Disability Rights Movement Growing Individual Voices in Political Influence

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Disability Rights MovementGrowing Individual
Voices in Political Influence
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Overview - 1900
Political Influence of People with Disabilities
No Organizations to encourage or support
Individuals with Disabilities.
Public Perception Should be Excluded
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Overview - 2009Political Influence of
Individuals With Disabilities

• Serving in elected and appointed offices
• Senators Governors
• County Executives
• Serving on Boards and Commissions

Maryland Disabilities Law Center
On Our Own

• As Voters, kept more informed and engaged
• Supported by outside advocacy groups
• Taking an individual voice as well as a
  collective voice for the disability community

Maryland Disabilities Forum
Arc
Epilepsy Foundation
Maryland Developmental Disabilities Council
MACS
Maryland Works
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Historical Perspective

• People with Disabilities forced into dependency.
• Others speak for them, label them, and while
  often with the best intentions generally dont
  view individuals with disabilities as deserving
  direct participation.

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A New Vision

• Self Advocacy and Individual Empowerment through
  inclusion in the political process.
• Independent Living, Equal Rights and Access to
  ensure full citizenship and progressive
  participation in every facet of society.

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Dorothea Dix

• In 1841 Dorothea Dix, a Boston schoolteacher,
  began a campaign to make the public aware of the
  plight of people with mental illness. By 1880, as
  a direct result of her efforts, 32 psychiatric
  hospitals for the poor had opened.

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Dorothea Dix Memorial To The Legislature of
MassachusettsJan. 1843

• I have seen many who, part of the year, are
  chained or caged. The use of cages all but
  universal. Hardly a town but can refer to some
  not distant period of using them chains are less
  common negligences frequent willful abuse less
  frequent than sufferings proceeding from
  ignorance, or want of consideration.

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Dorothea Dix Memorial To The Legislature of
MassachusettsJan. 1843

• It is not few, but many, it is not a part, but
  the whole, who bear unqualified testimony to this
  evil. A voice strong and deep comes up from every
  almshouse and prison in Massachusetts where the
  insane are or have been protesting against such
  evils as have been illustrated in the preceding
  pages.

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• Dix successfully petitioned the Massachusetts
  Legislature to remove individuals with
  disabilities from prisons, and to begin
  classifying their disabilities to determine
  treatment in state funded institutions.
• Dix also petitioned Congress in 1848.
• President Pierce vetoed a bill sponsored by
  Dorothea Dix calling for the sale of federal
  lands to subsidize institutions for indigents
  with mental disabilities. May 3, 1854.
• Set precedent for no federal intervention for
  next 50 years.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

• Elected President of the
• United States in 1933.
• In 1921, hed contracted
• a disease which paralyzed
• him from the waist down.

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FDRs Contribution

• FDR established the Roosevelt Warm Springs
  Rehabilitation Institute which gave way to
  technical advancements for people with
  disabilities
• More advanced wheelchair designs
• Accessible Restroom Designs
• Automobile Possibilities for alternatively
• controlled devices.
• He helped found the National
• Foundation for Infantile Paralysis
• (now known as the March of Dimes).
• Social Security was developed in response to
• the increasing numbers of disabled War Veterans.

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1930s-1940sParents Organize

• Parents who did not want their children
  institutionalized or banned from public schools
  sought each other out and started to organize.
• Concerned about lack of community resources and
  support, advocated need for special education.

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Institutionalization Is Not Necessary
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League for the Physically Handicapped

• New Deal programs label people with disabilities
  as Unemployable.
• In May of 1935, a group of 3 men and 3 women with
  disabilities went to see the director of the
  Emergency Relief Bureau in New York City to
  change that policy.

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League for the Physically Handicapped

• They demonstrated for a week, demanding
  handicapped people receive a just share of the
  millions of jobs being given out by the
  government.
• As a result, the Works Progress Administration
  (WPA) hired about forty League members.
• The protest was the beginning of the League of
  the Physically Handicapped, and over the next
  few years they fought job discrimination and
  contested the ideology of disability that
  controlled early twentieth century public
  policies, social arrangements and professional
  practices.

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Cross-Disability Action

• In September 1936, the League joined forces with
  the League for the Advancement of the Deaf to
  secure a promise that 7 of future WPA jobs in
  New York would go to deaf and handicapped
  individuals. As a result, 1500 people went to
  work.

