Spaces of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Making of Disability Rights Activists, 1950–73

Most accounts of the American disability rights movement have focused on the national accomplishments of the late 1970s and overlooked the local dynamics that shaped its activists.  Distinct locations, such as rehabilitation centers, summer camps, and university campuses, provided fertile ground for consciousness-raising efforts and friendship networks that nourished an emerging disability rights movement. Disability leaders, such as Fred Fay, Judy Heumann, and Ed Roberts, formed their activist strategies within these local contexts.  Their immediate concern for physical access in educational settings defined their vision of civil rights.  Drawing on oral histories and student organization and university administration records, this paper focuses on contested spaces of consciousness-raising in the formation of disability rights activism.

Throughout the phases of community formation that occurred in these sites, activists aggressively contested what they perceived as visual representations of bureaucratic authority.  Calling attention to inaccessible physical structures, activists used visible tactics to reimagine a society composed of accessible public and cultural spaces.  Rearranging and contesting elements of public and institutional space produced a new consciousness for the activists themselves.  It also broadcasted to their local communities a new vision for reordering inaccessible space.  These attempts at creating a spatial discourse were a foundation for transformed understandings of accessibility—both physical and social—by the late 1970s. 

Yet, as these training grounds engendered activism, they represented exclusion in other ways.  The local dynamics of activism were not immune to the forces of race and class, which regulated approaches to spaces of consent and dissent throughout post-war American society.  By drawing attention to the mingling of race and class with local histories of activism, this analysis complicates traditional histories of disability advocacy work.