Disability Rights Movement

J. Quinn Brisben and Carol Poore

DISABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Disability has always been a part of life, but it is only in recent decades that people with various physical, sensory, mental, and cognitive disabilities have increasingly come to understand themselves as a united minority. Rejecting discrimination, exclusion, and pity, people with disabilities around the world are now seeking more frequently to secure their civil rights in all areas of life. Linked to this political movement --which coalesces around the rallying cry “Nothing about us without us”-- are efforts by artists with disabilities to create a new Disability Culture and scholarly research in the burgeoning field of Disability Studies.

Disability has been defined differently in various times and places, but everyone is potentially a member of this group, and most people know someone who belongs to it. It is currently estimated that about 61 million US citizens (26% of the population) have a disability, but in 2019 only 31 percent of working-age people with disabilities held jobs, compared with 75 percent of those without disabilities, indicating ongoing problems with discrimination and with accessibility. Poor people and members of racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately impacted by disability although the disability rights movement has been slow to include them, having been mostly white and middle-class. The term “disability community” usually includes all those who advocate for full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of life.

Historically, disabled people have been hidden away, but they have no doubt always found certain ways to resist being excluded, mocked, ignored, and mistreated. Residential schools for blind and Deaf people were sometimes havens where supportive contacts could be nurtured. Disabled veterans often received sympathy and benefits, but these were not extended for a long time to civilians or to those among the poor whose disabilities were considered to be hereditary. These groups became targets of eugenicists through involuntary sterilization laws in more than thirty states that resulted in the sterilization of more than 60,000 individuals during the twentieth century.

In the first half of the twentieth century there were prominent disabled leftists who raised their voices to call for greater justice and equality, including Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, Helen Keller in her support for the Socialist Party and women’s suffrage, and anti-war activist Randolph Bourne. Mainstream political leaders have sometimes been disabled but have seldom identified with disability rights until recently. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lived with the aftereffects of polio, promoted the Social Security Act of 1935, which provided the first permanent federal assistance for disabled people. Many places were discretely ramped for his wheelchair, but he kept the extent of his disability hidden from the public because he felt that he would not be able to accomplish his goals if it became known that he could hardly walk. When the national memorial to Roosevelt opened in Washington, DC in 1997 without a statue of him in his wheelchair, disability rights activists protested strongly against this erasure of history, and the National Organization on Disability raised funds for such a statue, which was erected in 2001.

Influenced by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the women’s movement of the 1970s, increasing numbers of disabled people and their allies have no longer been willing to resign themselves to a status as second-class citizens. Ed Roberts, who could never be far from his iron lung, took over protest techniques from the free speech movement at Berkeley and learned to reject the argument that “anatomy is destiny” from feminists. Advocating self-determination for disabled people, he founded the first Center for Independent Living there in 1972, and such Centers exist all around the world today. His eventual successor at Centers for Independent Living, Judy Heumann, had founded New York’s Disabled in Action in 1970 after protesting against the Vietnam War and forcing the New York school board to certify her as a teacher even though she used a wheelchair. Heumann and one hundred other disabled activists, supported by the Black Panthers, took over the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the San Francisco federal building for twenty-five days in 1977, the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in American history. They demanded that the federal government enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibited job discrimination against disabled people in language copied from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The sit-in was successful, and Secretary Joseph Califano signed the regulations. Marian Wright Edelman used her civil rights experience to lobby effectively for the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which for the first time required federally funded public schools to provide equal access to education to children with disabilities.

Disability rights priorities concentrate on accessibility in the widest possible sense, and some of the earliest demands were for equal access to buildings, transportation, etc. In Denver on July 5, 1978, nineteen persons in wheelchairs from the Atlantis Community blocked two city buses for twenty-four hours in the nation’s first demonstration for accessible public transportation. Founded in 1975 by Wade Blank, who had marched in Selma and counseled anti-war Kent State students, Atlantis was a group of former nursing home residents who had liberated themselves and were now helping each other to live independently. This protest is now commemorated by a plaque on the site that proclaims “We will ride” and is the disability rights equivalent of Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat. Nonviolent direct action against inaccessible transport quickly spread to other cities, frequently coordinated by the Denver group, which in 1983 organized American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT), an advocacy group that soon had well-trained branches in many cities. After many protests and lawsuits, bus lifts became required by law as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.

Since the 1960s many other disability rights endeavors and organizations have been formed, including the psychiatric survivors movement, People First (an international self-advocacy organization of people with intellectual disabilities, founded in 1968 in Sweden and in 1974 in the US), the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (1979), the National Alliance on Mental Illness (1979), and the World Institute on Disability in Berkeley (1983) to name just a few.

Disability rights efforts had achieved significant gains, but activists advocated more far-reaching goals. In 1986 the National Council on Disability recommended that a federal civil rights law should be adopted that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability following the model of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The fight for the ADA linked more radical groups and individuals such as ADAPT and Patrisha Wright with moderates such as Justin Dart, Jr. and Evan Kemp. The passage of the ADA was opposed by some religious groups, who viewed any attempts to require accessibility as infringements upon religious freedom, and by many members of the business community, including the US Chamber of Commerce, who feared extensive costs and litigation over accessibility. When the ADA appeared to be stalled in the House, on March 13, 1990 over 1000 people marched to the US Capitol to demand that Congress pass the law. In an action known as the “Capitol Crawl” about sixty put aside their mobility aids and crawled up the senty-eight front steps to the Capitol in order to demonstrate how people with disabilities were excluded from the halls of government. Soon afterwards, on July 16, 1990 President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA, which, in addition to prohibiting discrimination against disabled people, also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations. The desire of disabled people to be deinstitutionalized, take charge of their own lives, and contribute to the economy appeals to many conservatives as well as progressives. The implications of restructuring employment to fit human needs rather than forcing people to adapt to conditions set by bosses are often obvious to the Right as well as the Left.

