NOTE: This Message was originally addressed to Tom Mckeever
      from Dempt@eskimo.com and was forwarded to you by Tom Mckeever
                           --------------------
Date:         Mon, 20 Mar 1995 16:48:40 -800
From:         Tom Dempsey 
Subject:      http://www.eskimo.com/~dempt/crights.htm
To:           Multiple recipients of list POLIO 
Here is an article about Ed Roberts that appeared in the January Polio 
Outreach
 Newsletter.
I'll also send the rest of the newsletter tomorrow.
                                   Tom
> The New Civil Rights
>
> by Joseph P. Shapiro
> (Source: Modern Maturity Nov.-Dec. 1994)
>
>     
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>
> The California breeze blew exceptionally warm that fall day in 1962 as
> Ed Roberts, a postpolio quadriplegic, was lifted out of his
> wheelchair, carried up a mountain of steps, and situated in Room 201
> of Cal Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. "It was a
> perfect day, a wonderful day, an exceptional day," says Roberts. "It
> was the first day of class, the first day of my freedom, and the first
> day of my life as a self- sufficient person."
>
> Taking their cues from the civil rights movements of blacks, women and
> other minorities, Roberts and fellow disability rights leaders would
> challenge widely held myths that people with disabilities were
> incapable of being educated, working, caring for themselves, or
> becoming contributing members of society. They would challenge the
> notion that they led tragic or lesser lives. And they would proudly
> call themselves "disabled."
>
> But it would take almost another 30 years, until 1990, before this new
> self-identity was reflected in law with the passage of the Americans
> With Disabilities Act, a far-reaching federal statute that prohibits
> discrimination against 49 million Americans.
>
> Birth of a Movement
>
> The disability rights movement, which won that law, began the day
> Roberts, who was so severely disabled that he spent most of his day in
> an iron lung, arrived on the Berkeley campus. He needed someone, often
> his brother, who was also a student, to help him get out of bed,
> dress, eat, and open his books. "Helpless Cripple Attends UC
> Classes...," said one newspaper headline of the Berkeley experiment.
> But Roberts saw school as one place where he could compete. "I'm
> paralyzed from the neck down, not from the neck up," he would say.
> Still, because few people with disabilities even tried to go to
> college, as Roberts points out, "there were very few role models." So
> he became one. And within a few years a dozen other students with
> severe disabilities, heartened by Roberts' example, followed him to
> the Berkeley campus.
>
> In the beginning Roberts himself wasn't sure a "crippled" man belonged
> on a college campus like Berkeley. Limited opportunities "did not seem
> like discrimination," he says, only something to be expected. "We had
> such strong feelings of inadequacy."
>
> On the Berkeley campus, however, Roberts watched as black students and
> women students challenged similar assumptions about their own assumed
> inferiority. "When women talked about being objects, I understood," he
> recalls. When blacks and women talked about the power of language,
> "underneath I got more and more angry at the way people perceived me
> as a vegetable with no future." Adds Roberts, "We were all talking
> about the same issues."
>
> The Rolling Quads, as the students with disabilities called
> themselves, quickly found the campus full of barriers that seemed to
> mock their every desire to succeed. So Roberts and his pals, with the
> help of a small federal grant, started the Physically Disabled
> Students' Program dedicated to solving any problem that stood between
> the student with a disability and academic achievement. That meant
> finding attendants to help them get to class; scouting accessible
> apartments; even establishing a 24-hour emergency wheelchair- repair
> service, since a broken wheelchair sent back to a dealer could keep a
> student out of class for weeks. "The most revolutionary part of the
> whole thing was that we did it ourselves," says Roberts.
>
> This seemingly simple program reflected a revolution in the way people
> with disabilities were coming to see their lives. Rejected was the
> poster-child or recipient of charity model that perpetuated the
> treatment of people with disabilities as sick, incapable and
> dependent. Doctors had up to that time measured independence by how
> far one could lift a leg or walk after an illness or accident. Roberts
> redefined independence as the quality of one's life with
> accommodations, like attendant care or a ramp. And he argued that
> people with disabilities knew better than doctors or rehabilitation
> counselors what they could achieve and what they needed. In 1972
> Roberts and his friends, who had by then begun to leave school, took
> their student-program concept a step further and started the Center
> for Independent Living. Its mission: to find jobs, homes and other
> accommodations and services in the Bay Area. Today there are some 300
> of these around the country.
>
> The nonprofit centers, which were among the first disability programs
> to be run by people with disabilities themselves, initiated a whole
> new generation of political activists. And the laws and programs those
> activists fought for had at their core the philosophy of accommodation
> Roberts had so valiantly set out at Berkeley. He was, after all, a
> perfect example of that philosophy: someone who, with help, far
> exceeded the expectations others had for him. In fact, counselors for
> California's Department of Rehabilitation had at first opposed helping
> Roberts go to Berkeley, arguing it "infeasible" that he would ever be
> able to work.
>
> In 1975 Roberts became the head of that very same state agency. "We
> should never define people's limits. Each of us has to define our own
> limits," says Roberts, who constantly explores his own outer edges. In
> the last few years, for example, the ventilator-using quadriplegic had
> studied karate and gone swimming with whales off the coast of Hawaii.
