Judy Heumann Defines Civil Rights

Background: Judy Heumann, a childhood polio survivor, became politically active as a student at Long Island University. After graduation, Heumann sued the New York City Board of Education when her application to obtain a teaching license was rejected because of her disability: despite her qualifications, the board considered her wheelchair a fire hazard and thought that she would not be able to lead her students safely out of the classroom if there was a fire. She settled the suit out of court and joined with other activists to found Disabled in Action, a New York-based advocacy organization. Heumann later moved to California to work at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley. In 1977, she served as one of the leaders of the San Francisco 504 sit-in. In 2004, she was interviewed by Jonathan Young as part of the University of California, Berkeley’s research on the disability rights movement. This excerpt comes from that interview.

YOUNG: What does it mean to you to say something is a civil right? If you say that getting on a bus is a civil right, what does that mean?

HEUMANN: It means that the average person in this country—if there is a bus that comes into their neighborhood or they go into a neighborhood where there is a bus--cannot be denied the opportunity to get on that bus because of race, sex or disability, or class or whatever. We have moved by saying that in order to enable a disabled person to get on the bus you cannot just say that we have removed the barrier, which says you are not allowed on the bus, verbally.

We've acknowledged that it's meaningless if, in fact, you don't provide a remedy. But we've said that if the remedies cost too much, you don't have to provide them... 

YOUNG: I think part of the trapping, too, is that we get tangled up about the definition of disability, confusing natural right versus civil right. . . .

HEUMANN: Nondisabled people think that it is a right to be able to go to the bathroom. They think that it is completely a right that there should be bathrooms, they should be easy to use, they should as a rule be free...I was on a committee dealing with the issue of making toilets accessible on airplanes. When I said it was fine with me if there were no toilets on the airplanes, people laughed. . . . I said to them, "Look, it is not a problem for me if you are denied what I am denied. If I can't use the bathroom and you can't use the bathroom, hey, that's equality." But they laughed at it because going to the bathroom is something, which is absolutely taken as a right. I don't know if you call it a civil right, a natural right, a human right. Whatever it is, it is something that people accept. . . . It's those types of things that people just take for granted because the vast majority of people use it and can use it... Well, you need to be making things which are usable and available. For me, part of it is making sure that there is a bathroom I can get into. But the other part is making sure that I can use it when I get there. I can't use it by myself.

Source: Oral History Interview with Judy Heumann, Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Project, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2004, https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9v19p0k9;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00109&toc.depth=1&toc.id=div00109&brand=oac4.