Shortly after the passage of the ADA, the disability rights organization ADAPT changed its name to American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today and has focused its efforts in the past thirty years on redirecting Medicaid money from nursing homes to independent living support for people with disabilities so that they can remain in their homes. On June 22, 2017 about fifty members of ADAPT were arrested at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Capitol office for protesting proposed cuts to Medicaid in the Republicans’ health care bill. Earlier that year an estimated 45,000 people with disabilities attended the January Women’s March on Washington to protest the election of Donald Trump, likely the largest gathering of disabled people in US history. The current generation of disability rights activists (those who grew into adulthood since the passage of the ADA) is informed by the marriage equality movement, the fight for the Affordable Care Act and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The ADA was formulated vaguely in certain ways, which on the one hand has been problematic but on the other hand has created openings for expanding the scope of civil rights through protests and litigation. Today disability rights activists also focus on questions of equal rights related to invisible disabilities, neurodiversity (the belief that cognitive differences such as autism are part of normal variations of human behavior), intellectual disability, and race and disability (for example, the National Black Disability Coalition). The organization Not Dead Yet, founded in 1996, opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia for disabled people.

In March 1988 a significant protest for Deaf Rights took place at Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C., the only university specifically designed for deaf and hard of hearing students. When its Board of Trustees decided to appoint a hearing President, students and others went on strike, shut down the campus, carried banners proclaiming “We still have a dream,” and demanded that the university appoint a Deaf president. After a week the “Deaf President Now” protest was successful, and I. King Jordan was named the university’s first Deaf president. The ADA extended civil rights protections to Deaf people and has led to advances for them in education and employment. However, some groups of people who identify as culturally Deaf reject being labeled as “disabled” and assert that they are more akin to a linguistic minority because of their use of American Sign Language (ASL). They view being Deaf as a source of pride that does not need to be fixed, reject oralism, and understand ASL as central to their identity.

All liberation movements encompass efforts to repudiate negative images and recover the history of oppressed groups. In tandem with the disability rights movement, disabled artists have sought to create their own images of themselves that reject stereotypes and express all the diverse possibilities of their lives. Under the umbrella term “disability culture,” these activities include performance (e.g. Petra Kuppers’s Olimpias Project at the University of Michigan), poetry and the spoken word (e.g. Cheryl Marie Wade, Krip-Hop Nation), painting and the visual arts (e.g. Riva Lehrer) dance accessible to all (often through contact improvisation, e.g. AXIS Dance Company in Oakland, CA), theater (e.g. the Wry Crips Disabled Women’s Theatre Group in Berkeley; the National Theater of the Deaf in West Hartford, CT), as well as fiction and non-fiction by disabled writers with emancipatory perspectives. The first Disability Pride Week, which promotes the idea that disability identity can and should be a source of pride rather than shame, was held in 1990 in Boston and was rooted in other pride awareness events such as Black Pride and LGBT Pride.

Also linked to the social movement for disability rights, the new Disability Studies rejects the medical or social service model of disability as a deficit to be fixed or normalized. This approach views disability as a socially and culturally constructed category to be studied in similarly complex ways as race, ethnicity, class, or gender, and focuses on how disability is caused by the way society is organized and by cultural rules about how bodies should behave, rather than by a person’s particular impairment. The Society for Disability Studies was founded in 1986, and a wealth of groundbreaking interdisciplinary research has emerged in the areas of disability history, theory, policy, bioethics, and the arts. Scholars are increasingly concerned with exploring intersections between disability and race, feminism, and gender and sexuality. Deaf Culture and Deaf Studies, while sometimes rejecting an association with “disability,” have been similarly connected to the Deaf Rights Movement.

It has been difficult for groups of people with disabilities to find a place in broader progressive or left-wing coalitions, where they are often absent or their presence is treated as an afterthought rather than as a critical part of diversity. Perhaps one reason is that women and members of other groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, or LGBT communities, have historically been denigrated and excluded by being portrayed as ill or disabled: as physically weak, intellectually inferior, mentally ill, etc. Therefore, these liberation movements have traditionally distanced themselves from disability by asserting that their members are just as “able” as men or as the majority. Another reason is the difficulty in creating solidarity among people with different types of impairments, especially with respect to the divisions between those with physical and those with mental disabilities. The ongoing efforts of activists, artists, and scholars, however, to transcend a purely “civil rights” approach and critique concepts and practices of accessibility in the broadest sense, models of community, independence and caregiving, and quality of life, give hope that such alliances will be strengthened in the future.

Recommendations

Verso Gift Card

Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet

Freud and the Non-European

Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change

A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight

The Homegrown City: Reclaiming the Metropolis for its Users

Berlin Childhood around 1900

You’re viewing our site

Disability Rights Movement

Further reading