The campaign for civil rights continued around the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. The intention to establish rehabilitation programs was not new; such programs had been first established in order to meet the needs of returning World War I veterans. The Rehabilitation Act, however, was driven by the needs of Vietnam veterans, but directly generated discussion of civil rights, largely because of the language of its Section 504, which would come to have the most significance for historians, activists, and the courts.
In the early 1970s, a small number of members of Congress began to argue that civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion should be extended to encompass people with disabilities. In January 1972 Senator Hubert Humphrey and Congressman Charles Vanik unsuccessfully introduced bills to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include disability. Building on this argument, congressional staffers drafting the Rehabilitation Act added language near its conclusion—Section 504—stating that people with disabilities should not “be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Throughout all of the congressional debates and public hearings, only one person commented on Section 504, a representative of the National Foundation for the Blind.16 Few paid any attention to the measure’s antidiscrimination language.
While Congress and President Richard Nixon argued about how much money should be dedicated to the Rehabilitation Act, people with disabilities quickly picked up on the potential of Section 504. Ironically, Nixon vetoed the bill first in October 1972, coincident with the yearly conference of the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. Conference attendee Eunice Fiorito, a blind social worker from New York also active in Disabled in Action (a cross-disability activist group), remembered spending six hours demonstrating in the rain protesting the president’s veto after leaving a banquet, while still in her formal dress.17
Activism also flourished at the state level. Texas debated whether state agencies discriminated “against the hiring of certain categories of handicapped persons.” In West Virginia, “J.B.” wrote to the “Question Line” of the Charleston Daily Mail, “Why does the Legislature tear down a bill to protect the handicapped? They have one for race, creed, color, sex, and age but none for the handicapped. Do they not think they are human or what?” In Lima, Ohio, a local group called the Able-Disabled Club pushed for the elimination of architectural barriers. Imogene Pritchard from Lima believed that the consequences could be huge: “So many kids with bedside teachers could go to school. This should automatically make jobs more accessible and a lot of the prejudice could be broken down, especially in the area of handicapped teachers.” In Brooklyn, a student group called SO FED UP worked “to alleviate the architectural, educational and bureaucratic barriers.” A Colorado activist testified to the state legislature, “People with handicaps don’t all want rehabilitation. What they need is the opportunity to get their foot in the door and to be considered [for jobs].” In Montana activists formed the Montana Coalition of Handicapped Individuals (MCHI). In Maine, complaints about disability discrimination constituted 20 percent of employment discrimination, and a government official said that “a higher percentage of them are based on legitimate grounds than other discrimination complaints.” And winning the prize for best acronym, a group in Florida declared itself on the ARPATH (World Association to Remove Prejudice against the Handicapped) to abolish barriers in public transportation.18
After being vetoed a second time by President Nixon due to financing disagreements, the “Rehab Act” eventually passed in September 1973. Its Section 504 and the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guaranteed a public education to children with disabilities, meant that the legal and cultural frameworks that shaped the daily lives of people with disabilities had changed dramatically. Estimates are that in 1970 US schools educated only one in five children with disabilities. Expanded legal rights gave shape to expanded expectations.19
The laws, however, were not enforced. Disability advocates initially tried to demand enforcement of Section 504 through the courts. James Cherry, eventual instigator of the lawsuit Cherry v. Matthews, which resulted in the development of enforcement regulations, began querying its enforcement almost immediately after its passage. Hospitalized at the National Institutes of Health from 1974 to 1976, he made so many phone calls garnering allies that nurses “asked me if I was making obscene phone calls.” In July 1976 a federal judge ordered the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop Section 504 regulations “with all deliberate speed.”20
Increasingly frustrated with the federal failure to enforce federal law, in April 1977 disability activists staged demonstrations in Washington, DC, and at each of the ten Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) offices around the country (HEW and HEW secretary Joseph Califano had responsibility for the law). In San Francisco, 120 protesters occupied the HEW building, and over half of those stayed for an entire twenty-five day sit-in. The protesters received support from allies both expected and unexpected. Former Berkeley student Ed Roberts, now director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, made an appearance at the protest and gave a public warning about the power of people with disabilities. “As a severely disabled individual and director of the largest state rehabilitation agency in the country, I know that HEW underestimates the strength and commitment of the civil rights movement among disabled people.” He asked the press, “Are we going to perpetuate segregation in our society for one of the largest minority groups in the nation?”21
The Section 504 sit-in exemplifies the ways in which the disability rights movement intersected with and borrowed from the free speech, antiwar, feminist, and racial freedom movements. Many of its activists had first become activists elsewhere, and then learned of the ways in which disability discrimination and oppression paralleled that of others. The organizing skills of leaders such as Kitty Cone meant that the protesters found support from traditional disability organizations, such as United Cerebral Palsy and the Easter Seals, as well as churches and synagogues.
