Because a comprehensive history of the disability rights and independent living movements is still to be written, the story of Ed Roberts is often discussed as the cornerstone of the independent living movement's origins. But just as Ed's story is a tale of many people, so too is that of the independent living movement. Perhaps most telling is the fact that the same year that CIL in Berkeley began operations, so too did Threshold, an independent living center in Helsinki, Finland. And like CIL, Threshold began first as a student movement. When CIL began in the early 1970s, similar organizations sprouted throughout the United States as well as other parts of the world. For example, a group in Boston began the Boston Center for Independent Living (BCIL). Unlike CIL, BCIL focused on housing issues. BCIL provided housing and attendant services to those college students housed on the fourth floor of the theological college at Boston University, and attendants were recruited from theological students (DeLoach 43). BCIL became formally established in 1974. Other groups formed in Houston, Ann Arbor and many other places across the country and around the world. 



This was indeed a movement. 


In Washington, D.C., Hugh Gregory Gallagher (long before he authored FDR's Splendid Deception) worked in a congressional office. Gallagher became extremely frustrated in trying to use the inaccessible Library of Congress. He authored the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, which became the first federal legislation to address architectural accessibility. Unfortunately, it would be years before that kind of thinking and legislation would be enforced. But it's another example of the incipient movement.


How the disability rights movement evolved from "helpless cripples" to a political force includes all of the preceding individuals and actions. In addition, numerous policies have affected disability issues. Perhaps the most important in a history of the independent living movement is the story of Section 504 and the Vocational Rehabilitation program.


“WE WILL ACCEPT NO MORE DISCUSSION OF SEGREGATION”
SECTION 504 AND VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION


Many advocates consider Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 the nucleus of all ensuing progress in obtaining disability rights. Section 504 stated:


No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United
States shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination
under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.


This concise paragraph guaranteed disabled individuals specific civil rights for the first time in history. Vocational rehabilitation, however, began in the early twentieth century. What was its purpose? Why was Section 504 so radical? How come many disability advocates consider Section 504 the opening salvo in the battle for modern disability rights? This section provides a brief history of Vocational Rehabilitation from its beginnings until the early 1970s when the discussion shifts to the campaign to implement Section 504.


Vocational rehabilitation, like many other government programs, did not develop in a vacuum. In fact, it was a culmination of a whirlwind of societal changes.


At the end of the nineteenth century, many community leaders advocated educating all citizens to ensure that the vast numbers of new immigrants understood the civic workings of their new country. Colleges and universities increased in number at the same time. But not everyone now required to obtain an education would attend college. Teaching a manual trade to students who didn’t attend college was called vocational education.


While vocational education became part of the landscape of early twentieth century models of education, new medical treatments enabled people with disabling conditions to live longer. Just as medical advances affected post World War II social movements, this earlier medical progress stimulated social change. A new discipline called ‘rehabilitation” evolved to work with these individuals.


Rehabilitation’s purpose was to find ways to alleviate disabling conditions by keeping people with disabilities in an appropriate social setting. Combining rehabilitation with vocational education led to vocational rehabilitation (Brown Investigating 39).


The first laws funding vocational rehabilitation were passed as World War I ended. Congress first passed the Smith-Hughes Law (Vocational Education Act) of 1917, establishing a Federal Board for Vocational Education (FBVE) to work with men with disabilities in hospitals and encampments. The following year Congress unanimously ratified the Soldier’s Rehabilitation Act to assist returning World War I veterans to join the labor pool (Lenihan 51; M. L. Walker 25).
Two years after the Soldier’s Rehabilitation Act, President Woodrow Wilson signed the first federal act providing vocational rehabilitation services to civilians with disabilities. The program gave states a choice about participating in it. Most states chose to do so. Just four years after the


1920 passage of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, thirty-six of the forty-eight states belonged to the program (M. L. Walker 33).


The FBVE, the umbrella agency to which vocational rehabilitation belonged, consisted of the cabinet secretaries of commerce, agriculture and labor as ex-officio members and three salaried members responsible for its operations. John Kratz, vocational rehabilitation (VR) chief in 1924, convinced the FBVE and Congress to renew VR for six years.


Early statistics maintained by VR indicated a modest expenditure of $12,000,000 had rehabilitated 45,000 people between 1921 and 1930. This averaged out to a cost of about $300 per person. By 1930, nine more states participated in the program. A total of 143 rehabilitation workers were employed in 44 states. VR’s apparent efficiency led to its renewal in both 1930 and 1932 with increased levels of funding support. Vocational rehabilitation became a permanent program in 1935 (M. L. Walker 39, 58).


