A Place of Their Own in History

Abstract

THE AMERICAN DEAF community faces daunting challenges to its existence in the twenty-first century. Residential schools, long central to the creation of Deaf identity, are disappearing, marginalized by the spread of educational mainstreaming and by the popularity of cochlear implants. The frequency of deaf births is declining dramatically from historical rates due to the near ubiquity of vaccinations against viruses and the use of antibiotics, and bioengineering threatens the future of genetic deafness.1 Those of us who pioneered the writing of Deaf history in the late twentieth century were only vaguely aware of these threats to the community. Ironically, we were instead excited by the growing acceptance of America's signing Deaf population as a minority culture with a promising future in our increasingly multicultural world. It was in this optimistic milieu that the idea of a Deaf history class and the book that resulted from it, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America, began to take shape in my mind.The ContextThe 1980s were a heady period on Kendall Green, home of Gallaudet University. Gallaudet researchers and colleagues had identified and defined American Sign Language and pushed for its scholarly legitimacy and popular acceptance. The study of ASL had begun to attract hearing students in high schools and colleges. Federal laws and technical innovations had spurred and eased electronic communication access. Small, simple TTYs, more convenient than the clunky refurbished mechanical teletypes, were on everyone's campus desk. A forceful coalition of Deaf organizations and telephone companies was pushing political structures to support free relay systems. These would obviate the need for hearing people to possess special equipment to communicate with their Deaf friends, colleagues, children, and clients. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 had opened professional opportunities for Deaf adults, notably Gallaudet alumni, who were moving into white-collar, middle-class jobs. More and more Gallaudet graduates were pursuing advanced degrees, including doctorates, foreshadowing a future when increasing percentage of the university's faculty would be Deaf themselves. The push for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 had begun in earnest, creating hope that discrimination on the basis of deafness was a relic of the past. Even early in the decade, before the Deaf President Now (DPN) movement changed the landscape, there was almost palpable feeling that we were witnessing a revolution in Deaf people's lives. An era of dramatic social, linguistic, and educational improvement appeared imminent.A revolution in scholarship, too, seemed inevitable. New ideas were being discussed; commercial and academic outlets had begun publishing work about Deaf culture, literature, language, and history. There were of course reasons to be cautious about the future. We were not unaware of the potentially negative effects of educational mainstreaming, for example, but within Gallaudet's history department, where I taught, most of us believed that we could affect the future through our research and publication. We believed, as historian Drew Gilpin Faust wrote when discussing the motivation of the great John Hope Franklin, that history could be an indispensable instrument of change.2 Gains made by African Americans and women, among others, had included, and to some extent had been dependent on, the development of new historical analyses and narratives focused on and sensitive to the particular interests of these groups. We were convinced that we had a unique opportunity to nudge the world in a positive direction, building on the civil rights advances made by other oppressed people in the 1960s and 1970s. A Place of Their Own grew out of this ferment and a desire to expand equality for deaf Americans, but it was inspired by a new genre in Deaf history. …