1

Judith Heumann - I

I think, I’m not sure, but the founding of the program at the University of Illinois

is the oldest or the second oldest. I think the oldest is Missouri, Columbia University,

Columbia University of Missouri in Columbia, but maybe that’s not before 1948, but

what I’ve been told, which is worth nothing, it’s either they’re one and U of I is two, or

they’re like very neck and neck. I know that either Tim’s program or the University of

Missouri is the oldest. At any rate, they’re both, I think the U of I, frankly, had much

more notoriety because of Tim, and this is just ____________ what I’ve heard, and that

the program in Missouri, you know, was for it’s time supposed to be a very, and I don’t

know any of the names of people.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1947; my date of birth is December 18, 1947. I had

polio in 1949, when I was eighteen months old. I guess the way I would describe myself

is I’m, I’m one of the leaders of the disability rights movement and my full name is

Judith E. Heumann. So, I guess, you know, one way to, have you read No Pity?, because

I’m in No Pity. _______________________, but it’s a great book. So I had polio in

1949, and I’m the oldest of three kids growing up in East Flatbush. So at that time, I

don’t want to say there wasn’t any movement because there were things that were

happening, but because I was the only disabled person in my family, there weren’t any

other disabled people in the neighborhood, you know, when I had polio, my parents

didn’t connect to anything else that was going on. They connected to the March of

Dimes eventually, but there was no organized group of parents, except really there were

some parents that were working with a group called United Cerebral Palsy. They had set

2

that organization up in the ‘30s or ‘40s, I believe, and I think the ARC was around at that

time, but they were, they were organizations focusing on disabilities, as opposed to like a

particular type of a disability, and so, you know, we kind of fell into it. I don’t know

what your experience with your daughter is, but so, I was five and my mother took me to

school, but I wasn’t allowed to go to school because I was in a wheelchair and the school

wasn’t accessible. The principal told my mother, it was a public school, P.S. 219, no,

197, only in New York are public schools referred to as P.S. The school I should have

gone to was P.S. 197, but the school I went to was P.S. 219, but I didn’t go to school until

the middle of the fourth grade. So the Board of Ed sent a teacher to my house for a total

of 2 ½ hours a week, and then, they threw an occupational therapist in, so I was getting 3

½ hours a week, and that was the first grade, second grade, third grade, and half of the

fourth grade, and my mother was looking to get me into a school program and,

eventually, there was, you know, in New York, you wouldn’t know this, but they had

these Health Conservation classes by numbers and I was in Health Conservation 21, and

that meant that it was a program for kids with orthopedic disabilities, although kids had

multiple disabilities, couldn’t ambulate up stairs, needed a special bus, and needed

assistance of some type in the classroom, get your coat on and off, go to the bathroom,

feeding, stuff like that.

So until I started going to these segregated classes, it was in a regular school, but

we went to school in the basement and it was very interesting because they were, well,

they all had to have a physical disability. If they didn’t have a physical disability, they

went to another, but P.S. 219 was basically a regular public school where they had six

classes for kids with disabilities in the basement. Well, the school wasn’t accessible

3

above the basement, but it’s just the model that existed at that time. Kids were either in

segregated schools or segregated programs. This would have been in the ‘50s, and so the

education that we were getting in those classes was nothing that you would really call

education, so my mother was kind of learning, you know, my father worked, my mother

was the one who was, my mother worked part-time for my father. He had a small

butcher store and she was getting more involved because when I was in home instruction,

I was academically, you know, achieving a lot. When I started going to classes to school,

the teaching was very minimal and so I wasn’t academically really progressing. It was

absolutely low expectations on the part of the teachers. There had been no kid from the

Health Conservation class who had ever gone to high school. They stayed in those

classes until they were 21 and then they went to sheltered workshops. I was the first

post-polio student in the program. I had a friend who had muscular dystrophy. She was

the first kid with muscular dystrophy. Now, the kids who had cerebral palsy, some of

them had intellectual involvement and some of them they didn’t, but there was really, I

mean, I think organizations like United Cerebral Palsy and others had really been pushing

to get the schools to start opening some programs, but the issue of substance and quality

of education really, there was, there was nothing going on. My mother and father, I

think, really started organizing with other parents when they realized that the kids who

used wheelchairs were going back on home instruction for high school and they didn’t

want that, so my mother worked with other, she found, unfortunately, nobody ever

interviewed my Mom before she died. There were a whole group of mothers that’s really

very unfortunate, but all across the country, there are mother stories that are worth doing,

mother-father stories, because many, I don’t know about you and your daughter, but your

4

daughter’s how old? Okay, so she, IDEA was passed by the time she started going to

school, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. At any rate, so she, my Mom

started working with some other parents who had kids with physical disabilities to force

the Board of Ed of New York to make some of the schools accessible and/or to use

accessible schools, and to provide transportation, and to provide aides in the school if we

needed it.

