Syd Barrett named Pink Floyd by mashing together two first names he spotted in the liner notes of a 1962 blues album: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The man whose record those notes were printed on was Fulton Allen, better known as Blind Boy Fuller, and his 36 years were a raw, unfiltered lesson in what it took to survive as a disabled, underprivileged Black man in the early 20th-century South. In this deep dive we begin in North Carolina around 1904, where Allen was born one of ten children, lost his mother young, married his wife Cora, and prepared for a life of manual labor until his eyesight began to fail in his teens. By 1928 he was completely blind.

We examine the medical neglect behind that blindness, from a Charlotte doctor's absurd "snow blindness" diagnosis to the 1937 examination that revealed untreated neonatal conjunctivitis, ...