A closer look

Expanding Disability Rights Activism

How did activists in the 1970s mobilize around disability rights as a civil rights issue?

by Nate Sleeter, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and Anne Valk, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Historical Lack of Access

In the late 1960s, the civil rights movement inspired disability rights activists to begin mobilizing on a local and regional level for expanded access to jobs, housing, and education. Until this time, the political and civil rights of people with disabilities were largely neglected. Instead, Americans generally treated disability as an individual problem to be addressed by charities, through institutionalization and medical treatment, or with family care. Many people with disabilities were seen as incapable or pitiable at best, disgusting at worst. Physical barriers compounded the problem. With no ramps or curb cuts to ease access to buildings and sidewalks, no signs in Braille or elevator lifts in public transit, and few hallways or bathrooms in public buildings wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair, people with disabilities were effectively segregated, and many were consigned to poverty. These conditions affected millions of Americans: veterans with PTSD or other injuries, individuals paralyzed by polio or accidents, those born with visual or hearing impairments, people with developmental differences, and many who lived with diseases that only a generation earlier might have been fatal. Even the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed race and sex discrimination, omitted disability entirely, allowing landlords, schools, and workplaces to continue to reject individuals solely on the basis of their disability.

Despite this exclusion, activists saw the possibility of expanding the civil rights movement’s achievements to cover people with disabilities. As African Americans, women, American Indians, and other groups had done, disability movement activists recognized that the challenges they faced constituted a form of second-class citizenship perpetuated by widely shared stereotypes that belittled the capabilities of individuals with disabilities. Rather than struggling individually to overcome barriers to schooling, employment, transportation, and recreation, or tolerating low expectations, disability movement activists publicly demanded social and legal changes that would challenge prejudices and expand their access to work, educational, and recreational opportunities.

A Groundbreaking Law on Hold

In 1972, community activists and students and professors at the University of California founded the Center for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley. The CIL helped locate accessible housing, repaired assistive devices like wheelchairs, and provided vocational training. It also became an important hub for activists in the disability rights movement. In New York, Judith Heumann founded Disabled in Action the same year. A polio survivor who used a wheelchair, Heumann had sued New York City’s Board of Education after she was denied a teaching license. Disabled in Action organized mass protests to advocate for increased access for Americans with disabilities, at one point blocking traffic in Manhattan to call attention to the need for accessible public transportation.

Passing federal legislation to ban discrimination constituted a crucial step in securing opportunities and accommodations for people with disabilities. In 1973, Congress passed the Vocational Rehabilitation Act; it gave funds to states that could support job training programs for people with disabilities. Although the act focused specifically on work and employment, its Section 504 prohibited all federally funded programs and institutions from discriminating on the basis of disability and required that federal agencies act to encourage the hiring and promotion of individuals with disabilities. It stated: “No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” This represented the first time the federal government acknowledged that discrimination against individuals with disabilities violated their civil rights.

Before the Rehabilitation Act could be implemented, it needed to explain what constituted discrimination on the basis of disability, write guidelines for coverage, and institute timelines for enforcement. The act faced strong opposition from institutions that would be affected, including schools, universities, hospitals, and local governments. Over more than three years of delayed implementation, disability rights activists pursued legal challenges to force the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the agency responsible for drafting the regulations, to issue new guidelines.

Activists Demand Change

Frustrated by HEW’s slow progress and concerned that the regulations would be weakened, the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD) formed to pressure the federal government to act to guarantee the civil rights of Americans with disabilities. Launching a national movement in support of Section 504, the ACCD demanded that HEW release strong guidelines by April 4, 1977; if not, activists would protest at HEW regional offices in ten U.S. cities, on April 5, 1977.

When HEW failed to meet ACCD’s deadline, activists across the country took to the streets. Most of the protests lasted a single day. But in San Francisco, about 130 protesters, led by Judith Heumann and Kitty Cone, decided to sit in at HEW offices in the federal building; their occupation lasted more than three weeks. To sustain their protest, Heumann, Cone, and other protesters utilized their experience as community organizers and activists in civil rights, antiwar, LGBTQ+ rights, and antipoverty movements, as well as the groundwork laid by the CIL and Disabled in Action.

