A Disability History of the United States (26 page)

Other people with disabilities focused on family issues, with less success. In 1988, for example, Tiffany Callo of San Jose, California, lost custody of her sons David and Jessie because California welfare officials determined that her cerebral palsy rendered her too disabled to care for them. Rather than provide the less expensive in-home support, the state placed her sons in much more expensive foster care. As Callo put it, “So what if it takes longer to change a diaper? That’s where disabled parents do their bonding. It’s quality time.”
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Callo lost custody of her sons, like many other parents with disabilities.

Parental custody issues remain important for parents with disabilities today. According to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare, almost two-thirds of US states continue to list “parental disability” as possible grounds for terminating parental rights, and parents with disabilities lose custody of their children at disproportionately high rates. This is despite research that overwhelmingly indicates that parents with disabilities are no more likely to mistreat their children than parents without disabilities.
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In September 1974, the United Handicapped Federation of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, announced its creation with a press release. It would, the UHF proudly proclaimed, “become a strong consumer advocate for its constituents in the major areas of transportation, housing, architectural barriers and employment.” It would use “confrontation and pressure tactics” and “significant public actions” instead of lobbying in the “time-consuming and restrictive legislation process.” Audrey Benson, the newly elected president of the UHF, reflected the organization’s confident manner in her acceptance speech. “We will hold up our end,” she declared. “We will act—force the issues into the open and gain control over the decisions that affect our lives. We will not stand still. Now is the time. This is the place.
And we are the people
.”
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As more people with disabilities became empowered by the actions of others with disabilities, as more and more began to think in terms of rights and citizenship, many disabled people began to consider seriously their own place in the American story—and who got to define that place. What this meant in daily life is perhaps best understood by examining one locale and one group. The story of the United Handicapped Federation exemplifies the growing expansiveness and excitement surrounding disability politics, culture, and life in the years after 1970. The United Handicapped Federation, despite its audacious name, was a local group. It was only one of many organizations of people with disabilities.

Sometime in the early 1970s the Catholic Interracial Council (CIC) sponsored an Action Leadership Techniques Seminar for people with disabilities. In the Twin Cities, the CIC had previously worked for the racial desegregation of local neighborhoods. As Audrey Benson described it, those attending the seminar “learned about [Saul] Alinsky principles and decided that we would organize as other minority groups have.” Originally from North Dakota, Benson had cerebral palsy and had graduated from Jamestown’s Crippled Children’s School. After earning her social work degree from Moorhead (Minnesota) State University, the young white woman moved to Minneapolis. Michael Bjerkesett became the UHF’s first executive director. While a college student Bjerkesett became paralyzed in a car accident. After finishing his degree he became a counselor in a hospital rehabilitation program. He left that position to help organize the UHF. The new organization brought together nineteen state organizations of and for people with disabilities.
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Other early members included Marilyn Rogers, Frances Strong, Stephen Marcinel, Scott Rostron, and Ronnie Stone.