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Disability Rights MovementA New Understanding

• Predicated on the notion that it is the
  structural and attitudinal barriers in capitalist
  society that are the fundamental cause for the
  discrimination and oppression faced by people
  with disabilities.
• In this framework, people with disabilities are
  limited by the systemic lack of physical access
  to public services, the failure of educational
  institutions and employers to make materials
  available in alternative formats, and the
  intricate bureaucracy that people must navigate
  in order to get essential services such as income
  support and medical services.
• Attention needed to be redirected from the
  medical impairment or medical model of
  disablement to the social-political issues that
  underpin disability oppression. In other words,
  the first step in the liberation of people with
  disabilities is a fundamental paradigm shift in
  societal values.

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Disability Rights Movement

• Struggle to gain full citizenship
• Demand for equality, independence, autonomy,
  access to public life
• Integration vs. separate but equal
• People First Language

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Rolling Quads

• Beginning with Ed Roberts, the Rolling Quads
  were a Berkeley based student activist group
  seeking Independent Living and Equal Access in
  the 1960s.
• The Rolling Quads questioned their living
  situation.
• Why were they forced to live in a hospital?
• Why was it so difficult to travel around the
  city?
• What options did a student with disabilities
  have?
• What could the University do to help students
  with disabilities?
• What would they do after graduation?

Ed Roberts
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Todays Rolling Quads still in Action
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Rolling Quads

• Rolling Quads members engaged in campus
  demonstrations as well as political activism and
  were able to accomplish
• The formation of a Physically Disabled Students
  Program that became the nations first Disabled
  Students Office.
• An independent living course to discuss
  improving conditions for people with disabilities
  in the city of Berkeley, as they had done with
  the University.
• Petitioning for government funds to create The
  Center for Independent Living or CIL.

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Disabled in Action

• Founded in 1970, Disabled in Action was based
  in radical activism.
• Adopted the tactic of direct political protest to
  raise both the consciousness of people with
  disabilities and awareness of the discriminatory
  barriers endemic in American society.

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Disabled in Action

• During the 1972 presidential election, militants
  in Disabled in Action joined with disabled and
  often highly politicized Vietnam veterans,
  clearly an influential base of support for the
  American disability rights movements, demanding
  an on-camera debate with President Nixon.
• They also organized a demonstration at the
  Lincoln Memorial after President Nixon vetoed a
  spending bill to fund disability programs.

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Rehabilitation Act

• The high point of the 1970s resurgence of
  disability liberation politics was the remarkable
  San Francisco occupation that occurred in
  conjunction with protests aimed at forcing the
  release of regulations pursuant to s. 504 of the
  Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
• The regulations were to outline how it was
  illegal for federal agencies, contractors, or
  public universities to discriminate on the basis
  of handicap. They had been delayed by previous
  Administrations but there was an expectation that
  the incoming Carter Administration would fulfill
  its promise to issue the regulations.

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Rehabilitation Act

• Democrats' policy makers were stalling and wanted
  to substantially modify the regulations to permit
  continued segregation in education and other
  areas of public life. Disability rights activists
  mobilized in nine cities across the United
  States.
• In Washington, three hundred demonstrators
  occupied the offices of the Health, Education and
  Welfare (HEW) Secretary for some twenty-eight
  hours despite the termination of the office's
  telephone lines by authorities and the refusal to
  permit food through to the protestors.

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Rehabilitation Act

• In San Francisco the movement raged on. There,
  disability rights activists occupied the HEW
  federal building for twenty-five days culminating
  in total victory the issuing of the regulations
  without any amendments.
• Many of the participants of the occupation, at
  times as many as 120, literally risked their
  lives, as they were without their personal care
  attendants or assistive devices, in order to
  pursue their fight for social justice and
  integration into mainstream society.

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• The impact of building cross-disability
  solidarity was remarkable.
• Instead of arbitrary divisions based on
  diagnostic categories, people with disabilities
  united around common political goals.
• The HEW Occupation was one of those rare events
  where the consciousness of the participants was
  dramatically transformed and their largely
  neglected creativity unleashed.
• Many of the participants had previously seen
  their oppression as personal medical problems. A
  real sense of disability pride was developed that
  would have lasting positive effects in building
  grassroots disability rights movements.

