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The Disability Rights Movement
In this updated edition, Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames expand their encyclopedic history of the struggle for disability rights in the United States, to include the past ten years of disability rights activism.The book includes a new chapter on the evolving impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the continuing struggle for cross-disability civil and human rights, and the changing perceptions of disability.
The authors provide a probing analysis of such topics as deinstitutionalization, housing, health care, assisted suicide, employment, education, new technologies, disabled veterans, and disability culture.
Based on interviews with over one hundred activists,The Disability Rights Movementtells a complex and compelling story of an ongoing movement that seeks to create an equitable and diverse society, inclusive of people with disabilities.
eBook
The rights of the disabled
The efforts of people with disabilities to achieve their civil rights in the United States have taken many forms, including demonstrations and sit-ins, lobbying, legislation, and judicial review. The disability rights movement - akin to civil rights movements by African Americans and other ethnicities, women, and the LGBT community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) - sought to challenge the prevailing wisdom by redirecting the public mindset from the medical/charity model to the civil rights model. Disability rights activists argue that people with disabilities are not only the largest minority (over one in five Americans according to the definition in the Americans with Disabilities Act), but also that the number is continually growing as the total population ages. Counterintuitively, the greater the technological advances, the greater the numbers of people with disabilities, as more people survive disabling conditions that formerly would have been fatal. At the same time, those technological advances enable those with disabilities to live increasingly rewarding and productive lives.
Book Chapter
The Struggle for Change
The struggle for civil rights for people with disabilities took place with less visibility than, but in the same venues as, the battles fought by African Americans—the streets and the courts. Demonstrations were held; lawsuits were filed; new organizations sprung up. While the names associated with the disability rights movement—leaders such as Judith E. Heumann, Patrisha Wright, Wade Blank, Michael Auberger, and Justin Dart, and attorneys like Sidney Wolinsky and Stephen Gold—do not resonate in the same way as, for example, Medgar Evers and Thurgood Marshall, the victories, large and small, of disability activists brought about a
Book Chapter
Groundbreaking Disability Rights Legislation
On October 26, 1972, and again on March 27, 1973, President Nixon vetoed early versions of what ultimately became the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—including Sections 501–504—both times asserting that the legislation was too expensive. He also argued that the act “diverted the program from its vocational objective into medical and social welfare policies” and “added a variety of new categorical programs.”! Throughout the country, disability activists protested these Nixon vetoes. In New York City, Judith E. Heumann and eighty allies organized a sit-in on Madison Avenue in October 1972, bringing traffic to a halt.²
At the annual
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“Wheelchair Bound” and “The Poster Child”
“Hope for the Crippled” was the name of a postage stamp issued in 1970, said Judith E. Heumann, current Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and quadriplegic wheelchair user, in her 1980 testimony to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.¹ The stamp pictured “a person seated in a wheelchair rising to a standing position [that] indicated what people thought of a disabled individual in a wheelchair . . . . You are not considered to be a whole person; however, once you are in this standing position—that is normality.” In January 1999, the nation saw another
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Deinstitutionalization and Independent Living
The trend in the late 1950S and early 1960s toward deinstitutionalization allowed people with severe physical disabilities to begin entering the mainstream, bringing a new population to the developing disability rights movement. Nearly all people with serious physical impairments had trouble coping with a physical environment so ill-adapted to their needs, and many were spurred into activism by the discrimination and lack of understanding they encountered.
An early experiment in deinstitutionalization occurred at New York City’s Goldwater Memorial Hospital, a long-term chronic care institution, where it was anticipated that people would remain their entire lives. Although hospital officials assumed that
Book Chapter
Education
The failure of the states, even as late as the 1960s, to provide many children with disabilities with the educational opportunities they required indicated the necessity for appropriate federal legislation. Two experts in the education of children with disabilities observe:
While the nation was seeking to improve the quality of the minority child’s schooling, the handicapped child’s educational needs remained forgotten, even though these needs were easily as great as those of the most cruelly disadvantaged able-bodied children. At that time perhaps one handicapped child in eight—over one million handicapped children—received no education whatsoever, while more than half
Book Chapter
The Americans with Disabilities Act
At an April 18, 1997, conference of disability advocates in Uniondale, New York, Joseph Shapiro, author ofNo Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement,¹ indicated that because the ADA had so much support, its passage was not a daunting task. In a meeting with New York City disability rights advocates on the following day, Justin Dart, who has been called the “father of the ADA,” disagreed, pointing to the concerted effort to prevent the passage of, or weaken, the ADA by such powerful forces as, for example, the five hundred thousand-member National Federation of Independent Business.²
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Disability and Technology
The disability rights movement “is a by-product of the technological revolution,” in the words of one commentator.¹ “Breakthroughs in medicine, the development of computers that allow the hearing and speech impaired to use telephones, and advancements in motorized wheelchairs have meant that more people with severe handicaps can live longer, can do more for themselves and have the potential for enjoying fuller lives.” Without political activism, however, technological advances do not automatically translate into gains for people with disabilities.
Universal Design “Growing up in a world full of barriers,” the design pioneer Ronald L. Mace, a polio survivor and a
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