price is $30 per print copy plus $3 for shipping and handling.
The price per copy for the Braille and cassette editions has not been set
but will be announced soon and will be as reasonable as we can manage. The
success or failure of this important project is now in your hands.
