Alexander Graham Bell was born on this day—Here's why his legacy to the Deaf community is one of destruction

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

While Alexander Graham Bell is associated with the invention of the telephone, many people are unaware that his father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a teacher of the deaf and believed to be the model for George Bernard Shaw's character of Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, which became the film "My Fair Lady."

Alexander Graham Bell mother was deaf and he taught students at several schools for the deaf. Despite the fact that he married a former deaf student, Mabel Hubbard, he was against deaf people being allowed to marry out of fear of them having deaf children — even though most deaf people are born to hearing parents. Bell's views on eugenics are presented his paper "Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race."

Besides discouraging married between deaf people, in his paper, Bell advocated for an oral-only method of deaf education, the removal of all deaf teachers from the classroom and a ban on the use of sign language.

Bell's fanatical promotion of oralism, his demand that all deaf people learn speech and lip-reading while forbidding them to use sign language, was based on scientifically incorrect theories leading to discrimination and human rights abuses. This disrespectful attempt to control the Deaf community was both damaging and silencing.