Kenneth Jernigan; Advocate for the Blind

Kenneth Jernigan, whose long and dedicated leadership of the National Federation of the Blind made the Baltimore-based organization one of the most influential and respected advocacy groups in the nation, has died at 71.

Jernigan, the recipient of a U.S. Distinguished Service Award for his lifelong commitment to help those who shared his sightlessness, died Monday at his home in Baltimore after a lengthy battle with lung cancer.

Blind from birth, he was reared in rural Tennessee before being sent at age 6 to a boarding school for the blind in Nashville, where he learned to read Braille.

“I came home that first summer to a home where there was no radio, no telephone and nothing for me to read,” he told a Times reporter years later. “But I knew I would be getting a magazine in Braille sent to me each month for June, July and August. And I knew that magazine was 60 pages long.

“So I rationed myself,” he said. “I would only read two pages a day and not a bit more, so that the magazine would last a whole month. It was all I had.”

The importance of being able to read led him, years later, to offer important support for Twin Vision, a Tarzana-based organization that provides children’s books, printed in both regular text and Braille, so that blind parents can read along with their sighted children, and vice versa.

“There is something about a child and parent reading stories together that far transcends the imparting of the information,” Jernigan said. “No one should be deprived of that.”

After his graduation from the Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville and Peabody College in Nashville, Jernigan got a job as a teacher at the Tennessee School for the Blind. From 1953 to 1958, he taught at the California Training Center for the Blind in Oakland, going on to become director of the Iowa Commission for the Blind.

In his unpaid post as president of the National Federation, Jernigan spearheaded a successful drive during the 1980s to get the State Department to reverse its policy of excluding blind people from diplomatic service.

He also battled, with less success, federal restrictions that sometimes keep blind airline passengers from being seated in exit rows, where they might be required to remove evacuations doors during an emergency.

“The person who sits closest to the exit has the best chance of survival,” Jernigan said. “The federal government does not have the right to force blind people to put their lives at greater risk than other people.”

Jernigan scorned those who expressed pity for the blind, demanding, instead, their respect.

“If a blind person has proper training and opportunity, blindness can be reduced to the level of a physical nuisance,” he said.

Among his many efforts was the founding of the National Newsline for the Blind, which permits people to listen to daily newspapers being read over the telephone.

Survivors include his wife, Mary Ellen Osborn Jernigan, and his daughter, Mary Cobb.