The Section 504 protests, however, also found unexpected allies—again, often due to the organizing skills of its leaders and their prior activism. Local and national labor unions provided protesters and statements of support. The Butterfly Brigade, a group of gay men who patrolled the streets in order to prevent anti-gay violence, smuggled walkie-talkies to the protesters after the phone lines to the HEW offices were cut. Chicano activists and a grassroots group of substance abusers and former felons named Delancey Street often brought food. The Black Panthers provided one hot meal a day. Disabled Black Panther member Brad Lomax was part of the protest, as was his friend and fellow Panther member Chuck Jackson—who provided attendant-care services for Lomax and many others during the protest. Corbett O’Toole, one of the 504 protesters, who’d been raised a Catholic in Massachusetts, remembered Black Panther support as particularly notable and transformative: “By far the most critical gift given us by our allies was the Black Panthers’ commitment to feed each protester in the building one hot meal every day . . . I was a white girl from Boston who’d been carefully taught that all African American males were necessarily/of necessity my enemy. But I understood promises to support each other’s struggles.” For O’Toole, “The steadfastness of the Black Panthers to a loosely organized, mostly white group of people fighting for disability rights was moving and profound.”22
The support provided to the Section 504 protesters proved essential. Nearly four weeks into the occupation of the San Francisco HEW building, and after increasing national media attention and pressure, HEW secretary Joseph Califano signed the enforcement regulations ensuring that programs receiving federal funding could not discriminate based on disability.
LIVING OUT DISABILITY RIGHTS
Across the nation, people with disabilities also sought an end to employment discrimination—and used the emerging civil rights legislation to do so.
Sandra Blackham became one of the first to use New York’s new human rights law to battle what she considered discrimination in the Madison County Sheriff’s Office. A wife and mother of two, a college graduate, an accomplished skier, and disabled with one leg, Blackham had worked in the Sheriff’s Office as a civil division deputy for many years. The newly arrived sheriff removed her from the position and denied her a new post. “If I were a male with two legs, I would have been civil deputy years ago,” she had said to the sheriff. His reply: “That is true.” Blackham noted that her disability had sometimes meant “rough times in my life, like when I was growing up and was a teenager and everybody was going to proms, but that’s life.” Now she sought her legally recognized rights: “This time I’m right . . . I know I’m right and I’ve just got to stand up for myself.”23
In Denver, those testifying on behalf of a bill banning disability discrimination in housing and employment shared similar stories. Legislators heard of the discrimination disabled students from Colorado University faced. One man, a paraplegic, was denied housing. A blind student, despite ranking at the top of his class, could not find employment. Don Galloway of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped testified that every day, his office received phone calls from “people who are being discriminated against,” and that as many as three hundred thousand Colorado citizens with disabilities needed civil rights protection.24
Attorney John W. Leibold, testifying on behalf of the Ohio antidiscrimination bill he helped to write, said it wonderfully: “We’re going to take disabled people out of the closet. They are no longer going to be shut-ins.” Guaranteeing civil rights was the means to do so. The Ohio bill, which eventually passed, banned disability discrimination in housing, employment, credit, and insurance.25
Sometimes, however, Section 504 did not do enough. When Paul S. Miller graduated near the top of his class at Harvard Law School in 1986 he initially had over forty firms seeking his application. After interviewing Miller, who was four and a half feet tall, firms changed their minds. One member of a hiring committee told him, and could say legally, “Our clients would think we are running a freak circus if they saw you.”26 Miller later became a commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and an international disability-rights expert.
Disability activists and their allies also sought to remove other employment barriers. In October 1988 historian Paul Longmore, for example, protested restrictive social security policies that, in his words, “made the American Dream inaccessible to many disabled citizens.” As a polio survivor with extensive needs, Longmore required personal aids to assist with bathing, dressing, and eating, and equipment such as a ventilator and motorized wheelchair. After earning his PhD and publishing his first book, The Invention of George Washington, Longmore discovered that his publishing royalties (which, for an academic, are rarely enough to live on for a month) would likely render him ineligible for the social security benefits that made it possible for him to “work and live and, literally, to breathe.” After borrowing a barbecue grill from a friend, Longmore and a crowd of supporters gathered in front of the Los Angeles Federal Building. Their signs read, “Jobs. Not Tin Cups” and “We Want to Work! Why Won’t the Government Let Us?” Longmore placed a copy of The Invention of George Washington, the result of more than ten years of labor, on the barbecue grill and watched it burn. It was, he wrote later, “a moment of agony.”27 Though Congress changed social security policies in 1990, partly in response to Longmore’s protest, it still was not enough. Ironically, just a few months before Longmore died in 2010, the then full professor at San Francisco State University learned that even the altered law meant that he would have to turn down a substantial and prestigious research fellowship he had been awarded by the US Department of Education.
