Session Abstract

This panel examines the dynamic relationship between disability and community in three ways: how people with disabilities built coalitions and communities, changed the landscapes of their communities, and, at times, experienced removal from communities.  The concept of community is a central but complex theme in understandings of disability history. Unlike people of color, ethnic minorities, and women, people with disabilities rarely share their minority status with other members of their families, and they become members of disability communities at various stages in life.  Identifying key moments in community building and removals of people with disabilities, this panel offers diverse perspectives on the actors and institutions that have defined – and redefined – categories of who counts as a citizen. These projects, which span from the early 20^th century through the 1980s, display a range of work in disability history and broaden the field’s scope beyond the standard topics of policy analysis, late 20^th-century activism, and deinstitutionalization.  

At the center of these papers is the interaction of the state and disability communities and networks.  Susan Burch (Middlebury College) examines state interventions in kinship and cultural communities and the marginalization of disability in the histories of removals.  Exploring the interdependent factors of identity formation, Burch investigates through three case studies the processes by which communities and networks reacted to disruptive state intervention and the effects on notions of disability. 

Audra Jennings (Western Kentucky University) and Lindsey Patterson (The Ohio State University) examine local efforts to build communities and coalitions, which in turn created large networks that influenced the state.  Jennings’s work focuses on the local and national activism of the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH). Since 1942, the AFPH and its liberal supporters pushed to redefine the boundaries of the welfare state—boundaries that placed people with disabilities either on the margins or completely out of bounds. Disability activists in the AFPH sought to redefine what it meant to be a disabled citizen, rejecting the passive support to which their legal and social status as dependents entitled them and instead claiming rights, particularly the right to work.

Patterson examines grassroots campaigns for antidiscrimination legislation and architectural barrier standards that occurred in cities and states across the country prior to national legislation.  Activist networks were essential to the project of creating disability rights legislation at both state and federal levels.  Disability rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s aligned with churches, philanthropic organizations, and labor unions to transform the physical landscapes of their communities.  Activists in local communities over time coalesced into regional and national networks, and their grassroots work established precedents for the 1968 Architectural Barriers Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Commenting on this session is Bob Buchanan (Goddard College) whose extensive work on disability, community, activism, and labor will further discussion of disability networks and citizenship. Our chair, Robyn Muncy (University of Maryland), brings deep knowledge of public policy, social citizenship, and disabled workers during the 1960s Great Society to the conversation.