These collections can be searched by an alphabetical listing of individuals and organizations, the geographic location of individuals and organizations, the organization name, or by research and study topics.

A good resource for those teachers looking to incorporate disability history into their curricula or for organizers trying to demonstrate the need for a Disability History week in their school districts.

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Covering the entirety of U.S. history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States places the experiences of people with disabilities at the center of the American narrative.

Throughout the book, historian and disability scholar Kim E. Nielsen illustrates how concepts of disability have deeply shaped the American experience — from deciding who was allowed to immigrate and establishing labor laws to justifying slavery and gender discrimination. Included are absorbing — at times horrific — narratives of blinded slaves being thrown overboard and women being involuntarily sterilized, as well as triumphant accounts of disabled miners organizing strikes and disability rights activists picketing Washington.

A Disability History of the United States reinterprets how we view a nation’s past: from a stifling master narrative to a shared history that encompasses us all.

The author of three books, including two on Helen Keller and one on Anne Sullivan Macy, Nielsen is a professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. [Description from the publisher.]

ISBN: 9780807022047 | Beacon Press

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Camp Jened campers. 1967. Credit: Netflix.

Crip Camp is a documentary that will enrich any educator’s teaching of the Civil Rights Movement. The film traces the birth of the disability rights movement from the late 1960s to today. It opens with an examination of Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities that one of the directors, Jim LeBrecht, born with spina bifida, attended as a youth.

The camp gave attendees what the outside world could not — a chance to simply be teenagers. Campers played games, discussed troubles at home and, like most teenagers, explored their sexuality. This opening segment is both funny and poignant.

The movie then pivots to the efforts by Judy Heumann and other people with disabilities in their fight for civil rights, first in New York City, then San Francisco, and on to Washington, D.C. The movie inspires viewers by showing the activism of people with disabilities and their struggle to be treated as equals by the wider society. These compelling stories include delightful moments of solidarity, like members of the Black Panther Party feeding demonstrators in San Francisco and the Machinists union providing transportation in D.C.

The movie culminates with the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but cautions viewers, by way of writer and Crip Camp “star” Denise Sherer Jacobson, that “until you change society’s attitudes [toward people with disabilities] that law won’t mean much.” [Description from Rethinking Schools.]

Trailer

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Inside a federal building office during the Section 504 protest, HEW employee Bruce Lee posts a hand-made sign ‘504 is law now make it reality.’ Photo by HolLynn D’Lil

Between April 5 and April 28, 1977, hundreds of disabled and handicapped activists organized, protested, and occupied government buildings around the country to pressure the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, to enact Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and publish regulations to guide its enforcement.

This was the most-powerful federal protection for disabled people in the United States before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and it was toothless without regulation.

Section 504 states,

No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States, as defined in section 705(20) of this title, shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, 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 or under any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service.

The Black Panther Party supported the demonstrators occupying the SF federal building by providing food during the sit-in. Source: The Black Panther Inter Communal News Service. May 7, 1977

After Congress passed Section 504 in 1973 as part of the Rehabilitation Act, the subsequent administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter failed to take action. In large part, this was because a powerful bloc of businesses and other organizations began to lobby the government to abandon Section 504 enforcement. They did not want to dedicate resources to increase accessibility or lose their federal funding.

In the same few years, it was challenged in courts with contradictory outcomes. Under President Carter, this unnecessary delay and disregard for disabled people came to a head in 1977, when disability rights activists formed committees around the country and worked together to put pressure on the government by protesting at Health, Education, and Welfare federal buildings in Boston, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Denver, and Washington, D.C. The longest protest was the sit-in at the San Francisco protest, in which over 100 activists occupied the San Francisco federal building for several weeks.

These activists successfully brought the nation’s attention to the fact that his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare refused to sign drafted regulations for Section 504 and put enough pressure on him that he approved the regulations by the end of the month.

Kitty Cone, a lead organizer of the San Francisco sit-in, speaks to the press. Source: Smithsonian.