Other people with disabilities focused on family issues, with less success. In 1988, for example, Tiffany Callo of San Jose, California, lost custody of her sons David and Jessie because California welfare officials determined that her cerebral palsy rendered her too disabled to care for them. Rather than provide the less expensive in-home support, the state placed her sons in much more expensive foster care. As Callo put it, “So what if it takes longer to change a diaper? That’s where disabled parents do their bonding. It’s quality time.”28 Callo lost custody of her sons, like many other parents with disabilities.
Parental custody issues remain important for parents with disabilities today. According to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare, almost two-thirds of US states continue to list “parental disability” as possible grounds for terminating parental rights, and parents with disabilities lose custody of their children at disproportionately high rates. This is despite research that overwhelmingly indicates that parents with disabilities are no more likely to mistreat their children than parents without disabilities.29
THE UNITED HANDICAPPED FEDERATION: COMMUNITIES IN PROCESS
In September 1974, the United Handicapped Federation of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, announced its creation with a press release. It would, the UHF proudly proclaimed, “become a strong consumer advocate for its constituents in the major areas of transportation, housing, architectural barriers and employment.” It would use “confrontation and pressure tactics” and “significant public actions” instead of lobbying in the “time-consuming and restrictive legislation process.” Audrey Benson, the newly elected president of the UHF, reflected the organization’s confident manner in her acceptance speech. “We will hold up our end,” she declared. “We will act—force the issues into the open and gain control over the decisions that affect our lives. We will not stand still. Now is the time. This is the place. And we are the people.”30
As more people with disabilities became empowered by the actions of others with disabilities, as more and more began to think in terms of rights and citizenship, many disabled people began to consider seriously their own place in the American story—and who got to define that place. What this meant in daily life is perhaps best understood by examining one locale and one group. The story of the United Handicapped Federation exemplifies the growing expansiveness and excitement surrounding disability politics, culture, and life in the years after 1970. The United Handicapped Federation, despite its audacious name, was a local group. It was only one of many organizations of people with disabilities.
Sometime in the early 1970s the Catholic Interracial Council (CIC) sponsored an Action Leadership Techniques Seminar for people with disabilities. In the Twin Cities, the CIC had previously worked for the racial desegregation of local neighborhoods. As Audrey Benson described it, those attending the seminar “learned about [Saul] Alinsky principles and decided that we would organize as other minority groups have.” Originally from North Dakota, Benson had cerebral palsy and had graduated from Jamestown’s Crippled Children’s School. After earning her social work degree from Moorhead (Minnesota) State University, the young white woman moved to Minneapolis. Michael Bjerkesett became the UHF’s first executive director. While a college student Bjerkesett became paralyzed in a car accident. After finishing his degree he became a counselor in a hospital rehabilitation program. He left that position to help organize the UHF. The new organization brought together nineteen state organizations of and for people with disabilities.31 Other early members included Marilyn Rogers, Frances Strong, Stephen Marcinel, Scott Rostron, and Ronnie Stone.
The UHF addressed a wide array of issues, reflecting both the shared experiences and the broad differences among people with disabilities. Its members were most active during the last half of the 1970s, as others across the nation sought to explore and expand the consequences of emerging civil rights legislation. Reflecting national trends with respect to accessible housing, in early 1975 the UHF became involved with what was first known as the United Handicapped Federation Apartment Associates—an early example of universal design. Bjerkesett considered the ninety-unit South Minneapolis
apartment complex “probably one of the most progressive housing projects for the handicapped in the country” at the time. Also in early 1975, in a letter reminiscent of those advocating that the handicapped be exempt from gas rationing during World War II, Bjerkesett asked that the transportation needs of people with disabilities be taken into consideration if gas rationing or higher gas taxes went into effect due to the national energy crisis. It would, he wrote, have “possible discriminatory effects . . . on the handicapped driver,” who had “no alternative forms of transportation.”32
A Disability History of the United States Page 19
