Pivotal Year - 1978
In this image: Photo from the Gas Demo, March 4, 1974, showing in center foreground, l-r, Julius Shaw, Fred Francis, and a side view of Anna Fay.
The story of Pivotal Year 1968 was all about foundational gains notched by the founders of the New York City Disability Rights Movement. From free parking at meters to the establishment of the Mayor’s Office for the Handicapped, accessibility provisions for the City’s Building Code and the expansion of the City’s Human Rights Law, 1968 was the culmination of efforts many years in the making.
But where that first pivotal year was a story of unprecedented organizational, political and statutory advances by and for New Yorkers with disabilities, to me the crux of the next pivotal year—1978—was a matter of generational succession. Within a few years after the high water mark of 1968, the tide began to turn. And the shift came at the hands of young people, barely past twenty years of age.
Fifty years on, it is difficult to recapture the intensity of the “Generation Gap” that seized the United States in the late 1960s. Just as it is difficult for anyone born after, say, 1980, to fully grasp that the Boomer generation wasn’t always large and in charge, that once upon a time the Boomers were young, idealistic insurgents. But the Generation Gap was a real thing at the end of the decade of protest, and the City’s disability rights movement was as affected by it as anything else.
By the early 1970s, a new corps of disability activists was coming on the scene. They included people at Long Island University, led by Judy Heumann, folks at Goldwater Hospital, and a group at Brooklyn College, led by Fred Francis and Pat Figueroa. Mostly born in the 1940s, many of them were alumni of Camp Jened, a summer camp for disabled children. They founded Disabled in Action and other new groups, and brought a much more confrontational, Sixties-style aggression to the cause.
Where the founders argued for legal rights and a representational foothold in government, the Boomers argued frankly for CIVIL RIGHTS in capital letters, and openly expressed their anger at the traditional consignment to social limbo. They blocked traffic and seized offices and picketed telethons—actions that the founders, who’d lived through the McCarthy Era, never seriously considered.
Where the founders wore suits to their protests, the Boomers wore fatigues and ponchos. Where the founders had established lives and careers that they were trying to protect and advance, the Boomers had the nothing-to-lose flexibility of youth. So the Boomers didn’t petition for rights—they demanded them!
The founders looked at the Boomers and saw kids, recklessly courting backlash. The Boomers looked at the founders and saw conservative old men, treading too lightly.
To say the least, the Boomers’ entry into the City’s disability rights movement was divisive. The two groups had a tough time working together at first, and there wasn’t much cross-pollination. So World War Two generation activists had relatively little buy-in to DIA or, for example, its big protests against Nixon’s veto of the 1972 Rehabilitation Act, and the young hippie-looking activists initially had little presence at the Mayor’s Office for the Handicapped (or MOH, now MOPD), one of the founders’ most important institutional accomplishments.
Perhaps the lowest ebb came with the protest against gas rationing during the OPEC oil embargo. The State failed to provide a gas rationing exemption for disabled drivers, and it refused to listen to community input. A public action became an obvious necessity. But where military veterans like Don Broderick of the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (or EPVA) had been an active and public part of the founders’ efforts, between the Generation Gap and young people’s antipathy for the Vietnam War, civilians and veteran activists had grown so far apart that there were actually TWO gas rationing protests, one by veterans and another by civilians, each separated by a week or so.
The generational freeze was never complete though, and it began to thaw in ‘74. Boomers like Fred Francis were an important part of the massive civilian gas demo that took place on March 4, even though it was a founder-led action. Coming out of that very successful event a mix of founders and Boomers, including Julie Goldberg, Sol Wieder, Kipp Watson and Michael Dickman formed the New York State Congress of People with Disabilities, or NYSCPD. As an outgrowth of the gas demo, NYSCPD’s origins bear similarities to the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD), which came out of the 504 Regs sit-ins of 1977.
So people were talking and working together more easily, and that was obviously positive. But the reality was that the wind was at the Boomers’ backs and in the founders’ faces.