Kitty Cone, a disability rights organizer, recalled the San Francisco sit-in:

The San Francisco federal building sit-in, the only one that endured, lasted 28 days and was critical in forcing the signing of the regulations almost unchanged. It began with a rally outside the federal building, then we marched inside where between 1 and 200 people would remain until the end. The composition of the sit-in represented the spectrum of the disability community with participation from people with a wide variety of disabilities, from different racial, social and economic backgrounds, and ages from adults to kids with disabilities and their parents.

We all felt that we were acting on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people who were not able to participate, people all over the country who were institutionalized or stuck in other dependency situations.

Their efforts were successful before the month was up: Secretary Califano enacted the regulations for Section 504 on April 28, 1977.

Learn More

Read Sitting-in for disability rights: The Section 504 protests of the 1970s by Andrew Grim, Smithsonian American History Museum

The historic sit-in is featured in the 2020 documentary Crip Camp and in Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, the biography of Judy Heumann, who led protests for disability rights throughout the 1970s and into the 21st century.

The Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University created an exhibition around these 504 protests called “Patient No More,” as well as a traveling version which is currently touring the U.S.

Brad Lomax was a disability rights activist and the founder of the Washington D.C. chapter of the Black Panther Party. Lomax was present at the San Francisco 504 sit-in and was instrumental in getting the assistance of the Black Panther Party in mobilizing supplies and publicizing the protest.

The Power of 504

This award-winning 18-minute documentary video captures the drama and emotions of the historic civil rights demonstration of people with disabilities in 1977, resulting in the signing of the 504 Regulations, the first Federal Civil Rights Law protecting people with disabilities. Includes contemporary news footage and news interviews with participants and demonstration leaders. Available in open caption, audio descriptive, and standard formats in English and Spanish.

Crip Camp Trailer

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Jennifer Keelan crawls up the steps of the U.S. Capitol on March 12, 1990. Source: Tom Olin/The Ability Center

The most memorable moment in the winter’s activism happened on March 12, 1990, when dozens of these protestors at the Capitol abandoned their mobility aids and began to climb, crawl, and edge up the steps to the top of the west Capitol entrance on the National Mall. Some climbing on their own and some climbing with help from friends and family, they were cheered on by allies, onlookers, and the press.

This direct action, which forced Congress to see them, is known to history as the Capitol Crawl. An entry on disability history from Minnesota’s state disability office describes the day’s events:

This protest, that came to be known as the “Capitol Crawl”, was intended to openly illustrate the struggles that people in the disabilities communities faced and spurred Congress to pass the ADA. About 1,000 other protesters watched as members of ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, now known only as ADAPT) threw themselves out of their chairs and began their crawl. Together, the march and the crawl comprised one of the largest disability direct actions to date.

The late Michael Winter, former Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living, contributed his reflections on the “Capitol Crawl” to ADAPT’s 25th Anniversary “I Was There Series” of firsthand accounts:

Some people may have thought it was undignified for people in wheelchairs to crawl in that manner, but I felt that it was necessary to show the country what kinds of things people with disabilities have to face on a day-to-day basis. We had to be willing to fight for what we believed in.

Congress was forced to respond. The bill passed through the House and Senate and was signed into law on July 26, 1990.

Jennifer Keelen Recalls the Crawl

Additional Resources

Learn more about the history of the ADA, disability activism, and the Capitol Crawl from the documentary Crip Camp.

Equal Access Commission article about the Capitol Crawl highlights the words of a woman who participated in the protest:

I want my civil rights. I want to be treated like a human being.

Story map, The Fight For Accessibility: Disability Rights Activists and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A picture book, All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything by Annette Bay Pimentel with Nabi Ali (illustrator).

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Yet today, as Ruth Shagoury writes,

The ‘Helen Keller story’ that is stamped in our collective consciousness freezes her in childhood. While she may be hailed as a ‘hero’ in lesson plans for today’s children, the books recount only a fraction of what makes Helen Keller heroic.

In honor of Keller’s birthday today, please read and share “Who Stole Helen Keller?” by Ruth Shagoury.