So Sheepshead Bay High School was the school, still in Brooklyn, Sheepshead

Bay, and I went to high school there, and it was a quasi-integrated program. Our

homerooms were only with disabled kids and I, in the first year, two of my classes were

with, three of my classes were with disabled kids and two of my classes were integrated

classes, and I went to segregated camps because the regular camps certainly wouldn’t

take kids with physical disabilities. You know, I’m sure that there were some kids with

less mobility disability, but as a rule, the disabled kids went to separate camps, separate

schools, separate classes, certainly in the urban areas and the rural areas. I mean there

were kids, you know, who really did need help who weren’t able to go to those programs.

My brothers went to a camp program, but I couldn’t go. They went to Camp Wilmette,

but I couldn’t go to that camp. There were weekend activities like social groups, but a lot

of the stuff was really just for disabled kids. Now, I think what I’ve always found

interesting is, you know, while the schools in New York were pretty, were segregated by

your neighborhoods, the Special Ed classes weren’t. The Special Ed classes and the

camps were racially integrated before anything else was and these were public schools.

I’m talking about both the schools and the summer camps. I mean when I went to school,

there were African American kids. In the area, there weren’t that many Latinos because

5

there weren’t that many Latinos in New York yet in the ‘60s, right, I was in elementary

school in the ‘50s and I went to high school. I mean the kids were bused in, yeah, the

kids were bused in from a pretty big area and there were a few Latino kids in the school.

There were more Latino kids in the camp. The camp was run by the Jewish Federation.

First was Camp Oakhurst that I went to and then Camp Ginette, which was run by

another group, but the elementary school, my elementary school was racially integrated,

the disabled classes, the school itself was not. It was in District 18 and that’s where there

were big issues around because the schools were becoming, because busing was starting

before they were integrating the schools, but this was before that and so it was really

very, there weren’t really expectations because, you know, I started going to school, I’m

nine years old, nobody’s graduated from the classes to go anyplace, my parents were, you

know, very much of the mind that I was going to go to college. Education was very

important and I was using a manual chair to get around, but I couldn’t push myself very

well. In these classes it was very small, so I could push myself a little bit, but in high

school I did have people who helped me move from class to class, but in elementary

school, it was just like a wing of the building. In the elementary school, okay, so our

wing was here, and right here was the cafeteria and the gym. We didn’t eat, we didn’t eat

with the kids and we didn’t go to gym with the kids, and right here was the bathroom.

We used to use the bathroom, everybody, but then, I don’t know why, they put bathrooms

in all the classrooms. So the only time that we went and did anything with the non-

disabled kids was once a week for assembly, that was it, and then the kids, as we called

them the kids upstairs, some of the kids upstairs would be identified as whatever would

come down and help us get our coats on and off, you know, it was like service.

6

So I graduated from high school in 1965, and then I went to Long Island

University. There was no disabled students program, so basically I think, you know, in,

as I was growing up and I was becoming friends with more and more disabled people, we

were basically looking at the need to form our own groups. We weren’t satisfied with the

UCP’s and the Muscular Dystrophy and the ARC’s and all those groups because they

were really more focused on cure. They weren’t focused on civil rights and human rights

and equal rights, and we were being very influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and

the Women’s Movement and the Gray Panther Movement, the elderly Gray Panther

Movement, and, you know, I, I think, you know, in disability, you know, as I was saying

earlier, the benefit of people being able to come together through these segregated

programs was there was a cohort of people then who understood issues of discrimination.

You know, we didn’t necessarily grow up, I mean, my experiences were even if you

came from a minority family, the minority family didn’t get the disability issue. I came

from a Jewish family. My family came from Germany. We lost our family there. They

understood issues of discrimination, but the issues of discrimination as it impacted us

with various forms of disabilities, we felt even the best people didn’t get what was going

on and I think as things were revolving, the other minority movements really didn’t get

the Women’s Movement, which is not a minority movement, but getting disability

integrated into those movements was very difficult. I mean, I think things have

progressed quite significantly, although they’re not yet where they need to be, but

compared to where they were in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, they’re much further ahead. I

think people didn’t, I think because disability has really been seen as an issue of charity, I

think because people really see it as a negative or it’s an issue of pity, you know, people

