Disabled activists Judith Heumann and Bradley Lomax as Chair Devils
October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month and this year is also the 30 year Anniversary of the ADA (American Disabilities Act). I wanted to share a little on how disabled have been treated since the beginning, to the disability movement and the less-known fact that Black Panthers and disabled black activists were intricately involved in the disability rights movement, including the success of the famous 501 sit-in; the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building that helped paved the way to the ADA. To celebrate all that has been achieved we Chair Deviled disabled activists Judith Heumann and Bradley Lomax.
Freedom, self-advocacy and choice among disabled people is a relatively new thing. Throughout history any form of disability, whether physical or mental, was seen as inferior. Largely, this is the same perception in the 21st century but with less atrocities committed against us.
In ancient times it was mandatory, and seen as a duty, to abandon disabled babies and children. Most of the time disabled children in the family were kept a secret, especially in the days of Kings and Queens. Disabled were murdered and/or left abandoned and naked in random areas like the forest. “Idiot cages” holding disabled were placed in town squares to entertain locals or we were appointed as jesters to the royal court. Due to ignorance, superstition, supernatural beliefs, religion, “fake news” and lack of intellect and science, disabled were often seen as mythical monsters or considered evil and the “work of the devil”. In biblical times disability was seen as a direct punishment from God (oddly, I still hear this from random people of faith). And, the disabled were systemically locked away – never to be seen again – in dirty institutions where physical, sexual and emotional abuse was rampant. Abuse of disabled is still true today as we are sexually assaulted at nearly three times the rate of people without disabilities.
Today, “83% of women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lives. 50% of girls and boys who are deaf have been sexually abused. Approximately 80% of women and 30% of men with developmental disabilities have been sexually assaulted – half of these women have been assaulted more than 10 times. And, just 3% of sexual abuses involving people with developmental disabilities are ever reported, according to disability justice.”
Throughout history society has been obsessed with the myth of human perfection and superiority; from Biblical times to the Greek and Roman Empire days to even today. And, of course during Hitler's reign, an era of “Master Race” (“good genes”), some of the most prolific abuse was casted upon disabled with approximately 300,000 disabled being killed in the Holocaust. We were subjugated to barbaric experimentation, sterilization and systemically gassed and mass murdered. We were labeled as “useless eaters” and “life unworthy of life”. (Talk about an insecure little man with little intellect.) Hitler's mass hate, divisive speak and fear mongering propaganda campaign led humans by the thousands to commit brutal atrocities, all while his followers watched in complicity and glee.
While this may be seen as treatment of disabled in AD days some of this disregard for disabled lives and rights was actually happening, in some form, up until the 60s/70s. Rosemary Kennedy, an intellectually disabled member of the famous Kennedy political family and JFK's younger sister, had a secret and cruel lobotomy performed on her that left her permanently incapacitated and unable to speak. Rosemary was kept a secret so JFK could politically succeed. Sadly, this was the typical treatment of disabled and worse.
During the Industrial Revolution, under the system of capitalism, disabilities were common due to dangerous work conditions, zero safety regulations and abuse of employees. This caused a rise of homelessness and social crises because disabled were no longer seen as able contributors to the capitalist structure.
The 1907 Immigration Act barred disabled from entering America because there was a fear that we would become a “country of defectives”. And, in the early twentieth century “Ugly Laws” were in effect making it illegal for disabled to be seen in public. This was happening in some states up until 1974.
From 1950-1970 a movement led by parents of disabled children began to attempt to improve conditions of state institutions, education and legislation, and in 1970 the movement empowered by disabled really began to take shape. The 1964 Passage of the Civil Rights movement inspired the disabled community and in parallel disabled people began to mobilize; a very similar situation that is occurring today as the BLM movement and Disability movement is once again happening in conjunction.
The ADA was passed on July 26, 1990. Prior to this, the struggle for equality was arduous and it still is today. According to the FBI disabled are still subjugated to hate crimes. Depending which country, hate crimes against disabled is in part due to the perception that disabled are lazy and takers from state services.
“The laws of the United States devalued persons with disabilities as society as a whole viewed such persons as a group of people to be pitied, ridiculed, rejected, and feared, or as objects of fascination. Persons with disabilities were seen as objects of charity or welfare or as needing to be subjected to medical treatment or cure.” – Molly Burgdorf
Most know the general points of the disability movement, but did you know it was the Black Panthers who supported the movement when the rest of society ignored us? The documentary Crip Camp lightly touches on this fact while simultaneously showing the power of protests when fifty disabled individuals in wheelchairs and on crutches stopped traffic by blocking Manhattan intersection to protest Nixon's veto of the Rehabilitation Act of 1972. This protest, in part, helped spark the disability movement. The documentary (in full here) highlights leading disabled activists like Judith Heumann and James LeBrecht, filmmaker and Crip Camp co-producer, who began their disability justice awakenings as young adults in a summer camp for disabled.