> "In the beginning it was, 'Why me?' Now it's, 'Why not?'"
>
> Accommodation, not pity
>
> The ultimate expression of the independent-living philosophy is the
> Americans With Disabilities Act. This sweeping piece of legislation,
> most of which went into effect starting in 1992, not only banned
> outright discrimination against people with disabilities but also made
> providing accommodations, like ramps and wheelchair-height desks in
> the workplace, the law.
>
> It is worthy punctuation of the movement's insistence that there is
> nothing tragic and pitiable in having a disability. "Disability only
> becomes a tragedy for us when society fails to provide the things we
> need to lead our lives -- job opportunities or barrier-free buildings,
> for example," explains disability rights leader Judith Heumann, who
> moved from New York City to California in 1973 to work with Roberts
> after having to sue the New York City Board of Education to gain the
> certification she needed to work as an elementary- school speech
> pathologist. Today, as a United States Assistant Secretary of
> Education, Heumann oversees federal special education, rehabilitation,
> and disability research programs.
>
> The power of the movement also came from the fact that people with
> disabilities represent the one minority anyone can join at any time.
> Fewer than 6 percent of Americans with disabilities were born with
> their disabilities, which usually result from accidents, diseases or
> complication of aging. "Disability knows no socioeconomic boundaries,"
> emphasizes Patrisha Wright, who led the fight for the ADA as the
> Washington lobbyist for the Disability Rights Education and Defense
> Fund, a legal group that started at Berkeley's Center for Independent
> Living. "You can become disabled from your mother's poor nutrition
> while she carried you or falling off your polo pony."
>
> Former Representative and now Chairman of the President's Committee on
> Employment of People with Disabilities Tony Coelho, who has epilepsy,
> also attributes passage of the ADA to the "hidden armies" of people in
> positions of power who claim personal experience with disability.
>
> But it also took people banding together in groups like ADAPT (then
> the acronym for American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, now
> for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today). Its members took
> a variety of direct actions, including blocking inaccessible buses, to
> bring attention to the need for wheelchair lifts, now a requirement.
> "Black people had to fight for the right to ride in the front of the
> bus," notes Mark Johnson, an ADAPT leader. "We fought for the right to
> get on."
>
> The schools, as in other movements, were another key battleground. In
> 1975 parents of youngsters with disabilities brought lawsuits to win
> the first federal guarantee that their children would go to school.
> Before then, a million children in this country received no education
> -- almost every one a child with a disability. Today there are
> approximately 5 million special-education students.
>
> All for one ...
>
> In fighting for the ADA, people of all disability types -- physical,
> sensory and mental -- came together in a mighty coalition to argue
> that they have one thing in common: All face discrimination and the
> low expectations of others. Sometimes prejudice is crude, like that of
> the New Jersey private-zoo owner who refused to admit children with
> Down's syndrome because, he claimed, they upset his chimpanzees; or of
> the airline employee who placed a 66 year-old double amputee on a
> baggage dolly rather than help him into a wheelchair.
>
> More often the bias is subtle, as in the most serious problem --
> employment discrimination. According to a 1994 Louis Harris study
> commissioned by The National Organization on Disability, two-thirds of
> people with disabilities ages 16 through 64 are unemployed. A full 79
> percent of them say they want to work. Arizona State health economics
> professor William Johnson, Ph.D., and East Carolina University
> assistant professor of economics Marjorie Baldwin, Ph.D., found that
> even when people with disabilities do hold jobs, they make less than
> other workers and are less likely to be promoted.
>
> It's discrimination like this that makes it necessary to keep the
> movement strong. Because, in the end, gains made in the name of people
> with disabilities benefit everyone.
>
> Changes in social policy have been similarly influential.
> Attendant-care programs, for example have offered new options for
> staying in one's own home instead of going to a nursing home. For such
> changes Ed Roberts, who now runs a disability think tank, claims the
> disability rights movement has made some of "the most profound social
> changes ever seen."
>
> Profound, yes. But what happens when Congress grants a new minority
> group rights and society has little understanding of those rights, why
> they were awarded, or even why they are needed? As the newly
> recognized minority of people with disabilities asserts those rights,
> there will be many breakthroughs for equality. But there will also be
> clashes, misunderstandings, even backlash.
>
> Because of their movement's successes, people with disabilities are a
> protected class in civil rights legislation, empowered by law as well
> as united against discrimination. Their mission now is to convince a
> nation and the world that they and their fellows want neither
> pity-ridden paternalism nor overblown admiration. What they do want is
> common respect and the opportunity to build bonds to their communities
> as fully accepted participants in daily life.
>
>     
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>
>
> The author writes on social policy issues for U.S. News & World Report
> and The Washington Post. He received the Alicia Patterson Foundation
> Fellowship to study the disability rights movement, which is the
> subject of his book, No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging a New
> Civil Rights Movement (Times Books, 1993). He also writes for The
> Progressive, The Disability Rag & Resource and many other
> publications.
>
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