7

focus on making people better and people, I think, frequently look at us as not equal and

so I think forming a movement kind of, we were learning kind of what was going on

around, but we were having to create our own voices. Although in creating our own

voices, we were, as I said, looking at other movements and what they were doing, but

even the ability to get together, you know, there was no accessible public transportation,

buildings were not accessible, bathrooms weren’t accessible, personal assistant services,

none of that stuff was really available, so you did see the blind groups organizing and the

deaf groups organizing, the veterans were organizing. The veterans were a very powerful

movement and that’s part of what Tim was doing. So I mean, I’m sure that in that whole

story are things that I’m saying also and, you know, so here you had, well, you had the

veterans, who had some very powerful organizations. In New York, there was a group

called Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association. Joe Madello, I think his name was, they,

EPVA served veterans who were disabled in the war, but they served veterans who

became disabled afterwards also, similar to Paralyzed Veterans of America. So, you

know, I remember in the ‘60s, I started getting involved in going to meetings that Joe was

having up at EPVA, which were looking at issues of accessibility and as we were getting

older, we were, there were some more of us that were going to universities and we were

meeting each other in these clubs and the camps and different places, and I think the

thread that was going through is when we were, when we were in these groups of

disabled people, we began at an age level. So the first time I went to camp I was nine,

but you know, you began to talk about what you wanted to be able to do, what you

weren’t able to do, how you felt about what you were trying to do when you weren’t able

to do it, and over the course of time, began to look at problem-solving, you know, if you

8

could, if we could create a world as we wanted it to be, what would it look like and I

think it was a very empowering, and so these activities, you know, that were emerging

were basically, you know, people kind of trying to figure things out and what to do, and

there was, I was involved in setting up a disability organization in New York called

Disabled In Action, that was the result of a lawsuit that I had had in New York against

the Board of Education from when I was in college.

So I graduated from high school, I went to Long Island University in Brooklyn

and I wanted to be a teacher, but at that point in time, my friends who had disabilities

who went to the high school that I went to, they basically said, “Don’t tell the RSA,

__________ Rehab Agency, that you want to be a teacher because they’ll only support

you to go study in a field where they know other disabled people have studied and gotten

jobs.” Well, that’s what they said, so I, they had disabilities, they were a little older than

me, I trusted what they had to say. Nobody else was giving me advice and this was a

state vocational rehabilitation agency, so I had had a teacher when I was in the fifth grade

who had told me, “You should be a speech therapist. You understand the kids who have

cerebral palsy very well. You can get a job in a hospital and you can get an MRS

degree.” Well, you know, at that age, I didn’t know what an MRS degree was. I was

like, “What are you talking about?” At any rate, so I actually, when I went to the ARC to

get services, told them that I wanted to be a speech therapist. So, but I minored in

education and I worked, I was very active in the university with other disabled people.

We eventually set up a disabled student’s program at the university and I minored in

education. I took the exams I had to take. All three of them were offered in completely

inaccessible buildings. I had friends who carried my wheelchair up the stairs. There was

9

nothing illegal about any of that at that time and I passed the oral and the written exam,

but I was failed on the medical exam because I couldn’t walk, that’s what they wrote

down, paralysis of both lower limbs ________________ of poliomyelitis. This is, well,

after you, after I graduated. You had to graduate, and then you could take your tests.

This was in 1969 to certify me to be a teacher. You had to be certified in New York.

Everybody had it but medical, which is a whole story in and of itself. Well, eventually,

we went to court. This was the first court case I was involved in and it was against the

New York City Board of Education, Heumann v. The Board of Education. There was an

editorial in The New York Times, editorials in The Daily News, in The Post. They were

actually in 19, I filed the suit in, I filed, I graduated in June of ’69, took the exams, I filed

the suit either in late ’69 or ’70 because I was teaching by ’71.

So I had a friend who had a disability, Sam somebody-or-other, I can’t remember

his last name, he was a stringer for The New York Times. He was a journalism major at -

_______________ University and he got, my God, that name, Malcolm, I haven’t talked

about this in so long, anyway, what was his name. I have a long oral history also at UC-

Berkeley; you know the program there? They have the oral history of disability at the

Bancroft Library. His, Malcolm, Malcolm, his name would be in that. At any rate, so he

did a piece on a Wednesday. On a Thursday, The New York Times did an editorial called

Heumann v. The Board of Education and on Friday, I did the Today show, and on

Thursday, I got a call from a guy named Roy Lucas, who was an attorney and had a firm

called, was a constitutional law firm and he called me because he was writing a book and

at the end of the conversation, I asked him if he would represent me. I had no lawyers

then. I hadn’t filed yet. I wanted to file, but I had no lawyers and I had no money. So I

10

asked him pro bono. So he did pro bono and there was a lawyer, who was a customer of

my father’s, who came in and said he’d be willing to represent me, and Roy and Elias

Schwartzbar were the ones who represented me. So we actually got to court and the

Judge was Constance Baker Mottley, so she was the first African American woman

appointed to the federal court and she told them, the lawyers wanted to file in federal

court and make it a federal issue, and it should have been. So that’s where we went and

she was great, you know. She basically told the Board of Ed that, what she was rotating.