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The Black Panthers was a 60s/70s political organization bred from decades of oppression, police brutality and in the wake of the assassination of Malcom X. The group assembled for more representation, equality and civil rights, but they didn't isolate this demand to only black people yet all marginalized including disabled. In addition, Chicanos under exploitative farming labor force, Native Americans fighting the government for land rights and broken treaties, and Asians fighting racist propaganda and contained inside internment camps, were all inspired and assisted by the civil rights movement and subsequently broke off into smaller communal resistance movements. Black Panthers in mainstream land was only known as an armed resistance against brutality against black Americans, but what is less known is their efforts in providing community social programs, including free breakfast for school children, free health care clinics across the United States and anti-war (war creates disability and mass murder). The mainstream focus and fear mongering was only zeroed in on the fact that Black Panthers carried guns, which is odd because we are a country that fights for gun rights including open carry.
But the mainstream, political and FBI rhetoric was Black Panthers were an enemy of the state and labeled as terrorists and “One of the greatest threats to the nation's security”. The FBI also undermined and dismantled Free Breakfast for Children and other social programs created by the Black Panthers, because, you know, supplying breakfast to poor children is a mortal sin.
Unfortunately, this one-sided propaganda worked amongst the white public and violence and clashing occurred.
This isn't the first incident of black people being used as propaganda pawns. The famous “War on Drugs”; a global draconian campaign led by the U.S. Government, was the same. Drummed up under the Nixon administration and carried through Reagan, Bush — and then tough on crime law and order created and upheld under both establishment republicans and democrats — the war on drugs was perpetuated and added onto with every single administration, leading to the highly profitable mass prison epidemic we see today. Despite marijuana, coca, psychedelics and opium being used for thousands of years, often for spiritual or medicinal practices, this war on drugs was the U.S.' prime “evil” to be dealt with.
In 1994, John Erlichman, a Nixon Aid, admitted the War on drugs/marijuana was created as a political propaganda tool to vilify blacks and anti-war hippies who dissented against the controversial Vietnam War, although Erlichman’s former colleagues disavow this and say it was allegedly a joke.
“In the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent, the government halted scientific research to evaluate their medical safety and efficacy.”
Power creating a villain for ulterior economic, political or geopolitical motives, and/or to vilify the oppressed and lesser to prevent change, is a common distraction tactic domestically and abroad. I won't even go into the fact that the U.S. government was assisting cartels and the funneling of drugs on American soil that were then dispersed among poor areas, predominantly affecting African Americans who were then imprisoned in doubled down law and order laws against drugs.
Since, the 50 year war on drugs has cost Americans over a trillion dollars and countless lives. And, it has had zero impact as drug use has not changed one bit. Many police today even advocate against this useless and continued damaging and expensive protocol. All this over a natural plant used throughout centuries.
“The War on Drugs is a trillion-dollar failure. We spend billions of dollars pursuing drugs and billions imprisoning people that probably shouldn’t be in prison. We have troops in Central America chasing drug dealers, we have Special Forces and Marines. Meanwhile, this war has killed a hundred thousand people in Mexico – and that doesn’t include 22,000 people missing.” – Don Winslow, The Cartel, 2005”
But I digress.
“‘Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in,’ Corbett O’Toole, participant in the 1977 504 protest in San Francisco.”
When we think of the disability movement we think of leading activist players like the charismatic and powerful Judith Heumann, but less known is the involvement of Black Panthers who contributed to the success of the famous San Francisco Section 504 sit-in protest and greater fight for disability equality.
“During the 504 protests at the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977, the Black Panther Party provided support, including feeding (over a 100 disabled) demonstrators during the 26-day sit-in. The following is an edition of the Black Panther Party newspaper describing the occupation the wheelchair-confined and disabled people who successfully took on the federal government – occupying the Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) offices in San Francisco for nearly four weeks, while sending a delegation to Washington, D.C., to directly confront their oppressors – had overcome, and, indeed, their message was heard across the land.”
As a result, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed into law Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 on April 28th birthing the disability movement, paving the road to ADA and to today.
One of the black disabled activists involved, yet often left out, is Oakland's Bradley Lomax; a Black Panther Party member living with multiple sclerosis. It was Lomax and Chuck Jackson who rallied and led the Black Panthers' pertinent assistance in food, solidarity and support for all 26 days. This support received limited coverage by the mainstream media, naturally.
“Or when Dennis Billups, a 24-year-old Black man blind from birth and in many ways the spiritual leader of the San Francisco demonstrators, marched joyfully out of the Old Federal Building holding a sign he instructed to be made, “You don’t have to see it to know.”
