Haben Girma: the Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law

Written by Indie Beedie, from the Faculty Disability Equity Team

Haben Girma is a disability rights lawyer and the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School in 2013 with a strong appetite for social justice. She interned at the U.S Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and was named a White House Champion of Change during the Obama administration. She has also gone on to receive the Helen Keller Achievement Award and a spot on Forbes 30 under 30. Haben advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities and believes that disability is an opportunity for innovation and inclusion benefits all of us not just disabled people.

She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area after her parents fled Eritrea as refugees of Civil War in the early 1980s. Haben lost her vision and hearing as a result of an unknown progressive condition beginning in early childhood, as a child she had some residual vision and hearing and she currently retains 1% of her sight. She has an older brother, Mussie Gebre, who is also deafblind, he did not benefit from access to technology and education in Eritera unlike Haben did when the family moved to America.

She found herself having to advocate for herself when she went to Lewis & Clark College where she found she couldn’t access the cafeteria menu. She successfully challenged the cafeteria manager that she was entitled to an accessible menu through the Americans with Disabled Act. From there, she discovered that advocating for her own rights benefited everyone, not just herself and went on to become a lawyer to increase access to books and other digital information for people with disabilities.

Now she focuses on the development of accessible digital services calling on programmers and technology designers to use this power to increase access for people with disabilities. She also empowers students with disabilities to become self-advocates and teaching families and educators to set high expectations, through sharing positive disabled stories and asking people to change their negative assumptions and fixed world views.

Haben communicates by connecting a computer keyboard to her braille note-taker which allows her to read the letters a person types on the keyboard in real-time braille and uses the assistance of a guide dog. She frequently points out the different methods that deaf-blind/disabled people use to gain access and that not everyone uses the same technology she does.
When she’s not advocating, she surfs, rock climbs, cycles and during her time at Harvard she competed on the Harvard Ballroom Dance team. She would prefer not to be called inspiring, but living in defiance of great social and physical barriers.

We could all learn to be more ‘Haben’ in advocating for ourselves and others in creating a more accessible environment for all.

If you would like to see more of Haben Girma, in 2014 she gave a talk at TEDxBaltimore where she confronts TED for not providing captions for TEDx talks, including her own. In August 2019 she released a memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Havard Law