By Patrick A. Barrett

(Editor’s Note: Pat Barrett is first vice-president of our Metro Chapter and a member of the NFB of Minnesota board of directors.)

Marching together for our rights. It was a thrill for my wife, Trudy, who is also blind, and me to participate in the March for Independence at our National Federation of the Blind 2009 convention in Detroit! Rallying for the right to read and write braille, as sighted kids are routinely taught to read and write print, was a central theme of the march. On-line literacy and access to electronic books was also an urgent concern of the thousands of convention delegates. Many on-line titles that the sighted could read have been denied to the blind through prejudice not only from authors, but also even by higher institutions of learning.

Trudy and I stayed a day after the convention to tour the Henry Ford Museum. One of our Federationists from Missouri had arranged the tour. There were about a dozen of us on the tour. We saw, and got to touch, a few of Henry Ford’s pot-bellied stoves. They were part of a collection of 300 he had at one time. Another exhibit showed a group putting together a Model T car. The chair Abraham Lincoln, one of my favorite presidents, had sat in at Ford’s Theater the night he was assassinated was also on display. But my favorite was the civil rights exhibition.

Through the glass, I could see the sinister costume of a Ku Klux Klansman. Prejudice fueled their fiery passion for beating and killing innocent black people. Incredibly, the KKK is still alive today. One big reason is that they have freedom of speech and assembly. I also saw signs on display that said “Whites Only” for drinking fountains and libraries. The most moving part of the tour for me was the Rosa Parks bus.

I scrambled ahead of the rest of our tour when I saw it to make sure I sat in the front of the bus. This was the actual bus that the Ford Museum had restored where Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat in the “Whites Only” section. She was arrested for her stand against old, discriminatory ideas.

A tape was played while our tour sat on the bus. This was an account in Rosa’s actual voice of the incident. I felt like I was sitting beside her in her struggle just to ride the bus after a tiring day of hard work. Then I thought, “Why do blind people have to be locked out of on-line libraries?” Half a century later, how can textbook authors and college administrators put gates up to keep us barred from just reading books? Is prejudice still fueling pushing blind people back from moving forward with their degrees or careers? Damn straight it is!

Amazon and the Kendall 2 folks do not want to understand that blind workers, students, and parents only want access to the written word. Blind people should not be charged or categorized because they need to hear the word on the electronic page instead of seeing it.

We in the NFB have come a great distance in asserting our right to sit wherever we want on the bus. If we have an additional physical disability, such as a leg or back injury, we have the option to sit in the front seats. Bus drivers may invite — even cajole — us to sit in the front seat, but we still have the right to choose. Gaining entrance into the on-line, “sighted-only” libraries of Amazon and Kendall, however, will take more time, work, and constructive passion to feel that freedom.