Without this solid and consistent support it is said the 504 sit-in likely would have collapsed. Disability justice was an intricate part of Black Panthers' movement and this needs to be shouted more.
In 1988, Deaf and hard of hearing of hearing University students overtook and shutdown their school demanding a deaf person should be president if a deaf school and the black community supported this sentiment. Rev. Jackson always spoke of the marginalized, including the disabled which was unusual for politicians to speak for disabled and still has today. Disability rights has only been a recent thing (2020) in political platitudes and platforms and much of that is due to acknowledgement that we are a powerful voting base, making up to 25% of the population, and not necessarily altruism or true understanding.
Lomax, at 33 years old, ultimately died in 1984 due to MS complications, seven years after the famous sit-in.
There is so much more history behind disabled black activists like Bradley Lomax, Chuck Johnson, Gary Norris Gray, Don Galloway, Johnnie Lacy, Brigardo Groves, Ron Washington and Dennis Billups. I urge you to look into their stories more. Knowing these stories humanizes disabled, Black Panthers and their efforts, making the contrived “Black Panthers were a dangerous threat and evil” narrative less black and white and more grey.
Mainstream public hasn’t heard stories like the raid of Black Panthers Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, who were gunned down by 14 police officers and a hundred flying bullets while asleep in their beds. Police then created “bullet holes” to contrive ballistic reports, but later was founded to be nail holes created by police. Fred Hampton was particularly considered charismatic and chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers. Officials feared he would be a unifying leader among blacks rallying for social justice, and basically assassinated him while his nine months pregnant girlfriend lay next to him. It was later discovered the FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Chicago police conspired to assassinate Hampton. FBI and the government have been battling civil rights activists throughout history, domestically and abroad, and we are often vilified and lied about by power to prevent more power going to the working and poor class.
I encourage you to look into the propaganda and political tactics employed by government and law and order that were used against the Black Panthers Party, anti-war and in general against activists to snuff out civil rights’ cries. There are always two sides to the story and unfortunately history is usually written by the victors and the powerful.
Section 504 reads:
“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.”
I'm particularly fascinated and proud of the history of disabled and powerful activists like Judith Heumann and Bradley Lomax who paved the way. They not only showed society that disabled are dynamic and capable, but also the combined acts of consistent civil disobedience can make change. What they were able to accomplish with just a few: from the 50 wheelchairs stopping traffic in a busy Manhattan intersection, to the longest non-violent 504 occupation of a federal building to the Capitol Crawl, was no small feat and an amazing accomplishment. This shows that it is not about letting ourselves be so easily divided, and instead work together on issues we do agree on.
But there’s still so much more to do and we’re still the most marginalized and underrepresented group. Contrary to public perception, the ADA, while a start, does not guarantee us rights and has no true accountability structure for the offenders.
We still have so many access issues, including but not limited to lack of physical access to building. “Working disabled people can legally be paid less than $1 an hour under federal law, an appalling exemption to already inadequate minimum-wage standards. Disabled people on Social Security Income (SSI) must report any income, including gifts, every month to maintain meager and poverty-level amounts of coverage, and can lose their benefits by marrying. We don’t have marriage equality. We are also more likely to be poor, and more likely to become homeless — more than 40 percent of homeless people are disabled.”
Most people don’t know but Up to half of people killed by police are disabled, predominantly disabled black and people of color, but the disability of a citizen killed by police is rarely shared in the media and the public automatically assumes the victim must have deserved it instead of admitting there are real systemic issues, including not having any real protocol in understanding our community. Like a deaf person who can’t hear commands and gets shot. Or autistic individuals being a large segment of police murders, and that parents and families of autistic or schizophrenic children have real fear their child will be wrongfully misunderstood by law and order, including fellow police. Or many times suicidal individuals, whose family call the police for help, end up getting killed by the police. It is not anti-police to point out problems, if anything it’s pro police as any system that lacks trust and in turn respect makes things dangerous for all sides including law and order. You can’t understand until it happens to you. The community are taxpayers of these institutions, we have a right to ask why when there is no accountability for mistakes or excessiveness.
And, then there is job discrimination and inaccessibility that is so common yet rarely discussed, leading the public to think the ADA fixed all our problems. I recently shared my own experience with job discrimination in blog post Wheelchair In the Room.
The disability community is vast, complex and extremely diverse. It is easy to internalize and accept the ableist standards set by a world that disregards, disrespects, sidelines and isolates the largest and fastest growing minority group in not only America (up to 26% of the population) but also the world (one billion people, or 15% of the world's population). But as an empowered community, we are unstoppable. So, don’t stop.
While the ADA was a major accomplishment the fight for disability rights, representation, equality and visibility is far from over and there is still much work to be done.
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