By the second half of the 1970s, the City was frankly running out of founders (and there hadn’t been all that many to begin with). Richard Match quit activism altogether. Ivan Wyler moved to Westchester. Vincent Marchiselli got elected to the State Assembly, so he was up in Albany much of the year. Curtis Brewer turned away from group politics in favor of a one-man path as a solo attorney. Joel Tyler became a judge (where he is best remembered for ruling in 1973 that the notorious film “Deep Throat” was criminally obscene). Meanwhile, the two Boomer members of the Architectural Barriers Committee—Marilyn Saviola and Anna Fay—quit ABC to devote themselves to youthful organizations like DIA.
Julie Shaw and his founder comrades had long used the old leftie technique of creating fistfuls of organizations in order to give the appearance of a larger movement. They even got a bit playful at times—one of their letterbox names was ACRONYM (Allied Citizens Representing Other New York Minorities). But the thinning of their membership could not be denied.
By contrast, the ranks of Boomer activists continued to grow, as people like Ann Emerman joined the fight. And simultaneously, in spite of their anti-establishment reputation the Boomers began to display real talent at institution-building.
These trends built to a pivotal moment in the year 1978. And one of the primary vectors was the New York Metropolitan chapter of the National Paraplegia Foundation, or NPF.
NPF actually predated the founders. NPF was the product of the disabled veterans of World War Two, circa 1946 (co-incident with creation of the Paralyzed Veterans of America and the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association). But the New York Metropolitan chapter was set up in the early 1970s by Boomers like Anna Fay.
The New York Metropolitan chapter put an emphasis on community advocacy, and that made for an uneasy fit with the national body, which had historically been more focused on medical research into spinal cord injury. So in 1978, chapter leaders like Pat Figueroa, Phyllis Rubenfeld, Marcie Goldstein and Carr Massi withdrew from NPF and transformed the New York Metropolitan chapter into New York State’s first ILC (or Independent Living Center)—the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York, or CIDNY. Pat’s colleague from Brooklyn College, Fred Francis, was working for VESID (a New York State agency, Vocational, Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities) and Fred helped get the critically important grant from the State (which included federal funds under the 1973 Rehab Act). Within a few years CIDNY was joined by BCID, BILS, and other ILCs in Harlem, Queens and Staten Island.
CIDNY is a big part of the reason that 1978 was a pivotal year. Not because CIDNY was operationally all that different from its NPF incarnation, but because it was the implementation of a new theory of disability community life—a blend of expert service advice and community and political advocacy, supported by some public funding—which went on to develop into a permanent public resource.
MOH (now MOPD) had been an earlier draft of a similar vision, but its relationship to the community has frequently been more or less fraught by virtue of its position within City government. The ILCs, by contrast, were more standalone, and represented the retailing of activism down to the branch level, so to speak.
1978 was also pivotal in that Julie Shaw succeeded Eunice Fiorito to become the second Director of MOH. His elevation meant that the agency would live on, despite a then-recent threat of complete defunding—and that MOH would remain the founders’ turf, at least for the time being. But with the founding of the ILCs there could be no doubt—the New York City Disability Rights Movement would become the Boomers’ show, very very soon.
By the end of 1978 the City’s disability rights movement had taken on a multi-level configuration that remains recognizable today, more than forty years later. On the inside is MOH (now MOPD), a City agency which serves as a liaison, as an intra-governmental policy coordinator and as a technical resource. On the outside are activist groups like Disabled In Action, which agitate and direct attention to issues and causes. CIDNY and the other ILCs are somewhere in the middle, as publicly subsidized community coordinators, service facilitators, and change advocates. Other middle- and outer-tier groups would follow.
For example, the very next year, in 1979, the breach with the vets was definitively resolved when EPVA, led by Boomers like Terry Moakley and Jim Weissman, joined an emerging campaign for accessible mass transit. EPVA became a major movement component, one that built out still further the new institutional fabric that the Boomers were forging.
It was all a magnificent achievement by the kids. And by the time it was done the remaining founders saw the Boomers no longer as reckless disruptors but as brilliant successors, fully deserving of the respect and admiration that people like my father Julie Shaw and Vincent Marchiselli expressed to me, many years later.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News.
by Warren Shaw
