Julius and Mollie Shaw
In this image: Photo of Julius in 1978, in manual wheelchair with arms extended to his sides, moments after being sworn in by Mayor Koch as second Director of Mayor’s Office for the Handicapped, surrounded by wife Mollie and their young adult children, Warren and Jenina.
It seems almost too neat, but the historical record shows the torch passing from Richard Match to Julie and Mollie Shaw, who immediately thereafter began fundamental work within the City of New York. They became the most effective agents of Match’s activist insights, and over the next fifteen years Julie and Mollie, as much as anyone, would catalyze, organize and articulate into being the New York City Disability Rights Movement--in the living room of my childhood home, on the very street where May Darrach launched her career as the nation’s first disability activist, some 75 years before.
Each of my parents had significant though very dissimilar disabilities. They were each the accidental, youngest children within their nuclear families, and each grew up in deeply poor, fatherless households.
Julie was a Bronx boy, born in 1924, who contracted polio at less than a year old. By the age of nine he learned how to walk using crutches and leg braces. He became a part of the Old Left, and acquired political and leadership skills running a Communist-front political group in the 1940s. As the Red Scare got under way, Julie quit the Left and moved to Greenwich Village, where he drifted into the beatnik and jazz scene.
In 1955 he met my mother, Mollie Rose, a former actor and director from the Upper West Side, who was seemingly able-bodied but in fact had a severe case of the so-called hidden disability--epilepsy. Soon they moved in together, then they got married. A few years later, there were kids.
By the time the kids were a few years old, now in the latter half of his thirties, Julie’s stamina on crutches was declining, and his doctor prescribed greater use of the wheelchair, and a regular regimen of swimming. Which led us to the Great Neck swimming pool that Richard Match had opened up.
So by the early 60s Richard Match, Don Broderick and Julie and Mollie had connected, along with other people with disabilities who, like them, had achieved enough independence to own a car and get to the pool in the first place, and who, in the second place, were irked at having to travel so far just to do some swimming. This brought up the larger question of architectural barriers and other obstacles faced by people just trying to live their lives.
They began looking for someplace to meet to discuss things more seriously. Through another pool person, Bobbi Wailes (a Special Olympics Gold Medalist in archery, long known for her career as director of the Department of Programs and Services for people with disabilities at Lincoln Center), they landed on the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, in Woodside, Queens, one of the only barrier-free buildings anywhere.
The pool people dubbed themselves the Handicapped Drivers Association, and chose as their first political target an exemption from paying parking meter fees. It took more than five years, but the Handicapped Drivers Association successfully gathered a huge organizational coalition and forged ties with the then-new Democratic Reform Movement, and on October 10, 1966, Mayor John Lindsay signed into law the bill allowing disabled drivers to park free at meters throughout the City. It was the very first law in New York State meant to protect a right special to people living with disabilities.
A few months later, on January 24, 1967, came a hastily organized but highly effective and well-publicized picket at City Hall. Meant to protest a new plan for easing congestion in Midtown by prohibiting parking and towing away all parked cars—including those belonging to people with disabilities—the Towaway Picket led directly to the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, the ancestor of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. Julie became one of the inaugural members.
The Towaway Picket was the breakout moment, when the New York City Disability Rights Movement burst into public view. And by the time the protest reached its successful conclusion, the activists had created and demonstrated the validity of an activist model that still holds today: build a cross-disability coalition and engage in political lobbying and civil action—up to and including civil disobedience—to promote changes in the physical, legal and cultural fabric.
My parents were involved in innumerable ventures and initiatives and actions, but surely one of their most important accomplishments was getting an elevator installed in City Hall. This too was a project years in the making, but once it opened, on December 27, 1977, people with disabilities could finally attend and participate in public hearings, instead of trying to get them moved to an accessible space across the street, or making noise by protesting outside.
Not long after, Julie succeeded Eunice Fiorito and became the second Director of the Mayor’s Office for the Handicapped.
My parents retired in 1979, and led largely quiet lives thereafter, until they passed away in 1984 and 1996.
by Warren Shaw
