PRECURSORS TO PRIDE
In this image: Representatives of the League of the Physically Handicapped confront Works Progress Administration National Administrator Harry Hopkins in Washington D.C., May 11, 1936, after a two-day sit-in.
In 2015, Mayor Bill DeBlasio declared that from now on, July was going to be Disability Pride Month in New York City. The Mayor’s declaration was celebrated with a parade and the first-ever museum exhibit about disability activism in New York City (curated by Yours Truly).
As some of you may know, there have been debates about whether the parades held in and after 2015 were the first Disability Pride parades in the City, or whether certain earlier marches, held in the 1990s under a different name, were also disability pride events. I am not about to wade into any definitional debates. But while the term “Disability Pride” wasn’t much used in this town before 2015, the idea of taking pride in the City’s disability community goes back long before.
I have to point out that the activists then defined disability more narrowly, back at the beginning, but still pride was rolling in 1968, when the disability pioneer Vincent Marchiselli got legislation passed that outlawed discrimination against disabled New Yorkers. Vincent’s bill defined a person with a disability as anyone visibly different, who used a device or appliance or seeing-eye dog in their “daily responsibilities as a self-sufficient, productive and complete human being.”
There was pride on January 27, 1967, when a group of disabled citizens picketed City Hall to protest Mayor Lindsay’s plan to invalidate parking permits in Midtown.
Pride and bawdy humanity inspired a late-Sixties bumper sticker that commanded fellow motorists to “Honk If You’re A Horny Handicapper.”
Pride motivated my father, Julius Shaw, in 1971 when he submitted a paper for publication in the extremely academic American Journal of Occupational Therapy. As usual, its table of contents was going to be filled by people with major credentials like “Ph.D,” “O.T.R.,” and “M.D.”—all except for Julie, who hadn’t had even a day of college at that point. So he asked for the initials “p.h.” after his name, meaning “physically handicapped,” which he called the most relevant of all credentials.
Pride and swagger led Julie to joke, a few years later, that his new column in the Soho Weekly News should be entitled “A Crutch In Your Crotch.”
Pride was on the page when Eunice Fiorito, the first Director of what is now the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, wrote that her report to the Mayor was “not merely [about] another government authority. It represents . . . the history of a social movement.”
It was pride that led the Disabled In Action Sngers to compose and perform “Let The Children Stare” and “Walking On My Wheels,” and to parody disability bigotry in songs like “Peter Singer’s Wonderful World,” with its ironic lyrics: “Disabled people have no personhood/Think we should kill them quick, and if we could/What a wonderful world it would be.”
It was pride that underlay 1990s slogans like “Nothing About Us Without Us” and “Free Our People;” pride that climbed up the steps of the Capitol; and pride that occupied the offices of Health Education and Welfare for 23 days--almost fifty years ago, back in 1977.
Pride is no newcomer.
Let us take pride this July, in all the innovators and activists who’ve come before. Let us this July celebrate the great chain, which has brought us to this month, in this year, in this City.
by Warren Shaw
Note: a version of this entry appeared in Able News, ablenews.com
