SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Mark Twain once said the two most interesting characters of the 19^th century were Napoleon and Helen Keller, but a series of TikTok-based conspiracy theories have young people of the roaring 2020s believing that Helen Kellen was nothing more than a myth.

The hashtag #HelenKellerWasntReal first appeared on the internet around 2020. Some of the related posts insisted that Keller never existed at all, while others insisted that Keller was only pretending to be blind and deaf.

Sue Pilkilton is the Executive Director at the Birthplace of Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama told KTAL NBC 6 that Helen Keller was absolutely a real person.

"It's unnerving so many young people today don't believe Keller was a real person," Pilkilton said.

Here's Helen's story.

Why Helen Keller's life matters

Helen Keller was 18 months old when she lost her ability to see and hear because of a high fever. Years later, she wrote that “there is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.”

Keller was born in Tuscumbia, a small town in the northwest corner of Alabama, in a two-room cabin covered in English ivy. The old plantation was known as "Ivy Green," and the ivy still grows there today.

The 204-year-old plantation grounds where Keller was born belonged to her grandparents, who were plantation owners that moved to Alabama from Virginia.

Helen's father fought for the Confederacy, but because of Helen's deafness and blindness she grew up in a seemingly different world--a world where she considered it perfectly normal to fight for equality for herself and others.

A few of the Executive Director's thoughts

“I feel like there’s so many people in this day and time that want to wipe history completely out,” Sue Pilkilton told KTAL NBC 6 NEWS. “But history is something that we all need. Whether we agree, whether we don’t agree, it’s still history."

Pilkilton believes that we need to pass our historic legacies on to our children.

"I know that maybe it hasn’t been a perfect world, but it’s our world. We should always keep our history alive.”

History is erased every day when people or organizations ban books or deny that certain events or people ever existed. But uncomfortable truths are part of who we are as a society.

Pilkilton never met Keller, but she said she loves her because she knows so much about her. And because Pilkilton watches over Helen's birthplace, she treats the entire property with respect.

A few years ago, Pilkilton was devastated when an ice storm covered the property and ruined the Boxwood hedges that encircled the area where Keller played as a child.

Pilkilton understands Keller's legacy thoroughly because she has been working at Helen Keller's homeplace for almost 55 years.

A stern English teacher from Pilkilton's childhood offered 100 extra points for students who brought back their tickets from taking a tour of Keller's homeplace. Pilkilton took her up on the offer and was surprised to find that she loved the place.

Pilkilton was later offered a summer job in the gift shop and she said yes without even thinking about pay or the number of hours she would be working.

"That's how my journey started. I was in the gift shop, and then I became a hostess, and then I became the assistant administrator, and then the administrator retired, and in 1980 they asked me to become the director."

Pilkilton helped create Camp Courage, a camp that invites blind and deaf children from all 50 states to experience hands-on learning at the Helen Keller Birthplace. Children at the camp participate in art and nature programs and learn through their senses of taste, touch, and smell instead of through sight and hearing. The camp encourages children to be like Helen, who was once known as America's "First Lady of Courage." It also teaches children to be like Ann Sullivan, Keller's teacher, who was legally blind.

Amazingly, the camp is completely free. The kids are shown that a person who has a disability can make a positive difference in the lives of others.

Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan spent the majority of their lives together, standing up for those with disabilities--particularly the blind and the deaf.

Working to help Keller was the only job Sullivan ever had.

Teens who don't believe Helen Keller was real, and why it matters

Teens in Caddo Parish, Louisiana are falling victim to the misinformation about Helen Keller that is circulating on the internet. One such teen, who lives in Shreveport and will remain anonymous, recently admitted she "learned" that Helen Keller wasn’t real on TikTok.

And though it may seem insignificant that some American teens doubt the existence of Helen Keller, the scary truth is that Helen Keller's story isn't the only puzzle piece of history being removed from history by misinformation circulating on social media.

In 2023 a host of conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Titanic upset Titanic historians. In April of this year, dentists went on TikTok to explain there are no secret codes on toothpaste tubes. And there are even conspiracy theories about TikTok, such as a rumor that insists Jewish peoples are trying to ban the app in the United States.

So why, exactly, are some social media users attempting to ban Helen Keller, of all people? Keller was born in 1880, after all. What is it about this woman, who has been dead for more than five decades, that is so controversial? And do most people see the irony of social media influencers becoming both deaf and blind to Keller’s incredible accoplishments?

And what came first--TikTok, or efforts to deny that Helen Keller existed?