In the early thirties, VR transferred to the Office of Education in the Department of the Interior, It did not thrive in this setting. Rehabilitation workers felt their role in placing people with disabilities in the workforce differed from a narrow focus on education. They longed to be housed in another agency. It moved to the Federal Security Agency, created in 1939, along with the Office of Education, but VR continued to be dissatisfied with its place in the hierarchy (M. L. Walker 102-103).


A year later, in 1940, Congress extended vocational rehabilitation services to people with disabilities working in sheltered workshops, those who were homebound, and those in the workforce who required services to remain employed. This significant increase in responsibility set the stage for a decade of greater funding and responsibility. VR grants increased 75% in 1940 and continued to increase throughout the 1940s. In July of 1943, services were broadened to include physical restoration and people with mental illness as clients (Scotch 21; Shapiro 143: M. L. Walker 103).


Vocational Rehabilitation continued to amass larger budgets and greater prestige throughout World War II and the post-war years. Mary Switzer, a career bureaucrat, became director of the agency in 1950. A long-time advocate of  vocational rehabilitation’s mission, Switzer spent the next two decades zealously expanding its role and power (M. L. Walker 125-26, passim).


Switzer guided a comprehensive legislative package through congressional appropriations in 1954. State vocational rehabilitation grants rose to a budget of $30,000,000. Additional monies for training medical and rehabilitation professionals established long range agency precedents. Switzer persuaded Congress to fund research and development in medicine and rehabilitation engineering, in-service training programs, rehabilitation centers and sheltered workshops. Switzer also obtained permission to create separate vocational rehabilitation agencies outside of state education agencies (Scotch, 1984, 22).


In the following decade, rehabilitation became a soldier in President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Funding levels continued to increase, greater numbers of individuals became eligible to receive services, and state matching fund requirements decreased (M. L. Walker 23).


Mary Switzer reluctantly retired in 1970 when she reached the then-compulsory retirement age of 70 (M L. Walker 253). Her impact has remained legendary within the rehabilitation community. But she might not recognize the evolution of disability rights that occurred after her death a year later.


During Switzer’s last years directing VR, organizations like centers for independent living were in their formative stages. Activists with disabilities, like the founders of CIL, empathetic rehabilitation workers, and progressive Congressional colleagues worked together in the early 1970s to implement an agenda for the vocational rehabilitation agency that recognized disability rights. This led to the writing of Section 504.


Sociologist Richard Scotch documented the genesis of Section 504 in his book From Goodwill to Civil Rights. He contended that government bureaucrats developed Section 504. But the late John Hessler, who followed Ed Roberts at Cowell and went on to be a founder of PDSP and CIL, disagreed with Scotch’s narrative in a letter published in the Disability Rag. Hessler remembered a number of activists participating in the concepts and language proposed in the Rehabilitation Act of 1972. According to Hessler’s letter, Fred Collignon, a Berkeley community planner who worked with then Rehabilitation Agency Commissioner Ed Newman, actively involved many Berkeley activists in the planning of the early 1970s act. Hessler wrote that he, along with other disability advocates, worked on language that appeared in the eventual act, including the controversial Section 504 (3).


In the Rehabilitation Act of 1972, Hessler and his colleagues across the country thought they had devised a progressive piece of legislation. It included concepts of independent living, client advocacy programs and some prohibitions of discrimination. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the legislation. He predicted that no one had thoroughly assessed the ramifications of the legislation. His own forecast was that parts of the act, like independent living and Section 504, would be extremely costly and become an administrative nightmare.


Nixon’s 1972 veto sparked demonstrations across the country. Judy Heumann, who organized disability rights protests in New York City and who had successfully fought being denied a teaching job because she used a wheelchair and who later became the united States Department of Education Assistant Secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, recalled in a 1980 conversation that New York’s Disabled in Action organized a demonstration of sixty to eighty people to go to Manhattan’s federal building to protest Nixon’s 1972 veto. Whey they arrived, they discovered the building was in an isolated section of the city. The demonstrators piled back into their vans and other vehicles, drove to Madison Avenue and stopped traffic on up to four blocks, effectively publicizing their demands (Heumann in “We Won’t Go Away…”)


In 1973, Congress passed another version of the Rehabilitation Act. This one contained changes Nixon approved, including eliminating independent living and client advocacy programs. But Section 504 remained in the compromise bill. President Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in September. But more struggles remained (Scotch 56-57).