She was going to keep the case and she encouraged them to do another review of my

medical situation, and but while that, this was going on, as I said, there was lots of

publicity, for a year, there was probably something every month, and in the beginning,

there were multiple things in papers and newspapers and magazines and radio and TV, all

over the country actually.

This started in ’70 really I think and I was getting a lot of, you know, I had this

group of friends who had disabilities, we graduated from college many of us, and, not

everybody, but what was basically beginning to happen is when I was doing my

interviews, I didn’t talk just about the case. I talked about the issues of discrimination

that we people with all types of disabilities faced and, you know, enumerated the types of

discrimination that people faced, the barriers that weren’t being broken down, and so I

was getting letters and phone calls and a lot of people were reacting, and in New York,

you know. So a group of my friends and I decided, well, let’s take all these letters and all

this stuff that we’ve got and let’s set up a meeting. So we set up a meeting at Long Island

University and about 80 people came, which was for a disability group, a huge amount of

people because they were mainly people with disabilities. It was mainly disabled people.

11

I mean they came with other people if they needed to, but the 80 people were mainly

disabled people. This took place at Long Island University I think in the ‘70s, or 1970

itself. I think it was February of 1970, and we started this group that for one week was

called Handicapped In Action and then we changed the name to Disabled In Action, and

it’s still in New York. It’s in New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore, yeah, they’re still,

yep. So it, it was, is a cross disability organization, and at that point, it was a pretty, for

the disability community, it was considered a militant organization because we organized

demonstrations. Well, basically I think we were cross disability and we worked on many,

many different issues and we also, I think, took an approach which was we identified a

problem, we would speak to whoever or whatever entity was involved, we’d try to

negotiate and if that didn’t work, then we would escalate what we were doing. So it was

anything from demonstrations outside of The New York Times because they weren’t

covering disability much at all and where they were, it was on the Style section or the

Medical section. It wasn’t being treated as a civil rights issue. Well, certainly nothing in

the media changes overnight, so it was little, I mean, I think everything was incremental.

The Jerry Lewis Telethon, I don’t know if you know anything about the controversy.

Well, there’s a lot of controversy about the telethon. Many disabled people don’t like it

because it’s a charity mode, it’s a pity mode, let’s give money to poor crippled kids

whose lives are terrible. So our organization, there were some people who had muscular

dystrophy, they actually had a hunger strike outside the telethon, you know, so they’re,

but then we also were getting involved in civil disobedience, so there was a piece of

legislation called The Rehabilitation Act and in 1972, Nixon vetoed it because of the

independent living section in the, IL, and also because of the, the Nixon Administration

12

was very opposed to this concept. Well, what they, basically, I would say an unfunded

mandate and I think what he also said was he didn’t want to raise expectations. This was

Nixon himself or whoever spoke for him, and I think also probably a bigger issue, but I

don’t know if it’s documented. My feeling would be Title 5 of the Rehab Act and

Sections 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, which were all these anti-discrimination, affirmative action, the

architectural barriers legislation, and I don’t think they wanted it. So when it was vetoed,

Disabled In Action and a group called Pride, which was also in New York, but hasn’t

been around for a while, we basically organized a demonstration, which was really kind

of comical, in New York, in the beginning in New York and then it came down here, and

I guess between 1971 and ’72, we started Disabled In Action in ’71.

The lawsuit was settled. They gave me my credential, my teaching credential, but

I couldn’t find a job. I couldn’t get anybody to hire me. I was eventually hired in the

school that I had gone to school in with the segregated classes in the basement, P.S. 219.

I had a regular teaching credential. The only classes that I could teach were the Special

Ed classes and when I had been doing all these interviews, one of the things I had talked

about was how poor the Special Ed system was and how kids weren’t being educated,

and then I wound up having to go back to teach in that, those classrooms with all these

Special Ed teachers when there were only five or six of them. Well, I went back to P.S.

