Alabama
Alabama School for Negro Deaf-Mutes and Blind (Talladega)
- Established 1892
- Integrated with the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind, 1968
The first officially expressed concern for the education of sensory impaired black Alabamians was made by President Joseph Henry Johnson in 1881 in a board meeting of the Alabama school.1 Although the Board agreed that the education of the African-American blind should be assumed by the state, nothing happened for more than ten years. The legislature finally appropriated $12,000 for the school, and, in 1892, the Alabama School for Negro Deaf-Mutes and Blind (later the Negro Deaf and Blind) opened with nine students. The two schools shared the same administration. By 1894, 52 students were enrolled. The school was split in 1947 into separate campuses for students who were deaf and blind.
In 1967, the school was party to a lawsuit, Christine Archie v. AIDB, which led to the desegregation of the facilities. Under the court ruling, which decided in favor of the plaintiff, AIDB was required to implement a plan for desegregation by December 1967. The court chastised the school for "pursuing a policy, custom, practice and usage of operating said Institute and the schools composing same upon a racially segregated basis" and roundly criticized the school's "freedom of choice" plan. Under freedom of choice, parents and children were "free" to choose the school they wanted to attend; this was, the court decided, merely a ruse to continue segregation. In July 1968, the Negro School for the Deaf and Blind was fully incorporated into the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind.
- Lynne Hanner and Rose Myers, The Ties That Bind: A Collection of Historical Remembrances of the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind (Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind, 2008), p. 91.