Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page ally for all deaf persons who felt that signs were a necessary part of their lives, and who objected to other people's oppressive insensitivity to this fact. But Garretson wasn't speaking for all deaf people. Tom Humphries, a student at Gallaudet at the time Stokoe's paper was published, offers a possible explanation for the rejection of Stokoe's work by many deaf people:
There were many who resented him for contributing to an ongoing and uncomfortable discussion about their language and proving to be right more often than wrong. Since many deaf people internalized the general negative view of ASL from hearing people, I think they felt as mystified and unbelieving as most hearing people did in response to Bill's work.
Many deaf people attained status and what passed for power fora deaf person by continuing to put down "sign language"
in favor of signing and speaking English well, and they were very threatened by any revelations that legitimized ASL.
They tried to make Bill into some kind of crackpot to trivialize what he was doing.8
To understand why Stokoe continued his research despite criticism from most of his colleagues at Gallaudet, from other educators of the deaf, and even from deaf people themselves criticism that persisted for almost twenty yearsrequires an understanding of his personality and temperament.
There is his intelligence, of course. Harlan Lane, author of When the Mind Hears, calls it "the high metabolic rate of his intellect Test results sent to Cornell from Stokoe's high school indicate an IQ. of 150 to a range that indicates genius aptitude. But genius is not enough to explain why Stokoe sacrificed his cozy niche as a Chaucer scholar. It would have been far easier for him to teach three or four classes and go home at the end of the day to his wife and children.
Stokoe was always fascinated by new ideas, by new learning friends and relatives remember that even at a very young age he liked to tinker with things to see how they worked. As a teenager he took his grandfather's rifles apart and rebuilt them to see if he

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