219 as a teacher in 1970. This case went through the court very quickly. Well, she heard

it, she said to the Board, “Deal with it or I’m taking it,” and they dealt with it. They put,

they got it, it was very clear. She wasn’t, you know, she made it very clear to them she

felt what was going on was wrong and she wasn’t going to let it go. So I had another

doctor who did a medical exam and took nothing, it was done. So now I’m certified, but

13

I can’t get any principals to hire me. So there was another, I just couldn’t get in. At any

rate, so Disabled In Action started in ’71. It was expanding and doing more work. I was

at that point working at the university in the Alumni Office, Long Island University in

Brooklyn, and I, so I finally got a job. Mr. Greenwald, who was the Principal of the

school that I had gone to school in, hired me, P.S. 219, and he was Principal when I was

there. So I graduated from there in what, ’61, and he hired me in ’70. So, you know,

what was really evolving over those years was the development more of a movement.

There were disabled student’s programs, which were starting on campuses around the

United States. They, more of those disabled student programs were coming much more, I

mean, I would say what you saw at Berkeley and what you saw at University of Illinois

was different for a couple of reasons. I didn’t go to U of I and I eventually went to

Berkeley, but I wasn’t in Berkeley in the ‘60s. I did my graduate study at Berkeley. So I

think that some of the difference is between the U of I and Berkeley is the Berkeley

disabled student’s program was started by disabled people. It was started by Ed Roberts,

Larry Biscamp, John Hessler, and those individuals had significant disabilities. They

were quads and I think it was ’63 when it began. I don’t know that he sued UC-Berkeley.

You know, I don’t think he did. I heard somebody say that. I don’t think, I’m not sure if

he sued them. I actually never recall Ed telling me that he sued. There was a big broo-

ha-ha, but I don’t think there was a campus demonstration. No, no he didn’t. That’s

what I said. There’s something going on that Leon said this to me and then I’d read

something, but I never heard that, yeah. So they basically, they were able to force the

university, it was because of Dr. what was his name, Bruen, Dr. Bruen. So there was no

suit and Joan worked with him for many, many years. There was no, Joan said there was

14

no confrontation. What they did was, Joan knew Ed very, very well. I mean I knew Ed

very well. Joan worked, Joan worked with Ed from like 1973, until, well, until he died,

but I, he died in ’95, ’96. Joan, Ed and I set up this group called The World Institute on

Disability and I met Ed in 1973, and then Joan worked with Ed on a day-to-day basis

between ’73, ’74, and I started work with Ed on a day-to-day basis in ’81. So I never

heard this. So basically, yeah, there was a doctor called Dr. Bruen. He worked at the

university and Ed and his mother and someone from, I think Ed had gone to school in San

Mateo at a university or community college. At any rate, there was no confrontation. It

was, but you know, over, then Ed went to school at Berkeley and they would, these

groups of young people who had other disabilities who started going to Berkeley also and

so, you know, I think, I don’t know why Tim started the program, but I’m just saying, I

don’t know.

I started teaching at P.S. 219 in the Fall of 1970, and I taught there for three years,

’70, ’71, ’72, and ’73, June of ’73, and then I went to Berkeley. I would say those three

years were, well, the first year I was teaching disabled kids. The second year, they

moved the disabled kids. This was, you remember when District 18, there was this big

issue that was going on that they were trying to desegregate in ’68, but so what happened

was I went to that school. When I went to that school it was an all White school, P.S.

219. When I started teaching there, it was basically 80-90% African Americans. It had

changed because of that. It might have been more. The disabled classes were still this

mix, but the school had gone from a basically white school to a basically African

American school. There were some Latinos and a few Whites. The first year, there were

no regular classes on the first floor. The end of the first year, there was a, there was a

15

school, I don’t know the number of the school, there was a school in the district, which

had space and they were going to be busing African American kids into that school. So

they decided to take the disabled kids, put them into that school so that they would be

occupied and they couldn’t bus kids into that school, and I never visited that school. I

have no idea what the school was, but I started, I was furious about it and I was trying to

organize, I mean, so here you had me, kind of by myself, I mean, you know, I got along

with the other teachers. There was one African American teacher, Mrs. Edwards, and she

and I were very good friends and I was basically trying to organize so that the disabled

classes wouldn’t leave 219, and I tried to work with some of the parents, I tried to work

with the Union. All the Union’s meetings were held in, not on the basement level floor.

They were held in an inaccessible part of the school, so I never could go to the Union

meetings. So I asked if they’d move a meeting so I could speak to the Union about why I

felt they shouldn’t be supporting what was going on because it was racist and it was

handicapped issues, it was everything that it shouldn’t be and that if there was a genuine

interest in opening up more classes for disabled kids, they should use that school, but at

that point, there were, there were like a million disabled kids out of school in the United

States and a huge, thousands and thousands of kids in New York City that were not in

public schools that were on home instruction. So I went to the Union, I asked for their

support. They disagreed with me. They wouldn’t support it. Then I asked to be heard at

a, at a meeting with all the teachers and the Principal introduced me the following way:

“Ms. Heumann alleges that there are disabled children in New York City who are not in

school and that she wants us to support the kids not going from 219 to this other school.

