Tenbroek, Jacobus (1911–1968)

American Advocate for the Blind

Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, called “Chick” by friends and family, blinded at the age of seven in a hunting accident, was a charter member and the first president of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), founded in 1940 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The NFB grew to become the largest advocacy group of blind people in the United States. TenBroek was a constitutional scholar who wrote academic monographs on the 14th Amendment, public policy (particularly as it pertained to welfare programs), and the nascent Social Security Administration and its impact on the blind. TenBroek waged a relentless war of words against publicly financed programs that purported to assist the blind but that were in fact, he asserted, institutions rife with paternalistic attitudes and designed to perpetuate the inferior status and indigency of the blind. TenBroek argued in favor of a pension for the blind that would not require means testing as did social security. After earning a law degree and a doctorate in public policy, tenBroek taught speech and political science at the University of California at Berkeley for 25 years.

As a boy, tenBroek studied with Newell Perry at the California School for the Blind in Oakland, California. Perry mentored a generation of leaders that would found the California Council for the Blind in the 1930s, along with a handful of other state advocacy groups that would coalesce into a nationwide movement of blind activists. TenBroek would galvanize this generation of activists and draw them into the NFB under his leadership.

TenBroek served as president of the NFB from 1940 to 1961, when he resigned at the NFB national convention in Kansas City amidst a firestorm of dissension among a number of NFB state affiliates. By resigning, tenBroek managed to quell this dissent and put in place the next generation of leaders who he felt best represented his vision for the organization and the broader movement.