Richard Match
In this image: Newspaper photo of smiling white man, age forties, with glasses and dark suit and tie, in a manual wheelchair.
I don’t know that anyone would have picked out Richard Match as the man to get the New York City Disability Rights Movement started. Certainly there was little in his background that augered in that direction. What’s more, his activism is barely remembered by anyone, including his immediate family; few members of the disability community even know his name. Nonetheless I am convinced that, as much as anyone, this is the man who invented the New York City Disability Rights Movement.
Richard Albert Match was born in 1920 and grew up in Brooklyn. At the age of fifteen he broke his neck in a swimming accident and emerged an incomplete quadriplegic, unable to stand or walk. Undaunted, Richard graduated high school at age 18 with an almost perfect academic record, in a private ceremony held in the family home. The unusual event was reported in an eight paragraph piece in the New York Times. The article proved to be the start of a unique life-long relationship between the young Match and that august newspaper.
Richard became a writer. Over the next 25 years some 150 articles appeared in the Times, and a similar number can be found scattered across the pages of periodicals like Popular Science, Reader’s Digest, the New Republic, and the Herald Tribune. For the most part his pieces focused on reviews of historical novels, topics in popular science, and stories of action and derring-do in faraway times and exotic locales—armchair safari material, just the sort of thing you might expect from someone living a quiet, homebound life.
Richard never disclosed his disability in his writings. Not that he didn’t leave hints from time to time--he certainly reviewed more books with a disability angle than mere happenstance can account for--but it is fair to say that even though Match lived a creative life in the pages of newspapers and magazines, he was a rather private fellow.
Nonetheless, it seems that life as a magazine writer eventually reached a dead end for him, and the upshot was a turn towards action instead of reflection. On Friday May 25, 1956, readers of the New York Times found, above the fold on page 5 of the late City edition, an eighth-of-a-page article with a photograph. The headline was “Portable Ramp for Library Aids the Disabled.” The gist was that a disabled freelance writer named Richard Match had persuaded the main branch of the New York Public Library to design and procure a portable ramp, so that wheelchair users could enter and make use of the library without having to make arrangements in advance. This was significant news--in those days such accommodations were at least extremely rare if not nonexistent, even for major public buildings in large cities. Ramping the library was something like an unprecedented accomplishment, and it meant that wheelchair users could now access one of the world’s great libraries whenever they wanted. Just like anyone else.
This was Match’s coming out. Twenty-one years after his accident, Richard announced to the world that this well-known writer was a man in a wheelchair.
Some months after the Times article, Richard moved from Brooklyn to a ranch house in Great Neck, and over the next several years his quiet conversion to disability activism accelerated. Match applied to the civilian wing of the PVA, the National Paraplegia Foundation (NPF), and obtained a charter to found a Long Island chapter of the NPF. Richard seems to have been the entirety of that one-man chapter, but armed with that institutional affiliation he now persuaded the Great Neck public school system to approve evening swim classes for disabled adults at large—that commuters might have use of what was then the one and only swimming pool available to people with disabilities in the entire Metropolitan area.
I believe that it was Match, with his writer’s imagination and facility with ideas, who first put together the crucial syllogism:
People with disabilities cannot use architectural features such as stairs and narrow doorways. They are architectural barriers.
The world is full of architectural barriers.
People with disabilities must therefore fight to change the world, that they may live freer and more meaningful lives.
It was a call to direct action.
This bit of reasoning may seem self-evident if not obvious today. But the centuries-long history of disability in New York City shows that it was not obvious, any more than it was obvious that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Match went on to a number of pioneering accomplishments on behalf of people with disabilities in and around Nassau County. But it was the Great Neck pool that gave rise to his most enduring legacy. For the pool randomly brought together dozens of men and women with disabilities. It was at the pool that Match’s energizing insights could be most readily transmitted, and it was there that a critical mass of personalities gradually came together.
In particular, during the years 1960-1963, three individuals came into contact with Richard Match via the pool—and right after that, each began pioneering political careers. The first of these is Donald Broderick, a Navy veteran who went on to re-invigorate activism at the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association, and bring it into broad disability action for the first time. The other two were Julius and Mollie Shaw, who would become among the earliest and most important founders of the New York City Disability Rights Movement.
The pool at Great Neck was one of the prime crucibles. There and elsewhere, for the first time in the century since May Darrach’s birth, during the early 1960s a group consciousness began to coalesce among the City’s disability population. Within a very few years it gathered enough energy and organization to force lasting changes in the City’s political culture and physical form.
Match surely deserves to be memorialized by a statue, an endowed chair at a university, a major annual award, or some such thing. But instead he is completely forgotten, even among disability activists—a lamentable state of affairs which has been one of the primary reasons for the development of this website.
by Warren Shaw