I’ve just gotten off the phone with the Board of Education who have told me that there

16

are no kids out of school.” This guy gets up, a teacher, who had just come from

Philadelphia and he said, “I don’t know about New York, but I know that in Philadelphia

there are thousands of disabled kids who are not in school.” So he validated it, but

basically they voted it down. So what happened was the disabled kids were bused out of

the school, just terrible, and of course, it’s still an emotional issue for me all these years

later because it was wrong and it was, you know, you asked me how it felt, it was like, I

mean, as, as a disabled person, you know, it’s what I said to you earlier, you’re kind of

out there by yourself unless you’re with a group, and in the school itself, I was the only

disabled professional, you know, all the others were the kids, you know. Ms. Parker

taught there and she had a limp, but outside of that, there were no visibly disabled people.

There were no politically active disabled people. I was President of Disabled In Action

as all this was going on and I was furious because all these kids were out of school and it

was such a racist activity, and I was trying to get, you know, like the woman who was the

President of the PTA was an African American woman and I met with her and I said,

“Don’t you see?,” and she was an activist, you know, in her own community and I’m

like, “Don’t you see what’s going on? You really, the parents have to say something

about this. This is really wrong to allow these kids to be used in a pawn game. It’s, it’s

not right,” and so, why ever and whatever, at the end of the day was they moved the kids

out.

Then the next year, I was given a regular second grade class in 219. Now, it’s

important to remember that I minored in Education, I never student taught, I had worked

on trying to figure out ways that I could get experience to teach, so I worked at a Reading

Clinic when I was studying to get my degree in Speech, it was Speech and Theatre

17

actually, and I worked with a friend of mine named Tony Melee. We had set up an after

school program in Fort Green and so I was working, we were working with inner-city

kids, and actually, the only Principal who offered me a job was, my friend Tony taught at

this Junior High School and it wasn’t accessible, and a lot of the kids that we worked

with were in that school, and so one day they had carried me up the step, steps to come

into the school, and I was in the hall talking to a bunch of the kids and the Principal came

over to me, and because apparently the kids that I was dealing with were problem kids

and troublemaker kids, and he said, “Would you like to teach here? These kids don’t

typically react this way to teachers. They want to get rid of teachers, you know, they

want them out of the school,” and I thought about it, but you know, I had no experience

in Junior High School and I couldn’t teach in a school that wasn’t accessible. I couldn’t,

I mean I needed, I had a motorized wheelchair at that point, finally, but it was in the ‘60s

that I got it, like probably ’69, that I finally got a chair. It wasn’t that heavy actually

because it was an attachment to a manual wheelchair, but I didn’t want to be carried up

and down stairs. I couldn’t be independent in a school I, I didn’t want to do that, but he,

he offered me a job, so he’s the only other one, sight unseen, never saw me teach

anything. He said, “If you can get along with these kids, you can come teach at this

school.” So I taught this one year regular class, second grade at 219, and the Principal

and I no longer had a good relationship because of what I had done because I had

publicly opposed him, and I had no student teaching experience and I had never been in a

second grade class in my life. What was really interesting is that the day I started

teaching second grade, I realized as the kids started coming into school I’d never been in

a second grade class because I was on home instruction. I didn’t go to school until I was

18

in the fourth grade. I was never in, I was never in an integrated elementary school

classroom in my entire life until the day I taught because there were no regular classes in

P.S. 219 on the basement level. So they lost my records, 36 kids came into my classroom

and I did the best I could do and I did, I think I did as a first year teacher with no support,

I think I did a decent job. At the end of the school year, it must have been like in May,

he, the Principal came in unannounced one day to evaluate me, May of ’72, he came in to

evaluate me and he writes. So I had, you know, in New York, there were big schools, so

the school that I taught in, there were ten classes on every grade level, so there was 2-1 to

2-10, and I had 2-6, so they were tracked, I mean, they were classes so basically 2-1 was

the best, 2-10 was the worst, 2-6 was a little beyond middle, it was, if 5 was the middle, I

was a little more on the problematic area. So I liked my kids. I had 36 kids in the

beginning of my class. I had an aide in the class and the first person I had working with

me was great. She got sick and she had to leave, but I had a lot of problem kids and, you

know, it was an inner-city school and I set up an after school program. Oh, they hated

things I wanted to do. When I first started that class, I sent a letter out to all the parents, I

gave them my phone number, I told them to please call me, we had an open school, we

had, you know, Open School Day. In the Fall semester, they had an Open School

Afternoon and an Open School Evening. In the Spring, they only had Open School

Afternoon and I insisted that they let me open the school to have an Open School

Evening because parents worked and they couldn’t come in the afternoon and I didn’t

care how many came. I just wanted them to know that I was trying to work with them

and about four or five parents came and, but, and I set up an after school program, just for

my class, where kids could stay until 5:00 and, you know, we did tutoring and stuff after.