Section 504, still viewed by disability advocates as the linchpin of change, became bogged down in the Nixon cabinet. HEW expressed the same concerns about costs and administrative headaches that had caused Nixon to veto the earlier bill. The cabinet department simply refused to issue regulations to implement the law.


Frustrated by this federal inaction, James Cherry and the Action League for Physically Handicapped Adults sued the government in 1975 for issuance of 504 regulations. The next year, disabled leaders demonstrated in NEW Secretary David Matthews’ office and threatened to picket the 1976 Republican Convention. A federal notice of intent to publish proposed rules materialized in the May 17, 1976 Federal Register. In July of the same year, the courts ruled 504 regulations should be promulgated but did not set a deadline. A second federal notice of intent to publish proposed rules was published in mid-July with little change from the earlier edition (Scotch 93-96); Brown Investigating 55-57).


During the 1976 presidential campaign, the Philadelphia contingent of Disabled in Action invited representatives from both major parties to a press conference. The Carter campaign emissary was so totally unaware of disability issues that DIA practically ran her out of the room. She returned to local Carter campaign headquarters and reported how tough DIA had been on her. She then educated herself and convinced the local Carter staff that this was important.


The campaign staff sent her back to talk to the group. Out of that meeting came an effort to organize nationwide for Jimmy Carter. The American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD), which had formed the previous year and with which DIA in Pennsylvania was associated, became the national disability focus of organizing for Carter (Pfeiffer).


Passage of 504 regulations became a battle cry of disability activists throughout the country. Two days after president Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, about fifteen people met with new HEW Secretary Joseph Califano to advocate for rapid distribution of regulations. The administration received a deadline of April 4, 1977, to issue regulations or disability advocates would pursue an alternative course. Califano resisted for some of the same reasons that Nixon originally vetoed the entire act. He feared that both actual and administrative costs would be more far reaching than anyone imagined (Eunice Fiorito in “We Won’t Go Away….”, Scotch 104).


Disability advocates scheduled a series of demonstrations to follow the April 4 deadline. Ten cities across the country were targeted. The most successful action occurred in San Francisco. More than 150 people took over the federal building there and remained for twenty-eight days. Judy Heumann, who had moved to Berkeley to work at CIL in 1973, was one of the event’s planners and a leader of the takeover. Ed Roberts, in his new position as director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, did not officially engage in planning the protest but left his Sacramento office to join the protest. Early in the action, Heumann, in a statement reminiscent of freedom fighters of all ages, declared, “…we will no longer allow the government to oppress disabled individuals…we will accept no more discussion of segregation” (“We Won’t Go away…”).


The protest in San Francisco worked because many in the community supported it. The city’s mayor ordered law enforcement personnel to leave the protesters alone. The Black Panthers and the Gray Panthers brought in food donated by Safeway and assisted with personal care needs. Attendants were allowed to go back and forth from the building to bring necessities. This also enabled a communication network with those outside the building to be established (Shapiro 67-68).


Local news stations aired the story. Evan White filed the most comprehensive reports, though he was so new to the field that he did not yet have credentials to file national news stories. But White’s luck was good.


Heumann left San Francisco during the occupation to lead a delegation to Washington to talk personally with Califano. He refused to meet with them. They decided to camp on his front lawn until he changed his mind. Evan White traveled from San Francisco to Washington with the group to report the story. A media strike left a void in national news stories, and uncredentialed stringers filed stories. White’s coverage of the demonstrations made national news networks and both the story and his career took off (Walker, personal communication).


After twenty-five days of protests, sitting in, and having demonstrators camped on his lawn, Califano signed the 504 regulations. Victorious protesters emerged from the federal building chanting “We Shall Overcome.” The siege remains the longest takeover of a federal building by any group in American history (Brown Investigating 57-58; Shapiro 69).


A White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals was scheduled to occur May 23-27, 1977. Some speculated one reason Califano signed the regulations was because he knew that 3,000 persons with disabilities and their supporters were on their way to Washington. If he had not signed the regulations by the time they arrived, then many demonstrations would have occurred to the embarrassment of the Carter administration (Pfeiffer).


The successful protests to implement 504 could be considered the first battle of an ongoing war disability advocates have waged to change vocational rehabilitation. Although hardly the only program affecting disability issues, VR has for many years been perceived as one of the most important influences on disability politics.