Additional Resource

After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of Helen Keller by Max Wallace

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Cover of one of the many pamphlets produced by the National Joint Action Committee in support of Congressman Ernest Lundeen’s social insurance bill. “What Every Working Woman Wants” was printed by Workers’ Library Publishers, NYC, 1935. Courtesy of the Institute of Social Medicine and Community Health. Lundeen’s bill ultimately lost to the more conservative social security legislation.

On Aug. 14, 1935, the Social Security Act was passed. Howard Zinn said in 1994 in a Rethinking Schools interview:

Emphasizing social and protest movements in the making of history gives students a feeling that they as citizens are the most important actors in history . . . Students should learn that during the Depression there were strikes and demonstrations all over the country. And it was that turmoil and protest that created the atmosphere in which Roosevelt and Congress passed the Social Security Act.

Read more in the interview, “Why Students Should Study History: An Interview with Howard Zinn.”

Rethinking Schools editor Adam Sanchez describes how he teaches about this period in history in “Who Made the New Deal?”

However one analyzes the impact of Roosevelt or Obama, it is clear that the Great Depression and the New Deal are vitally relevant to those grappling with today’s economic crisis. As a 10th-grade U.S. history teacher at Madison High School in Portland, Oregon, I knew that studying the 1930s would be especially pertinent to my diverse, largely poor and working-class students, whose families are still living with the effects of the 2007–08 meltdown.

My goal was to get students to see the similarities and pinpoint differences between the two crises and the two presidents. I hoped they would question why Roosevelt’s presidency produced so many more and so much deeper structural reforms than Obama’s. By the end of Roosevelt’s first two terms in office, nonagricultural private-sector workers had the right to organize unions and the National Labor Relations Board was created to enforce that right. The unemployed had access to a new, permanent system of unemployment insurance, and the elderly could rely on social security. Millions of people were put back to work through federal jobs programs.

Did the differences indicate that FDR was a better politician? Was he more left-leaning than Obama and today’s Democratic Party? Or was the difference the result of massive pressure on Roosevelt from below—the strength of organized labor and other mass movements of the 1930s? Were the New Deal reforms an instance when the government genuinely intervened on the side of poor and working people or, as historian Howard Zinn wrote, were they aimed at “giving enough help to the lower classes to keep them from turning a rebellion into a real revolution?” Exploring these questions requires delving into a people’s history of the Great Depression and the New Deal—one too often overlooked in the history textbooks. Continue reading.

Find lessons and other resources below to teach outside the textbook about the New Deal.

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Too often, texts present “great individuals” in a way that leaves readers feeling small by comparison.  “I could never do that,” is the message students can easily take away. 101 Changemakers focuses on extraordinary individuals, but in the context of the broader movements and events that sparked and nurtured their activism.

The editors feature the famous — like John Brown, Mary Beth Tinker, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez — along with the less celebrated — like Harry Hay Jr., Mary and Carrie Dann, and Constance McMillen. Along with 500 word profiles, written by teachers and activists across the country, each selection includes a timeline of the changemaker’s life, provocative questions, and suggestions for further research.

Sample page.

Written for middle school students, but great for high school students, too.

Authors

Michele Bollinger lives in Washington, D.C., where she teaches high school social studies.

Dao X. Tran is an editor based in the Bronx, New York. Dao is currently working on the Domestic Worker Oral History Project. When not reading for work and pleasure, she enjoys time with her daughter Quyen, a changemaker of a different sort.

ISBN: 9781608461561 |Haymarket Books

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Award-winning 18-minute documentary video, which captures the drama and emotions of the historic civil rights demonstration of people with disabilities in 1977, resulting in the signing of the 504 Regulations, the first Federal Civil Rights Law protecting people with disabilities. Includes contemporary news footage and news interviews with participants and demonstation leaders. Available in open caption, audio descriptive and standard formats. [Publisher’s description.]

Watch

Full version, open caption, English and Spanish (YouTube).

Visit the 504 Sit-In 20th Anniversary (1997) website for photos and historical accounts.

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