Helen Adams Keller

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. When she was 19 months old, an illness left her deaf, blind, and unable to speak. From her childhood teacher and life-long companion, Annie Sullivan, she learned to communicate by touch, braille, and the use of a special typewriter. In 1890 a teacher from a Boston school for the deaf taught her to speak. She attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies and graduated from Radcliffe College with honors in 1904. Keller and Sullivan collaborated on Helen's autobiography, The Story of My Life.

• Keller embraced a variety of social causes, including women's suffrage. She lectured and wrote in support of these causes and called attention to the plight of people with physical handicaps. Following World War II, she traveled abroad to support the blind.
• Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, in Westport, Connecticut; her ashes are interred at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
• The statue depicts a moment made famous in the biographical play and movie The Miracle Worker. It shows Keller as a seven-year-old girl wearing a pinafore over her dress. She stands at an ivy-entwined water pump. Her expression of astonishment shows the moment when she and Annie Sullivan first communicated, by touch, the word “water.”
• Because of braille around the statue base, the Helen Keller statue is the only statue in Emancipation Hall without a “Do Not Touch” sign.