Devoted Deaf And Blind Teacher Provides Inspiration For Students Like Herself

Jet, August 3, 1998

Jerrie Lawhorn can neither see nor hear, but her imagination allows her to see clearly, and what she can't hear, she can feel in her soul.

Lawhorn is a teacher at the Hadley School for the Blind in Winnetka, IL, and has been inspiring students there for the past 31 years. For her students she has been a lesson in overcoming the biggest of obstacles.

Lawhorn has spent her lifetime performing, writing, teaching and lecturing. She's delivered monologues at Carnegie Hall, studied at the American Conservatory of Music and is the first Black deaf-blind person to earn a college degree, graduating from Northeastern Illinois in 1983, according to the Chicago Tribune.

She is also the author of an autobiography, On Different Roads, published in 1991.

But Lawhorn reveals that she really does not think her accomplishments are anything extraordinary.

"There are so many blind and deaf-blind people who have done bigger things than I," she told the Chicago Tribune. "I have a great deal to be grateful for."

Geraldine Lawhorn was born in Dayton, OH, a healthy seeing and hearing little girl. She moved with her family to Chicago when she was 18 months old. It wasn't until later that she lost her sight and hearing. The doctors said her condition came from a bout with the measles when she was 5. Her sight was gone by the time she was 10 and her hearing by the time she was 19.

In her book she talks about the gradual failing of her eyesight. "I did not want to be different from my classmates. I pretended I could see. When the teacher pointed to the blackboard, I looked in that direction attentively ... If called on to read or recite, I relied on my memory, guesswork and whispers from surrounding kids. Of course I made mistakes ... Yet I believed it was better to be considered stupid than blind."

Losing her hearing was no easier, especially for someone who loved conversation and the theater. She had to adjust and had to have interpreters tell her about shows.

Now Lawhorn carries on conversations with either a human interpreter using a form of sign language pressed into her palm or with special machines that translate words into Braille. And she talks in her own voice, a deeply resonant sound that has been shaped and molded over the years by trial and error, according to the Tribune.

With all of her success, are there any unfulfilled dreams that Lawhorn possesses? Well there is one, she told the Tribune. "I would buy myself a car."