Access Living Youth Center - Disability History

Disability History

Disability history is about collecting the stories of people with disabilities throughout time and sharing those stories to make sure that we remember them.

Disability history is about having pride in the accomplishments of people with disabilities. For example, the man who invented the lightbulb, Thomas Edison, was deaf. Julius Caesar, ruler of the Roman Empire, had epilepsy. Wilma Mankiller, who was the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, has a form of muscular dystrophy. The richest man in the world today, Ingvar Kamprad, who owns IKEA, has a learning disability.

Disability history is about remembering the suffering of people with disabilities. Over time, human society has not understood disability. In fact, usually disability made people feel scared. There have been many attempts to cure or get rid of disability altogether. Sometimes this has meant treating people with disabilities very badly; in some cases governments have killed people with disabilities outright. We remember these stories to make us stronger and motivate us to prevent these things from happening to ourselves and people we know.

Disability history is the story of our movement, our fight for our own civil rights. From students starting a disability service program at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, to wheelchair users crawling up the steps of the US Capitol to demand passage of the ADA, to the fights carried on by advocates everywhere in America today, the story of how we have spoken up and seized power is a story every young person with a disability should know.

There are lots of books and movies on disability history, and there are some websites too. Take the time to seek them out. Your local Center for Independent Living and your local library will probably have some things you can look at. Maybe your local college or university has classes on disability history, or your local museum might have an exhibit about disability.

Some good places to start learning about disability history on the web are:

A Timeline of the Disability Rights Movement

http://www.sfsu.edu/~hrdpu/chron.htm

Tom Olin's Photos

http://adawatch.smugmug.com/Road%20To%20Freedom

The ABCs of Disability Rights from the Southern Poverty Law Center

http://www.tolerance.org/teach/activities/activity.jsp?ar=872&ttnewsletter=ttnewsgen-102307

The Smithsonian Disability Rights Movement Exhibit Online

http://americanhistory.si.edu/disabilityrights/welcome.html

The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic Online Exhibit

http://www.suitcaseexhibit.org/indexhasflash.html

A History of the Independent Living Movement by Maggie Shreve