The UHF addressed a wide array of issues, reflecting both the shared experiences and the broad differences among people with disabilities. Its members were most active during the last half of the 1970s, as others across the nation sought to explore and expand the consequences of emerging civil rights legislation. Reflecting national trends with respect to accessible housing, in early 1975 the UHF became involved with what was first known as the United Handicapped Federation Apartment Associates—an early example of universal design. Bjerkesett considered the ninety-unit South Minneapolis apartment complex “probably one of the most progressive housing projects for the handicapped in the country” at the time. Also in early 1975, in a letter reminiscent of those advocating that the handicapped be exempt from gas rationing during World War II, Bjerkesett asked that the transportation needs of people with disabilities be taken into consideration if gas rationing or higher gas taxes went into effect due to the national energy crisis. It would, he wrote, have “possible discriminatory effects . . . on the handicapped driver,” who had “no alternative forms of transportation.”
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The UHF did not hesitate to point out the occasional political condescension directed at people with disabilities. In early 1975, when it looked as though the state legislature was going to pass legislation giving free license plates to paraplegics but allow insurance companies to deny health coverage to people with disabilities, the UHF pointed out the irony. “The bill dealing with license plates for paraplegics . . . is probably the most meaningless piece of legislation I have ever been acquainted with,” wrote Bjerkesett, while, “the lack of insurance coverage will, often times, severely affect one’s ability to become independent in the community and also has serious effects on one’s ability to maintain gainful employment.” Free license plates were not the goal of the UHF.
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Like many other groups across the nation, the UHF focused on the accessibility of public buildings and transportation. In 1975 the organization began making the case that the famed Minneapolis Orchestra Hall be made accessible as it went through a planned renovation. UHF leaders submitted a list of building barriers and asked to meet with the building’s leaders. “Now is the time,” Benson wrote, “for you to listen to those most affected by the problems of inaccessibility.” Not getting the answer they wanted, the UHF protested repeatedly outside the building—collecting over nine hundred signatures of support at an event in July. The “handicapped,” they pointed out, were being “denied Mozart.” Building smart alliances, the UHF succeeded in getting resolutions of support from the Minneapolis City Council, the Minneapolis Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, and the St. Paul Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped. Similarly, the UHF protested its members’ lack of access to the Minneapolis skyways that connected buildings and made wintertime shopping easier. At a wintertime rally sponsored by the UHF, Benson asked, “Are we going to allow these people to keep sixteen and a half percent of the population oppressed? Are we going to remain invisible? Are we going to allow them to deny us the usability of Minneapolis?”
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Like activist groups in Denver, San Francisco, New York, and other cities across the nation, the UHF also sought access to public transportation. After several years of requests and then protests that shut down city streets, the UHF sued the Metropolitan Transit Commission of Minneapolis/St. Paul and its chairperson Doug Kelm. In an early 1976 press release, the UHF firmly positioned itself in the tradition of rights: “The right to travel and move about in this country is as fundamental as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the UHF proclaimed. Despite Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, the MTC had recently purchased an additional 338 inaccessible buses. By so doing, Kelm was “denying the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the handicapped people by the US Constitution.” By 1989 ADAPT, a national disability-rights organization, ranked the MTC as one of the ten worst large-city transit systems in the country.
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The Minnesota UHF reflected and intersected with national trends in many ways. In 1976 the UHF office first received TTY technology, which made telephones accessible for deaf people; the affordability and national availability of TTY was made possible by deaf activists. Like other national and regional disability-rights groups, the UHF found financial and institutional support from religious organizations (both Catholic and Lutheran) and unions. For example, in the middle of the transit lawsuit, a local of the Minnesota Teamsters Public Employees Union donated money for legal fees.
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Also like other disability activist organizations across the nation, the UHF increasingly sought to welcome and advocate for people with a wide range of disabilities—physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychiatric. In 1977 the AFL-CIO contacted the Twin Cities UHF and the Minnesota Association of Retarded Citizens (MARC) as part of a larger discussion about organizing disabled laborers in sheltered workshops. The concept of sheltered workshops—employing people with disabilities separately from other workers—dates to the nineteenth century. By the 1970s, sheltered workshops provided employment to people with disabilities—but at dismally low wages, basically exempt from labor law, with few benefits, and with virtually no possibility of advancement or additional training. Built into them was the assumption that people with disabilities could not survive in the outside world and needed a special, protected, environment. By the time it contacted the UHF, the AFL-CIO had successfully unionized workers at a sheltered workshop in Clinton, Iowa. In 1979 the National Labor Relations Board would rule that sheltered-workshop employees must be allowed the opportunity to unionize if they so desired. What became of the Minnesota effort is unclear, but it prompted discussions about welcoming those with cognitive disabilities into the disability activist community.
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Just as the Section 504 protesters in San Francisco and those across the country drew connections between racial, sex, and (sometimes) sexuality discrimination, and created alliances, so did those emerging disability activists in Minnesota. In the
Progress,
the UHF’s newsletter, UHF member Scott Rostron wrote in a 1977 column, “Equality is coming to the handicapped communities slowly, as it has for the black, women, elderly, and other sub-cultures in America today . . . It is time that we move from the special needs category to the people category. From segregation to integration. Identify to ourselves and to others our true needs . . . The point is the handicapped, black and elderly all need as people . . . It is more than the rights of the handicapped, it is the rights of the people, equal people.”
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In 1978 events highlighted the intersections between systems of oppression. After a UHF member was raped in her apartment, she utilized the resources of the UHF in reaching out to advocates and other rape victims, thus bringing the emerging feminist and disability rights movements together. In its attempt to learn more about people with disabilities and sexual assault, the UHF concluded that “sexual and physical assault of the handicapped is a real problem and probably bigger than anyone knows.” Other victims shared their stories, and community law enforcement provided information about the sexual assault of blind, mobility impaired, and cognitively disabled women. UHF members learned that rape support services were generally inaccessible to women with disabilities: architectural barriers, inaccessible transportation, a lack of TTY and ASL interpreters, and few Braille resources existed. An emerging coalition of police, feminist activists, disability activists, county attorneys, and social workers participating in a July 1979 conference uncovered some sixty cases of sexual assault against local women with a wide variety of disabilities in just the previous one-year period. As one community antiviolence activist wrote to the UHF, there was a “lack of services and facilities for physically handicapped or disabled sexual assault victims. The time has come for us to share our expertise in our respective fields in order to develop accessible, effective services to disabled sexual assault victims.”
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The barriers were not merely physical. As conference activists pointed out, many assault victims “experienced the barrier of community disbelief,” “stereotypes that make it hard for the average person to accept the fact or even imagine that handicapped people are raped and beaten.” An additional barrier was that 1970s Minnesota law, like that of many states, required that victims bringing rape charges prove the use of “legal force” in resisting their assault. While there are many reasons that a woman would not physically resist sexual assault, for some disabled rape survivors, doing so was physically impossible. In such cases, even if the assault was reported and the rapist caught, prosecutors had to free the perpetrator. When the sexual assault law was finally changed in 1982, the UHF was recognized as both a sponsor of and impetus for the legislative amendment.
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The UHF disbanded in the mid-1990s. It had, however, accomplished a tremendous amount. In 1975 Minnesota citizen Curtis Mohn had written to the
Minneapolis Star
protesting the use of the word “cripple.” To him, the word had connotations of “uselessness, ugliness and helplessness.” “I am,” he insisted, “far from that, as any other handicapped individual is. We are strong of heart, mind and soul.” Most importantly, he went on, “there are over ten million physically handicapped people in the US. We have strength; we have numbers; we have friends, relatives, and concerned citizens on our side. We must use that strength.”
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It is not known if Mohn affiliated with the UHF. It is clear, however, that through organizations such as the UHF, and because of organizations such as the UHF, people with disabilities used the strength they had. And likely, and perhaps unexpectedly, Minnesota citizens with disabilities discovered that they had far more strength than they thought they did, like many others across the nation. Through collective work, people with disabilities and their allies created community, asserted influence, claimed power, and shaped policy in such a way that enhanced both their lives and the lives of many others.