Pivotal Year - 1968
In this image: A portion of a newsletter from the Architectural Barriers Committee, dated September 5, 1968, advising that Paul O'Dwyer, then a candidate for the US Senate, would be addressing the organization at its next meeting.
Like all social movements, there have been peak moments in the New York City Disability Rights Movement, times of clustered breakthroughs that can fairly be called pivotal years. For the next few installments in this website, we’ll be examining some pivotal years in the history of our movement.
Pivotal years are snapshots of the state of play, guides to the leading players. And the first pivotal year in the New York City Disability Rights Movement came in 1968, the fruit of our movement’s founders, little-remembered men and women who built much of the foundation for all that has unfolded since.
It all began around 1960, when for reasons less than clear, several strands of activism appeared independently, as if by spontaneous combustion. There was Sol Weider’s newsletter, Handy-Cap Advancement, and Kurt Schamberg’s Queens-centric group PRIDE (People for Rehabilitating and Integrating the Disabled through Education). There was Richard Match and the Handicapped Drivers Association, in Great Neck just over the Queens border. There were my parents, Julie and Mollie Shaw, and the Architectural Barriers Committee on the Upper West Side. A disabled Bronx resident named Vincent Marchiselli became a player in his borough’s powerful political system. Another Bronx native, Sandra Schnur, helped people with disabilities get out and around the City through her innovative series of guidebooks, “New York With Ease.” There was Curtis Brewer, an African-American man from New England, who went on to chart a singular path as a quadriplegic attorney in Manhattan. And in the Republican political world there was Joel Tyler, a polio survivor.
The founders were mostly born in the 1920s, part of what is now known as the World War Two generation. They came from different races, places, genders, classes, and politics, yet they were united in synergy, in their common human rights struggle. Why did these folks bubble up when they did? Were they really something new, or were they simply more successful than their predecessors had been? I really cannot say for certain. But these were the agitators who actually got the ball rolling.
After a six-year campaign, in 1966 the Handicapped Drivers Association finally won an exemption from parking meter fees for disabled drivers in New York City. A few months later came the towaway picket at City Hall, where people with disabilities gathered to protest a new plan to control Midtown traffic congestion by prohibiting anyone (including disabled drivers) from parking, on pain of having their vehicles towed away. Curtis Brewer came into his own that day, serving as the protesters’ leading voice and press liaison. Meanwhile, the Architectural Barriers Committee issued a lengthy and detailed critique of accessibility problems at the then-new Lincoln Center, which was supposed to have been a barrier-free project.
It was these efforts and more that coalesced in the pivotal year of 1968.
In that year, in response to the towaway picket, came the creation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, the nation’s first permanent government liaison to the disability community, and the ancestor of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. Joel Tyler, who’d been an important behind the-scenes proponent, became Chairman of the new body.
At the same time, retrofittings at Lincoln Center addressed the bands of steps, the remote bathrooms, and many of the other wheelchair-access problems that the Architectural Barriers Committee had identified. The corrections to Lincoln Center constituted an impressive and prominent accomplishment—even if the New York Times, for one, went to some lengths to avoid mentioning the disability activists’ influence.
In this Image: A photo of Mayor Lindsay signing the 1968 amendment to City’s Human Rights Law which barred discrimination against people with disabilities. From left to right: Julius Shaw, Vincent Marchiselli, unidentified, Mario Merola, Joel Tyler, Mayor Lindsay, Dr. Howard Rusk, City Council Majority Leader David Ross.
On November 6, 1968, the City adopted its first comprehensive overhaul of the Building Code since Fiorello LaGuardia. At the urging of the disability community, the new Code mandated the first-ever provisions for disability accessibility, including requirements for wheelchair-usable entrances at public buildings, ramps, and wider doorways. Particularly gratifying to the pioneers was a ban on the then–fashionable use of electric eye circuits as buttons on elevator panels. Why? Because in the event of fire, the heat-triggered electric eyes took the elevator directly to the floor nearest the fire, and kept it there--trapping any passengers, including of course wheelchair users for whom stairs were impossible.
Most remarkable of all, on December 23, 1968, Mayor Lindsay signed into law an amendment to the City’s Human Rights Law that flat-out prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities.
This was legal protection without precedent in human history, so far as I can tell. It was the brainchild of Vincent Marchiselli, and a triumph for the Bronx Democratic leadership that had backed the bill, including Councilmembers Aileen Ryan and Mario Merola (who was later elected District Attorney). Among other things, the Human Rights bill was notable for its definition of a person with a disability as someone who relied upon a device, appliance or seeing-eye dog in the performance of “daily responsibilities as a self-sufficient, productive and complete human being.”
This remarkable phrase, Vincent later told me, was suggested by his wife Eunice, a social worker.
The Human Rights Law was a very big deal, akin to the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act’s declaration that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.” It was recognition of shared humanity in cold hard law, permanently etched onto our society’s pages.
These stories aren’t very well known, unfortunately. I’m afraid that our collective memory still bears the scars of the Generation Gap. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” may sound pretty silly, now that the Baby Boomers who coined the phrase are themselves ready for Social Security. But at the time of its invention around 1969 it was intended, and it was taken, very seriously, and I think it has meant that to this day the Boomers and their successors don’t really know about the accomplishments of the World War Two generation that preceded them--because they were already over thirty back when it mattered.
Yet it was the founders, the World War Two people who, after near a century of mostly fruitless attempts, made the fundamental leap of reimagining the disability population as a minority group, as a potential political force. It was the World War Two generation that rammed through the first legal and governmental changes, and created the momentum that flowered in that first pivotal year of 1968. As a result of their efforts, the Boomers who followed them encountered a basic legal fabric and political precedents which proved that people with disabilities could actually change the world.
1968 was the founders’ biggest and best year. They went on to other and further accomplishments, of course, but the founders came to disability activism in mid-life, and their careers as political actors were correspondingly shortened. They never recaptured the sheer density of this moment.
Imagine how the founders would feel if they knew how thoroughly the memory of 1968—and of them—has faded over the 54 years that have passed since then.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News.
by Warren Shaw
