Building Communities and Breaking Down Barriers: Disability Rights Activism 1959–68

Despite a decade of campaigns for antidiscrimination legislation and architectural barrier standards in cities and states across the country, current scholarship has left us with an incomplete understanding of how the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 came to fruition and little description of the grassroots activism that preceded it. Instead of assuming national politics to be the stage of disability activism, I argue that the drama of contesting public access and civil rights first played out at the local level, prefiguring the passage of the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.  For nearly a decade before national legislation, disability rights organizations were aligning with builders, insurance companies, churches, and labor unions to transform their communities.  This evidence demonstrates that activist networks were essential to the project of creating disability rights legislation at both state and federal levels. In efforts to appeal to a broad coalition, disability activists argued that access to employment would ensure that a large population would no longer burden society and that the elimination of architectural barriers would reduce the number of work-related injuries, making the issue particularly vital to labor and insurance.  Furthermore, I suggest that disability rights activism was not just a by-product of the 1970s, but was instrumental in creating political change. More generally, this framework allows me to consider the historical relationship between the growth of state and federal governments and grassroots activism.