Press Release

Humanist Honored on U.S. Coin

(Washington, D.C., March 27, 2003) “The American Humanist Association welcomes the decision to feature famed Humanist Helen Keller on the new Alabama quarter,” said Mel Lipman, president of the American Humanist Association (AHA). Helen Keller was an advisory board member of First Humanist Society of New York, led by Charles Francis Potter, a founder of the modern Humanist movement. She was also a personal friend of Freethought Press Association president Joseph Lewis.

As virtually every American schoolchild is taught, Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama; a childhood illness left her blind and deaf. She learned to write and read with the help of a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and became the first deaf and blind person to complete college, graduating Radcliffe College with honors in 1904.

“What American schoolchildren are not taught is the depth of her humanistic values, which she never hesitated to express and which were once widely known,” Lipman responds, “Helen Keller’s full story needs to be told.”

In keeping with the Humanist spirit of reform, Keller became a fierce advocate for disabled women and other disadvantaged minorities. Keller was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, a loyal supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a suffragist, and a staunch supporter of Margaret Sanger’s efforts on behalf of reproductive rights. After hearing of the devastation the atomic bomb wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Keller visited the two cities and became a vociferous opponent of nuclear war.

In fact, her outspoken, egalitarian ideals prompted the FBI to keep tabs on her. During the McCarthy era they compiled such a significant file of her “subversive activity” that she felt compelled to write letters disavowing communist sympathies to conservative donors of the American Foundation for the Blind, who were taken aback at her impassioned socialist rhetoric.

Keller shared the Humanist ideals of leading an ethical life and trying to better one’s world, writing, “Many persons have no idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Lipman says, “Her fearless advocacy demonstrated that—as the AHA has long argued—humankind and humankind alone should face its manifold obstacles with conviction and resolution without reliance on supernaturalism.”