19

So in May, he comes into my class. Mr. Frank was the Principal. The, Mr. Greenwald

who had been the Principal, was when I was there. Mr. Frank was the Principal when I

worked there and he came in to evaluate me and, you know, it was a, everybody was

getting set up. I had some math problems on the board and kids were beginning to get

settled, but he wrote this scathing evaluation. So I went to speak to Mrs. Edwards, who

was the other African American teacher. You know what, I’m saying something wrong.

This is what happened. In the second year, they moved, okay, they moved, they had a,

they had a classroom on the basement level, an early childhood classroom. They moved

that out. It was the end of the second year of my teaching that the Special Ed classes

were moved out. So it was the end of ’72 was when they moved those kids out. The

second and third year I did the second grade. The first year I did Special Ed. The second

year they moved this early childhood class out, put a second grade class downstairs, I

taught that second grade. The third year they had moved the disabled classes out to this

other school and they put second grade classes on that floor. Anyway, so I went and I

spoke to Mrs. Edwards and I said, “I haven’t gotten any bad evaluations since I’ve been

here.” Mrs. Edwards was the other African American teacher in the Special Ed classes

and she said to me, “You know what this is all about. You need to write a letter in

response.” So I wrote a letter and I said, “If my teaching was so bad, why did it take you

until May to come and tell me?” That was basically, I mean I wrote down, “You came

into my class unannounced.” He sat in one of my kid’s class seats, who had an emotional

problem. He sat in her chair. He didn’t get up. She went into the class and rolled herself

into a ball. I mean it was, you know, I remember this like it was yesterday, and he was

completely non-supportive and not helpful. You know, even if he felt that what I was

20

doing wasn’t what he wanted, it should have been that he then came in and said, “Okay,

let’s work on this,” but that’s not what, and he’d never evaluated me, and the Vice

Principal, who did evaluate me, I never had a bad evaluation.

So the next year I taught, I didn’t have my own class. I was rotating. I was, he

couldn’t get rid of me. I mean I don’t know who was trying to get rid of me, but he

wanted me to leave and I basically attacked what he said, so he didn’t give me my own

class again and I had like two or three courses that I taught rotating, which was fine, and

then I went to graduate school after my third year of teaching, because in New York, you

had to have a Master’s within five years to teach at all, you had to have a Master’s in five

years and I had taken a course at Columbia University while I was teaching, but it was

much too hard because transportation was inaccessible. I had to get a friend to drive me.

I was living in Brooklyn, teaching in Brooklyn, so basically what I decided to do was

apply to graduate school. So I applied to Columbia and I was accepted into Columbia’s

School of Social Work Community Organizing and then I got this call from Ed Roberts

in California. They were, he had a couple of professors that were interested in bringing

some disabled people into graduate programs in City and Regional Planning and Public

Health and they wanted people to come to get involved with this new organization that

was being set up, The Berkeley Center for Independent Living, so I applied to City and

Regional Planning, which is what they said, “Apply to that.” I didn’t know what it was.

I got accepted and about two weeks later they called me and said, “We accepted too

many disabled students in the program. What about Public Health?” I said, and at that

point, Public Health and City and Regional Planning were just emerging fields and I

thought what’s the difference. I’m so happy I got into Public Health because that was

21

really my strong point. It was totally in happenstance because I really wanted to go to

Columbia Community Organizing. I was obviously very interested in doing that and

that’s how I got out to Berkeley, but I mean basically, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I was

organizing with other disabled people, just lots and lots of stuff that we were doing, you

know, we had a major demonstration in New York the Thursday before the 1972 election

where we shut down Madison Avenue, about 50 of us took over Nixon Headquarters.

