Colin Heneghan

Colin Heneghan is a leader of the American mute rights movement. Heneghan was born in Marcusville, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, on March 23, 1932 to Patrick, a police chief, and his wife Jane. He was the second son born to the couple, but the first to live beyond infancy. The family would later have two more sons, Mark and Matthew, and finally a daughter, Patricia, who had a rare throat disfunction, called thracheal dixitionation, causing her to be only able to speak in an inaudible whisper.

Following his graduation from Tulane University in 1954 with a master's degree in political science and a minor in ceramics, Heneghan used money he had earned from a successful oil investment to found a small non-for-profit called Patricia's Peace in memory of his sister, who had died three years earlier from an allergic reaction to penicilin. Patricia's Peace's goal was to demand equal opportunities in education for people who were unable to speak, or mutes as they were referred to at the time.

As Heneghan began to run rallies and charity events in major towns in Missouri, Patricia's Peace grew in recognition and Heneghan used this leverage to push this issue into the forefront of national politics, running for the United States Senate seat for Missouri in 1958. Though he lost the election in a landside, he used his new-found notoriety to propel his movement and in the following five years he produced countless books and articles on the Mute population in America, including "Sorry Colin, Patty Ain't a Talker"; "He Says, She Says"; and the nationally acclaimed "Words Without a Voice". Unfortunately, before Heneghan could achieve the equal rights for the speaking impaired that he so avidly strove for, he died unexpectedly of malaria, which he contracted on a trip to Panama that turned out to have been funded by money he had stolen from Patricia's Peace. With its founder dead and disgraced, Patricia's Peace dissolved and the entire Mute Movement was derailed by the harsh backlash as a result of the Panamanian Scandal. Tragically, what gains Heneghan had worked so hard to achieve were so quickly lost, and the mute population did not receive the recognition it deserved until the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed by the United States Congress in 1990.