Dyslexia crosses racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines and is the most common cause of learning disability.

As a child, Carol Moseley Braun knew she learned differently. When she entered the third grade, as the result of the desegregation of schools, she was bussed across Chicago to a previously all-white public school.

Because of the difficulty she experienced as a dyslexic, she was quickly seated in the “dumb row” in her new school.

At first, she was horrified.

Then, she became aggrieved and angry and determined to work her way out of that seat.

Intent on righting that wrong, she came up with the “ruler trick.” She used her ruler under words and numbers to help her focus on the writing that seemed to jump on the page.

By the second semester, she was moved to the “smart row.”

She resolved to succeed and worked hard to do so. Her dyslexic brain transposed letters and numbers and sometimes filled in wrong endings. Spatial relationships were a disaster. She kept her struggles to herself and would re-read sentences and re-do arithmetic calculations.

Reading was not her forte. She discovered that she learned better by hearing, seeing, feeling, and experiencing instruction, so she ran away from school and visited the Chicago museums…until she got caught.

Her grit paid off.

She graduated class Valedictorian.

She went on to graduate with honors from the University of Chicago Law School.

Carol has served:

• As a Prosecutor in the office of the U.S. Attorney
• In the Illinois House of Representatives as a Democrat,
• As Cook County (Illinois) recorder of deeds,
• As the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate
• As the first African American woman ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.

You can check out her interview on C-Span’s Oral Histories here.

In her work, Carol is noted for speaking out to de-stigmatize dyslexia and learning differences and has built a reputation as an advocate for social reform in health care, education, and gun control.

She believes her dyslexia gave her more than it took from her – it taught her discipline, the expectation of working harder, and helped her find her courage.

Referring to herself she says, “I see connections other people don’t. I can see around corners…”

In her advocacy for dyslexic children, she is convinced that, “We are wasting an awful lot of talent and losing an awful lot of capacity by pigeonholing and relegating dyslexic children to less. When we give them less and don’t recognize, support or nurture their capacity, what we do is deprive ourselves of all they could contribute.”

Parents of dyslexic children must prepare them to protect their own progress in an education system that still largely misunderstands them.