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Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 12:14:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: Daveed Mandell <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: NY Times (fwd)
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Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 16:24:15 -0700
From: Julie Russell <[log in to unmask]>
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To: Multiple recipients of list <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NY Times
1998 New York Times
Wednesday, October 14, 1998
>
> Kenneth Jernigan, 71, Advocate For The Blind
By RICHARD SEVERO
Kenneth Jernigan, who was a forceful advocate for the blind in gaining
> access to jobs and to public places during his longtime leadership of the
National Federation of the Blind, died Oct. 12 at his home in Baltimore.
He was
71.
The cause was lung cancer, said Barbara Pierce, director of public
education
for the federation and editor of its Braille Monitor magazine.
The current president of the federation, Marc Maurer, said Jernigan
"has
reshaped thinking about the blind in this country and his writings have
been
translated into 100 languages."
Jernigan, who was blind at birth, started volunteering for the
federation,
based in Baltimore, in 1951 and was president of the organization from
1968 to
1986. During his unpaid tenure, the federation, which was founded in 1940
by
Jacobus tenBroek, became one of the nation's most influential advocacy
organizations.
Jernigan was in the vanguard of a successful effort in the 1980s to
persuade
the State Department to revise its policy excluding unsighted people from
the
diplomatic service. He was also instrumental in litigation that sought to
stop
what the federation regarded as discriminatory practices among airlines
in the
accommodation of the blind, one of which was that the airlines did not
want
them sitting in rows near emergency exits.
Jernigan appeared before a Senate subcommittee in 1989 and showed a
video
demonstrating that sighted and blind people could make an orderly
evacuation of
aircraft with equal ease.
"The real problem of blindness is not the loss of eyesight," he said in
1992. "The real problem is the misunderstanding and lack of information
which
exist. If a blind person has proper training and opportunity, blindness
can be
reduced to the level of a physical nuisance."
Over the years, he made it clear that he took exception to various
statements
he heard about blindness, which included the suggestion that true
Christians
never lost their sight and that blind people were not equal to sighted
people
because of their "inability to see atoms." He called such statements
"gibbering
insanity."
Above all, he loathed expressions of pity for the blind, who, he
maintained,
did not want pity and were quite capable of taking care of themselves and
competing with sighted people in the job market.
>
Among his accomplishments was the creation of the Newsline for the
Blind
> Network, in which the daily reports of The New York Times, The Washington
Post
> and other major American newspapers are scanned and recited by a computer
voice
over telephone lines available to blind people all over the country.
Jernigan also created the International Braille and Technology Center
in
> Baltimore, which researches and promotes technology to aid the blind and
maintains a job information bank for the blind that can be accessed by
telephone.
In recognition of his work in creating the Newsline for the Blind
Network,
Jernigan received the Winston Gordon Award for Technological Advancement
in the
Field of Blindness and Visual Impairment this year from the Canadian
National
Institute for the Blind. Among his many other awards was a citation from
the
American Library Association in 1967 that praised him for his efforts in
making
the contents of libraries available to the blind.
Kenneth Jernigan was born in Detroit on Nov. 13, 1926. When he was
quite
young, his parents, Jesse and Novella Inez Trail Jernigan, moved near
Beech
Grove, Tenn., where they were farmers. Their son was educated at the
Tennessee
School for the Blind in Nashville. After high school, he ran a furniture
store
in Beech Grove for a time, but then went on to college, earning his
bachelor's
degree from Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, where he
majored
in social sciences.
He originally wanted to be a lawyer, but his college counselor told him
that
without sight, he should seek a more realistic goal. In that era, many
blind
people were shunted off into such jobs as piano tuning or teaching the
blind.
He decided to become a teacher and got his master's degree in English
from
Peabody College in Nashville in 1949.
There he became active in the Tennessee chapter of the National
Federation of
the Blind. He then went to California and taught at the California
Training
Center for the Blind in Oakland from 1953 to 1958. In 1958, he became
director
of the Iowa Commission for the Blind, which he reorganized and
strengthened. He
remained in that post until 1978, running the federation as a volunteer
at the
same time. Then he moved on to Baltimore and became the paid executive
> director
> of the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults, a sister
> organization of the National Federation of the Blind. He held that post
from
1978 to 1989.
His other activities included work for the National Advisory Committee
on
Services for the Blind and Visually Handicapped; special consultant to
the
executive director of the White House Conference on the Handicapped, and
consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, advising on museum programs
for
blind visitors.
In retirement, he continued to write essays andbooklets, many of them
of an
inspirational nature, that were widely distributed to sightless people
> all over
the world.
Among Jernigan's survivors are his wife, the former Mary Ellen Osborn,
who
assisted him in his work for the federation; a daughter from a previous
marriage, Marie Antoinette Jernigan Cobb of Baltimore, and three
grandchildren.
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