Cone, Kitty

CONE, KITTY (1944-2015). An early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and, later, the Young Socialist Alliance, Kitty Cone was active in struggles against racial segregation and the US war in Vietnam and, most prominently, for disability rights. Disabled herself, she helped to spearhead the 504-Sit-In, a twenty-six day occupation in April 1977 of the San Francisco federal office of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The protesters aimed to implement Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which restricted federal aid to programs that discriminated against people with disabilities and which foreshadowed the Americans with Disability Act of 1990 that banned discrimination. Later in life, she recalled this moment as ushering in “an era of disability rights activism, empowerment, and legislative victories.”

Born in Champaign, Illinois, Curtis Selden Cone received a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy at age fifteen, putting her, according to her physician, on a path to further disability and most likely an early death. She attended Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, DC, a private girls’ school, and refusing to honor restrictions imposed because of her physical limitations, she was expelled. She credits the headmistress’s preemptive and harmful decision as her inspiration to take up the struggle for civil rights. “Things that happened in my life determined the fact that I would be an activist,” she later affirmed in a 2013 oral history.

In the early 1960s Cone began undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she became a student activist, affiliating with Friends of SNCC and SDS. She joined campaigns against apartheid in South Africa and racial discrimination in local housing. Campus radicals introduced her to Left politics, which became the center of her undergraduate life by the mid-1960s. The local SDS chapter invited to campus several Old Leftists, such as Raya Dunayevskaya, and she listened intently to them and supplemented their lectures with directed reading of Marxist classics. By this time, Cone had moved considerably along her politcal path from Republican, Democratic, to Trotskyist politics. In the late 1960s, she traveled to South America and met the imprisoned Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco, an experience that deepened her commitment to socialism. Returning to the United States and settling in Chicago, Cone worked for several years helping to organize the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War under the auspices of the Socialist Workers Party.

In 1972, Cone moved to the Bay Area in California, where she became a non-stop community organizer for disability rights, highlighting many issues, with transportation and housing at the forefront. In Oakland, she found employment at the Center for Independent Living. In 1993 she became a development director of Disability Rights and Educational Fund, a law and policy center for individuals with disabilities and their parents. Kitty Cone retired in 1999; she died of pancreatic cancer and left a powerful, remarkable legacy of disability rights.

Kitty Cone: Political Organizers for Disability Rights, 1970s-1990s, and Strategist for Section 504 Demonstrations, 1977. An Interview Conducted by David Landes,1996-1998. Bancroft Library. University of California-Berkeley Libraries. https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1w1001mt/?brand=oac4