504 Protests Outside San Francisco City Hall

In 1977, Anthony Tusler photographed activists gathered in support of Section 504. Tusler is a photographer, author, art curator, and activist. After a spinal cord injury that occurred when he was five, Tusler has traveled in a wheelchair. He was the founding director of the Disability Resource Center at Sonoma State University (California) for twenty-two years. He cocurated probably the first fine-art show, D&A2, that had disability as its explicit subject matter. He has helped to found several nonprofit organizations, including the Institute on Alcohol, Drugs, and Disability, Community Resources for Independence, Disability Associates, and the National Center on Disability and Journalism.

Source: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/504-sit-in-anthony-tusler/OAGFxh9qgVGyIw

The occupation required protesters to put their bodies on the line in unprecedented ways. The city’s federal building had no handicap access (a problem that Section 504 was supposed to address); many protesters used personal attendants and sign interpreters or needed catheters, medications, or food at regular times. They had to rely on each other and on allies from outside who could supply meals and medical assistance. Labor unions and churches lent crucial support to the continued occupation. The Black Panther Party helped deliver hot meals to the protesters, spurred on by Bradley Lomax, a Panther member who used a wheelchair to help him manage multiple sclerosis (MS).

The courage and plight of the occupiers also captured widespread attention. Newspapers and television broadcast powerful images of protesters who were blind or deaf, or who depended on crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs, hoisting banners and signs demanding that HEW take action. Such media coverage brought attention to the challenges many people with disabilities faced and demonstrated their courage and tenacity. Public sympathy increased after administrators cut off hot water and phone service in the building and took other steps to force an end to the protest. After weeks of pressure, on April 28, 1977, the HEW finally issued the new regulations. The sit-in was the longest peaceful occupation of a U.S. federal building in history.

Legacy of 504 Protests

The Section 504 sit-ins helped to mobilize activists and led to implementation of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, but further progress was required to dismantle physical and social barriers that prevented independent living and full participation in public life by people with disabilities. Using tactics ranging from sit-ins and mass protest to lobbying and lawsuits, and working in coalition with organizations that originally formed to push for civil rights for African Americans, activists pushed for broad new civil rights legislation, the American with Disabilities Act (ADA). When President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA into law in July 1990, it represented the federal government’s strongest legal prohibition against discrimination against individuals with disabilities.

The ADA aims to ban discrimination against individuals with disabilities by ensuring equality of opportunity, full participation in government services and public accommodations, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency. It requires employers, state and local governments, and other entities to make reasonable accommodations to ensure that people with disabilities have access to workplaces, civic buildings, public transportation, and other public spaces that equals that of other individuals. Despite its profound impact, the ADA has eliminated neither housing and financial insecurity experienced by many people with disabilities, nor the stereotypes and misconceptions that result in discrimination. Given these limitations, people with disabilities have pushed for education to expand public knowledge about disability, and continue to fight to exercise their rights to independent living, quality medical care, economic self-sufficiency, and equality of opportunity and access.

Reflection Questions

How did the race-based civil rights movement influence the ways that disability movement activists understood their position in society?

What made the Section 504 protests effective?

How did the Section 504 protests inspire later activism by disability rights advocates?

In what ways have the principles expressed in Section 504 been achieved? How do they remain unfulfilled?

How did disability intersect with the racial, sexual, and gender identities of activists in the 1970s? How did those intersections affect activists’ experiences living with their disabilities? How did it affect the disability rights movement?

How are people with disabilities depicted in media and popular culture today? In what ways have attitudes changed since the 1970s? How have they not changed?

Additional Reading

Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).

Lennard J. Davis, Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority its Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).

Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2020).

Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2020).

Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

Susan Schweik, “Lomax's Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504,” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2011), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1371

Related Chapters

Economic Adversity Transforms the Nation, 1973-1989