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Policy that Followed the Disability Rights
Movement

• 1970 Urban Mass Transit Act requires that all
  new mass transit vehicles be equipped with
  wheelchair lifts.
• 1975 Developmental Disabilities Bill of Rights
  Act among other things, establishes Protection
  and Advocacy (P A).
• 1975 Education of All Handicapped Children Act
  (PL 94-142) requires free, appropriate public
  education in the least restrictive environment
  possible for children with disabilities. This law
  is now called the Individuals with Disabilities
  Education Act (IDEA).
• 1978 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act
  provides for consumer-controlled centers for
  independent living.

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• 1983 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act
  provides for the Client Assistance Program (CAP),
  an advocacy program for consumers of
  rehabilitation and independent living services.
• 1985 Mental Illness Bill of Rights Act requires
  protection and advocacy services (P A) for
  people with mental illness.
• 1988 Civil Rights Restoration Act counteracts
  bad case law by clarifying Congress' original
  intention that under the Rehabilitation Act,
  discrimination in ANY program or service that is
  a part of an entity receiving federal funding --
  not just the part which actually and directly
  receives the funding -- is illegal.
• 1988 Air Carrier Access Act prohibits
  discrimination on the basis of disability in air
  travel and provides for equal access to air
  transportation services.
• 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act prohibits
  discrimination in housing against people with
  disabilities and families with children. Also
  provides for architectural accessibility of
  certain new housing units, renovation of existing
  units, and accessibility modifications at the
  renter's expense.

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American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit
(ADAPT)

• In 1983, the organization American Disabled for
  Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) was formed by
  disability rights activists in several cities
  across America to highlight the inaccessibility
  of public transit to mobility impaired people.

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ADAPT

• ADAPT repeatedly disrupted the conventions of the
  American Public Transit Association, to the point
  of requiring mass arrests, in order to raise
  awareness of the industry's hostility to
  implementing accessibility features that would
  enable people with disabilities to participate
  fully as citizens.

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ADAPT

• They also demonstrated a dramatic flair for
  symbolism and a sense of strategic genius.
  Crawling up the stairs of important but
  inaccessible public buildings, including the
  eighty-three marble steps of the Capitol
  building, to demonstrate their exclusion from
  American society.
• Having secured a measure of victory in this
  field, they renamed themselves American Disabled
  for Attendant Programs Today and have continued
  their direct action tactics to raise awareness of
  the need for attendant care programs, that
  provide assistance with activities of daily
  living, to permit people with disabilities to
  live independently rather than face warehousing.

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Demonstration for Accessibility
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People First

• Starting in the 1970s and permeating public
  policy language and perception, self advocacy
  groups chose a People First approach to change
  the context of disabling labels.

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Americans with Disabilities Act

• The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)
  is the most significant civil rights legislation
  to be enacted by Congress since the Civil Rights
  Act of 1964.
• The ADA makes it illegal to discriminate against
  anyone who has a mental or physical disability in
  the area of employment, public services,
  transportation, public accommodations and
  telecommunications.

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President George Bush signing the American with
Disabilities Act
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A Vote is A Voice

• Voting Rights Act of (1965)
• The Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and the
  Handicapped Act (1984)

• The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)
• The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)

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With increasing accessibility to voting
locations, individuals with disabilities are
actively pursuing their rights as citizens to
engage in the political determination of
leadership.
Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act of
2002, which required polling places to have at
least one voting system accessible for people
with disabilities.
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• Today we find people with disabilities more often
  living in the community, employed in an
  integrated workforce, voting, and holding
  appointed and elected offices.
• While discrimination still exists, public
  perception of disability has been steadily
  shifting to that of equality, inclusion, and
  independence for all.

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Presented By The Maryland Disabilities Forum

• A non-profit cross-disability organization led by
  people with disabilities that produces statewide
  systems change in order to achieve community
  inclusion, civil rights, and equal opportunity.
  This is accomplished through education,
  leadership development and facilitating consensus
  with the disability community, while respecting
  its diversity.
• This display offers a glimpse into the evolution
  of advocacy and influence from no representation
  in the policies that govern individuals with
  disabilities, to advocacy, and eventually self
  advocacy. In essence it is a movement from
  exclusion and
• segregation to full inclusion.