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HISTORICAL CONTEXT As Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project's third hour begins, Laurie Block, series' producer and narrator, asks: Why is it that we see so many more disabled people in public spaces than we used to? How did the ramps and handicapped parking spaces, the Braille on the ATM machine, the signing interpreters at official speeches and public events come into existence? The answer is found in the emergence of the organized disability community. In large part, that community grew out of the activities of a group of self-motivated young people with disabilites who, in the early 1970's, realized that people with different disabilities shared many of the same experiences and obstacles. Chief among the obstacles were programs, services, and benefits, ostensibly intended to help them, that were created without the input of people with disabilities and that had serious negative consequences on their lives. With that awareness, people with disabilities mobilized and fought for basic civil rights: protection from discrimination based on disability. Emboldened by the success of the Civil and women's rights movements, they successfully fought for their own civil rights legislation, first Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and then the ADA. They also won the right to participate and represent themselves in programs and policies directly focused on disability. In this program, Block considers the experiences of three different communities of people with disabilities. The first group is the deaf community in the late nineteenth century who were the subject of (but only sometimes participants in) an intense debate over the methods and goals of deaf education. The "Oral vs. Sign Debate" featured "auralists" vs. "manualists." The former argued that the deaf should be forced to learn to speak to facilitate their full integration into society-- and the breakup of the thriving deaf community. The latter claimed that sign language was an easier and more articulate form of communication that better served the deaf. The Clark School, one of the last major schools to still teach speech to deaf students, is in Block's New England neighborhood. Nearby is one of the American "insane asylums," now almost entirely abandoned. And not far off is a former state school for those labelled mentally retarded. The next group she revisits is the community of people with cognitive impairments and their parents in the 1950's. Before then, parents of people with coginitive disabilities-- including mental retardation and Down's Syndrome-- had had little input in the treatment or care their children received. Beginning in the 1950's, though, parents-- with the help of social workers and other activists-- began taking a more active role in their children's medical care and helped re-establish their full humanity. They resisted the pressure to institutionalize their children and treated them as full family members capable of giving and receiving love. Parents organized themselves in groups like the National Association of Retarded Citizens and lobbied for more responsive care on their children's behalf. Their efforts helped change the perception that children with cognitive impairments were helpless and hopeless. The experiences of the deaf community and parents groups helped establish precedents, albeit protean ones, for the cross-disability community that came together in the 1970's. Do all people with disabilities share a common history, a common identity? When Judy Heumann, who uses a wheelchair, and Frank Bowe, who is deaf, were working with others in the 1970s to build a coalition of people with all disabilities to take political action, it was a new idea. But that coalition found a rallying point in a little-noticed provision of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act-- Section 504, a paragraph 42 words long-- that guaranteed access to all Federally-financed institutions-- schools, hospitals, transportation systems, etc. Because of the extensive changes this law entailed, regulations to implement it had never been issued during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Finally, in the Spring of 1977, the new American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities started civil actions across the country to demand implementation. In San Francisco, people with different disabilities occupied the HEW offices and stayed for 28 days. In Washington, protesters in wheelchairs were locked out of the offices of the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. But in the end, the regulations were issued. The political action that preceded the signing of these regulations mobilized a generation of young disability activists. Their efforts led to the ramps at the post office and university, the handicapped parking spaces and the deaf interpreters, the independent living centers, a cultural and environmental transformation that provided the legal precedent and institutional experience that paved the way for the Americans With Disabilities Act.
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