Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments

I wish to express my thanks to Anthony D. Cobb and the entire staff
at the National Center for the Blind in Baltimore for their indispensable
assistance in the tedious process of collecting data, assembling
materials, and scanning the manuscript of this book for factual
errors.
It is also a particular pleasure to acknowledge the cooperation
of the present generation of leaders in the organized blind
movement who are too numerous to single out by name but who gave freely
and often extensively of their time, memory, and wisdom in
the interest not merely of building a historical record that was part
of it, of course but of telling a story (as true as it is remarkable)
that has never been told before.
The
narration of that story, however, is entirely my responsibility.
No one in the organized blind movement with whom I have
talked tried to tell me how to write it, or sought to influence
its point of view. I have had full access to the files of the
National Federation of the Blind and free rein in developing my historical
reconstruction of salient events. In the writing of that history
I have attempted to present the facts (and the drama) in the
context of the time in which they occurred, not in the light of later
developments. I have done this even though in some instances relationships
have evidently somewhat altered in recent years the most
notable example being, perhaps, the relationship between the NFB
and the American Foundation for the Blind. This is only to say that
I have tried not to rewrite history to conform to present attitudes
or agendas. To the best of my ability I have sought to tell
it as it was and as it must have felt to all those blind Americans
who, through half a century of pain and progress, were forming
a more perfect union of their own.
—Floyd Matson
Honolulu, Hawaii
April, 1990
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