The day before the election, we had a demonstration marching up against traffic in Times

Square, took over Nixon Headquarters on Madison Avenue, shut it down the day before

the election and the issue was the vetoing of the Rehabilitation Act. We got McGovern’s

people involved. The first day we had, we’ll have to talk more later, but the first day we

had our demonstrations, we had no veterans and although we literally had shut down the

city, it was 4:30, 5:00 in the afternoon, the whirlybird was going around. We had

originally shut down four streets, but it was getting too tense because really, people

couldn’t, trucks couldn’t go anywhere, so we opened up three of them and left this one

closed for a couple of hours, and people from Nixon Headquarters came downstairs, they

wanted to know what we wanted. We said we wanted a debate with Nixon on television

about why he had, of course, we knew he wouldn’t do that, but that left just basically

saying we were all crazy and nuts and blah, blah, blah. We didn’t have much publicity. I

mean I think it was very interesting that an organization could shut down, organizations

could shut down traffic in Manhattan and get very little coverage. So I called the

McGovern Headquarters the next day. So I mean what happened was I called and got

this woman named Nancy Amaday, who was, I don’t know exactly what her position was

with the McGovern Headquarters, but she was in a big position and I got to her and

22

explained what we were doing and said, “We’re going to have another demonstration on

Monday. I need some veterans.” So she got us two disabled veterans.

One guy was a guy named Bobby Muller, who has become a very big person in

the Vietnam Veterans Movement and Bobby had never been involved in, he’d been

involved in anti-war activities. He’s a wheelchair user. He was injured in Vietnam, but

he had never been involved in the Disability Rights Movement. So he basically will tell

people that I was crazier than he was. He had never met anybody that was crazier than he

was. I’m sure that’s not exactly true, but and when he joined us, you know, there we

were, marching up Times Square against traffic and he, we probably went up Broadway.

We went to Madison Avenue to go over to Nixon Headquarters again. So but, oh yeah, it

was really, the Thursday that we did it, they called in a bomb threat. They were trying to

get us out of the building and but, we did get coverage when the veterans were with us.

We got a lot of coverage and, you know, radio, TV, newspaper, and before that, nothing,

and we had two veterans who knew nothing about the issues. I don’t have any idea, both

of them were in wheelchairs, you know, both working for McGovern, you know, they

were very supportive and very _______________, but in reality, knew nothing about the

issue, but came out because Nancy had told them to come out and so I mean, I think

getting back to the issue around Tim and, you know, what was going on, the disabled

student programs were very important because they again, these micro groups of people

that were getting together in the case of the disabled students programs, they were getting

an education, but they were also able to come together to talk about basically planning

how to make changes in society, and so you began to see the formation of disabled

student programs, some in the ‘50s, more in the ‘60s, more in the ‘70s, and now because

23

of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which was a part of the law that was vetoed by

Nixon in ’72, which was eventually passed in ’73, and there were many, many more

activities that went on in ’73 with demonstrations in Washington and demonstrations with

the President’s Committee and many other things that happened. We got coverage,

extensive, no, but we got coverage, little things, you know, we got some coverage. You

know, we had an all night vigil outside the Lincoln Memorial because it wasn’t

accessible and it was, you know, epitomized why we needed the Rehabilitation Act

passed and why we needed, because Section 504 says you can’t discriminate based on

disability, any program receiving federal financial assistance. Well, the Lincoln

Memorial was built completely with federal financial assistance and the symbol of what

the Lincoln Memorial was all about, but if you had a physical disability, you couldn’t get

into the Memorial, and Bobby actually participated in that demonstration and he came

down from New York, but he’s here, Bobby Muller, but anyway, so I mean I think in a

very small nutshell, you know, Tim’s work I think was very important because he really

was able to be, you know, a very cutting edge program, who was I think obviously it

came about as a result of the end of the Second World War when there were veterans that

were living that hadn’t lived before, and they accepted post-polio and Fred had, Fred was

a quad, spinal cord quad, Kitty had some kind of dystrophy, Mary Lou had polio, but I’m

sure the polios were coming in before Fred. Fred had broke his neck and Fred went to

college in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, and Kitty’s about the same age. Kitty and Fred went

to school at the same time and Mary Lou, now Kitty, Kitty is a, Kitty was a political

activist, a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party, and lives in California. I got very

involved in the Center for Independent Living and we called it, basically we called it the

24

Disability Rights Independent Living Movement and, well, what happened was, so

basically it’s, I went to graduate school, got a Master’s degree, but I did an internship in

D.C. I was a Legislative Assistant in D.C. for a year and a half, then I went back to

Berkeley and became the Deputy of the CIL, Berkeley CIL, Center for Independent

Living, which is the first CIL in the country and then the experiences that I’ve had in

D.C., we brought them back to Berkeley. So we began to have, be involved in national

legislation in many different ways and so really I think between ’75 until I came back

again to D.C. in ’93, when I was Assistant Secretary in the Clinton Administration. I

didn’t go on purpose when the ADA was signed. I actually consciously did not go. I was

very happy the law had been passed. I’d worked on it like others. I didn’t, I didn’t like

Bush and I didn’t want to get tied into that.