October 4, 1858

Dr. Joseph Henry Johnson opened the Alabama School for the Deaf in Talladega. Inspired to work with the deaf by his hearing-impaired brother, Johnson founded the school in a former Masonic school building with the support of Gov. A.B. Moore. The state purchased the campus in 1860, added the Alabama School for the Blind in 1867, and approved funding for the joint schools in 1870. Now known as the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind (AIDB), the school includes nine regional centers and serves more than 12,500 residents from all 67 Alabama counties.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Manning Hall at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega, 1939. (Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Georgia native Joseph H. Johnson founded the Alabama School for the Deaf (now the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind) in Talladega in the mid-1850s. Johnson served as president and an instructor at the school for many years. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History)

An audiologist gives a young woman a hearing test at the Negro School for the Deaf and Blind. In 1967, a decision in the Christine Archie v. AIDB discrimination lawsuit resulted in the incorporation of the school into the larger Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama)

Like most other schools in Alabama, AIDB has a long and active sports tradition. The men’s basketball team, shown here in 1917, has won a number of national titles, as have several other teams at the institute. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.