Nathie Marbury: The Western Pennsylvania School For The Deaf

The video titled “The D: Detroit Deaf Education” is about the deaf students and their parents explaining their experiences with Detroit Public Schools, specifically the deaf education that the students are receiving. I chose this video because it is directly related to my major, ASL Education and hopefully Deaf Education in the future as well. I wanted to see what it’s like for the students in Detroit Public Schools and if the education they receive is appropriate for them as well.

Heather Whitestone has contributed so much to deaf history. In 1995 Heather made history by being crowned the first deaf Miss America. She has raised awareness for Deaf and hard of hearing people all over the United States. She has written three books, been part of the National Council on Disability, promoted awareness for deaf issues, and ,of course, been the first deaf woman to win the Miss America title.

George William Veditz was the president of the National Association of the Deaf located in the United States and was one of the first people to make a film of American Sign Language. Veditz recognized the injustices suffered by deaf people such as job discrimination, repression of sign language, and the general treatment of deaf people as second-class citizens. In 1880, oralist at the (International Congress on Education of the Deaf) in Milan voted to ban sign language, which quickly spread the ban of sign language in education worldwide. Therefore, Veditz wanted to inform the public about these injustices. He did so by writing numerous articles, organizing Deaf conferences, writing a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, and making a series

Anne Moody grew up in the south as a sharecropper on a plantation in the postwar south that still had Jim Crow controlling what the black population was able to do and what they couldn’t do. The Moody family was poor and was trying to make a living working for a white farmer. They and the other black plantation workers lived in a tiny two bed shack without electricity and plumbing, while the Carter’s house had both. Anne’s childhood was very difficult when her father decided to leave the family and have an affair with another black women. After this happened Anne, her mother, and her siblings moved around a lot while Anne’s mother, Toosweet, look for work. Eventually working as a waitress and as a maid for white families. Even while the family is struggling Anne continues to do well in school and decides to start working part-time as well to help put food on the table for the family. She was only in fourth grade. Some of white families that she worked for even encouraged her to continue her studies as she got to high school, while others were extreme racists and accused her and her brother of doing things that they didn’t do. As time went on Anne’s mother meets Raymond Davis and start a relationship with each other and Anne starts to enjoy her new life, but starts to get into several conflicts with her mother.

A major turning point in Anne’s life was when she heard of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who had allegedly whistled at a White woman. She was tremendously bothered by the murder and was unable to sleep or work for days. She realizes that she has been greatly unaware of the racial inequality and violence going on around her. When she was younger, she struggled to figure out the difference between the races and she gains no more insight or understanding of why there was such inequality, as she grew older. This causes her to wonder if there any true differences between Blacks and Whites, other than the fact that the Whites typically employed the Blacks. She now fears being murdered simply for being Black.

Linda was born deaf on November 30, 1945, to deaf parents. She was born in Garfield, New Jersey. As a child, she attended schools in both Bronx, New York and Trenton, New Jersey, so she could get the best deaf education. She went to St. Joseph School for the Deaf, Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf, which she graduated from in 1963. After high school, she attended Gallaudet University for college, where she studied library science. While in college, she got into theatre, where she was in multiple theatrical productions, such as, “The Threepenny Opera” and poetic characterizations of the “Spoon River Anthology”. After becoming more

Betty G. Miller was born in 1934, and her parents were both Deaf. Betty had two older brothers who were hearing, so everyone just assumed that Betty was too, especially because she could clearly hear a little bit. It was a surprise to everyone in her family when she attended Kindergarten for the first time and was diagnosed as Hard of Hearing. This threw her family for a loop. Remembering all the prejudice and oppression they had experienced at the hands of hearing people, Betty’s parents decided that they wanted her to make the most use of whatever hearing she had. This is why they made the surprising decision to send her to Bell School in Chicago – a school known for Oralistic practices. Later, Betty’s parents took her out of Bell School

She says she has not been treated fairly all her life, works as much as a man, has given birth to many children, and has lost all her children to slavery. What she says is very compelling because it can relate to many listeners. The women relate to her knowing the pain of childbirth. The men also work in the same way. Black people relate to life as slaves.

She focused on how hard things use to be for African Americans. She wanted to get her point across about the way African American’s use to be treated. No one would ever listen to what she had to say, that inspired her to write the books. She wrote about experiences from her own past and those of her family members. Using the Logan family, she told her stories through them.

In this 2 hours of deaf history I found it very interesting. It taught me a lot about deaf history. In those 2 hours I found out about how people would treated deaf people. Deaf people were treated very badly, they were treated like something was wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them even though they can’t hear, nothing is wrong with them they are still humans with feeling. Deaf people were told that they had to go to a school so they could learn to talk (oral schools). In those they were not aloud to sign or use hands in class. They would try and teach deaf kids how to speak by putting their hands on the teacher's throat to feel the vibrations of when the teacher speak and the kids had to copy that feeling on themselves and when

It is often said that kids don’t usually understand race or racism, and that is true until Janie is met with kids who have faced oppression all their lives. Janie is a young girl who is raised by her grandmother in the deep South during the 1930’s. Janie lives among many white kids and doesn’t realize that she is not white until she sees a photo of the children and cannot identify herself in the picture. “Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me?’ Ah don’t see me’”(9). Janie didn’t know that she was a black girl because she had always been treated the same as the white kids, and they never treated her any differently than anyone else. The only kids that ever abused her with their words were the other black kids at school, they always teased her for living in

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine on February 2, 1892. She was the first daughter of three girls; her parents, Cora Buzzelle Millay and Henry Tolman Millay. Millay's parents divorced in 1900 and her mother

Even though her mother was a light skin black woman, she did not want to live her life as a lie, by living as a white woman. Her mother embraced her blackness, which forced her to find work as a maid; her employers did not treat her with the same dignity as a white woman would receive. After seeing what her mother went through for accepting her blackness and living her life as a black woman, she knew that was not the life she wanted to live.

In the mid 1940’s special schools begun to provide education for deaf children. In 1946 the first special education program for the deaf and hard of hearing of

The tone of the writing is honest, sensitive and innocent. She tells her thoughts and struggles of being an African in america and what it means to be black for the first time.