Robert and Lucille Moss
In this image: Photo of white woman, standing, and a white man in a manual wheelchair, both age thirties, discussing a scale model of an accessible house.
The nation’s very first, very tentative toe-dip into physical accessibility came at the hands of a few thousand paralyzed veterans of the Second World War. The veterans’ specific aims were modest--limited to the means to get around their homes and into a car they could drive—but these measures were in service to the larger goal of at least some access to the public sphere, the agora, from a wheelchair. They provided the nation’s first acquaintance with the idea that people with disabilities had a just and fair claim to participation in American society.
The most effective movers of this effort were a husband and wife team of New Yorkers, Robert and Lucille Moss. Paralyzed by a spinal cord injury at the Battle of Anzio, from his hospital bed on Staten Island Robert co-founded the Paralyzed Veterans of American, or PVA, and its local chapter, the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association, or EPVA. He immediately took charge of public relations and began pushing the vets’ most ambitious cause: getting plans and legislative support for homes that would be accessible and usable from a wheelchair—what the vets termed “prosthetic homes.”
In support of the PVA’s campaign, Robert organized and led the first disability picket lines anyone had seen since the League of the Physically Handicapped. Robert addressed the nation on CBS radio, the very first national broadcast on issues surrounding disability, and both he and Lucille addressed Congress. In just a few years they compiled a whole roster of accomplishments, including the first studies of accessibility requirements for wheelchair users, legislation providing for both prosthetic homes and automobile hand controls, and parking permits for disabled drivers in New York City. They also founded the National Paraplegia Foundation and Paraplegia News, the first periodical aimed at people with disabilities as an independent readership and distinct consumer demographic.
The vets’ accessibility work was simultaneously important and insignificant. Important in that they scored first-ever victories in accessibility, and in pushing the view that people with disabilities had a just claim to the agora, like anyone else. But it was insignificant in that the vets’ efforts were limited to paralyzed veterans scattered across the United States, a few thousand people out of a national disabled population of something like 15 million. For the civilian disabled population, the vets’ accomplishments made almost no difference at all. But there matters pretty much stood for the next 15 years, until the founding of the modern New York City Disability Rights Movement.
by Warren Shaw