Perhaps one of the reasons why it is so difficult for some people to believe in Helen Keller is that her story involves not just one, but two geniuses. Both Keller and Anne Sullivan, Keller's teacher, were brilliant women in a day when women were not allowed to attend most universities. Keller and Sullivan were born when female colleges were a new concept. Women across the United States, particularly in the South and on the East Coast, were finally being allowed to attend college. It was the first time in world history that women were being educated on such a high level, but the world wasn't quite ready for the likes of Helen Keller!

Here's why.

Helen Keller caused a culture shift

“Every significant change in our history—the abolition of slavery, the extension of the right to vote, the passage of worker protection and safety laws, the end of Jim Crow—came about because people took action, rallying together against unjust laws and practices,” wrote Maya Lindberg in a 2014 article called "The Danger of Censoring Our History."

It was Keller's ability to work with others, such as Ann Sullivan and Alexander Graham Bell, that helped her significantly change American (and world) society.

When Helen Keller was seven, she and her mother visited the Perkins Institute in Boston and then stopped to meet President Grover Cleveland at the White House. Keller soon began to attend Perkins and learned about a little girl in Norway who was deaf and blind and had learned how to speak.

Once the bar was raised, Keller decided she wanted to learn to talk.

The very first sentence that Helen Keller ever spoke was "It is warm."

By the age of 14, Helen was attending the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. There she worked to make her words more understandable for others.

She's pictured below in the first graduating class at Wright-Humason.

She wanted to attend Harvard, but Harvard did not allow girls to enroll.

Helen would attend the prestigious Radcliffe College, Harvard's partner school for women. Radcliffe College merged with Harvard University in 1999.

At Radcliffe, Keller had to take tests without the assistance of Sullivan because some believed it was Sullivan, and not Keller, who was the real genius. (Technically, they were both brilliant.)

Keller quickly proved, by taking tests without Sullivan present, that she was the true test-taker. Before long, one of her professors talked to the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal about Keller, who was offered $3000 to write six articles--in 1902, no less.

She published The Story of My Life, a bestseller in 1903. In the book, she published such words as "My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges."

Keller would also write "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do something I can do."

And that was just the start of Keller's writing career.

"It is always painful to set one's self against tradition, especially against the conventions and prejudices that hedge about womanhood," Keller wrote in the Ladies' Home Journal. "But continuous study of blindness has forced upon me knowledge of this subject, and, if I am to stand as an advocate of the work for the sightless, I cannot, without accusing myself of cowardice, gloss over or ignore the fundamental evil."

The more Keller learned about blindness, the more upset she became because many forms of blindness are preventable. She also realized that poverty and blindness were connected.

Keller educated readers of the Ladies' Home Journal about how special eye drops can keep some babies from going blind. In 1920, she helped form the American Civil Liberties Union.

Today more than half a million members are active in the ACLU.

Keller was a suffragette, giving speeches where she asked such questions as, "Are the political and industrial needs of women less genuine than those of men? Let us put an end to this stupid, one-sided, one-power arrangement and have suffrage for all--an inclusive suffrage that takes in everybody. After all, the aim of every good man and woman is justice."

Despite being blind, Helen Keller had views that allowed her to see far past skin color and gender. She was brilliant and her desire to understand what it meant to feel, to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to know challenged others to understand that humanity can and must strive to be better, too.

Keller proved that the deaf and blind could also become philosophers, poets, and even movie stars. And in doing so, she also became a role model for those who can see and hear.

Throughout her long career, Keller wrote 14 books, including:

• The Story of My Life
• The World I Live In
• Optimism
• Light in my Darkness
• Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy
• My Religion
• The Open Door
• The Song of the Stone Well
• How I Would Help the World
• Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision
• My Story (age 12)

Today, all but one of those books is out of print.

She was, as JSTOR Daily so perfectly worded it, "uniquely poised to point out--and challenge--the troubled racial heritage of the American South.

"Nay, let me say it, this great republic of ours is a mockery when citizens in any section are denied the rights which the Constitution guarantees them, when they are openly evicted, terrorized and lynched by prejudiced mobs, and their persecutors and murderers are allowed to walk abroad unpublished. The United States stands ashamed before the world whilst ten millions of its people remain victims of a most blind, stupid, inhuman prejudice. How dare we call ourselves Christians? The outrages against the colored people are a denial of Christ. The central fire of his teaching is equality," Keller wrote in a letter that endorsed the work of the NAACP in 1916.

Helen Keller overcame a lot in her life, so a series of TikTok-based conspiracy theories that have young people believing that she was a myth can also be overcome. And it's important that we set the record straight, too.

Helen Keller's legend lives on not only because of what she did for others, but because of what she did for others. And that's why she deserves her place in history.

"Alone we can do so little," she said. "Together we can do so much."

Hear, hear.

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