Raise your hand if you have never heard of Ed Roberts.
Raise your hand if you have never been called a vegetable.
Raise your hand if you have never organized a nationwide–and then a worldwide–movement to enable disabled people to live independently.
Raise your hand if you did not know that approximately 70 million U.S. adult citizens (25% of the population) have a disability, according to the CDC, and that almost half have physical disabilities.
So, first, count yourself lucky if you can raise your hand. Ed Roberts could not.
Nor could he do the hundreds of countless routine tasks “normal” people do not have to even think about to accomplish.
I have been reading “An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights,” by Scot Danforth.
At age 14, polio left Roberts mostly paralyzed from the neck down. He slept in an iron lung so he could breathe. When outside the lung, he had to frog breathe, a complicated method of forcing air into his lungs.
He was destined for a life of institutionalized care at the margins of a society that took paternalistic pity on “cripples” but wanted them out of sight.
Ed Roberts never entered that life and helped lead a movement in the 1960s and 70s that not only took lessons from the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement, but also aligned with them in many ways.
He has been called the Martin Luther King of the disability rights movement.
I guess I thought that curb cuts and ramp access and the ADA magically appeared through the benevolent largesse of politicians.
Ed Roberts and the disability rights movement fought and fought and fought for every piece of legislation and dollar that helped level the playing field for the disabled, using the same strategies (such as civil disobedience) the other movements used.
One topic that really made me think–especially in connection with Flynn (the son of my niece who has CVI and whom I have written about previously) is who gets to make decisions about the disabled.
Roberts railed against the fact that abled people ran the institutions dealing with the disabled and decided what was best for the blind, the paralyzed, the deaf, etc., without input from a single disabled person.
Now, when Flynn and his parents sit down for a meeting with Flynn’s school, is someone with CVI sitting across the table? Would they take the advice of someone with CVI?
Here is a modest proposal: county intermediate units should form, or contract with, experts in educational accommodations for those with disabilities. They could go from school to school to be the last word on what kind of accommodations would be provided.
I’m raising my hand in favor of that proposal.
The Q-View 