Eunice Fiorito
In this image: Newspaper photo of white woman, age forties, with big hair, seated at a desk.
Eunice was part of the second wave of the founders of the modern New York City Disability Rights Movement, along with people like Anna Fay and Marilyn Saviola, and probably the first to come to the movement with relevant professional credentials. A native Chicagoan who lost her sight as a teenager, Eunice came to New York City and earned a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Columbia University, graduating in 1960.
She was living at the 34th Street YMCA at the time, where she became friends with Anne Emerman, later a Director of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. They traveled the City together--as Anne described it to me, “I was the eyes, she was the power.”
Eunice was hired out of school by the Jewish Guild for the Blind, then moved to Bellevue Hospital. Any chance of a conventional social work career disappeared when she got swept up in the notorious Willowbrook scandal. In 1970 she became Coordinator of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, and her performance as the one permanent member of that body was so successful that in 1972, when Mayor Lindsay upgraded the Advisory Committee into the Mayor’s Office of the Handicapped (MOH, today known as the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, or MOPD), Eunice was named its first Director.
Eunice fought successfully to keep MOH from being shut down during the Fiscal Crisis. She took the office to its most radical moment when she helped coordinate the 1974 Gas Demo, in which hundreds of activists picketed Governor Malcom Wilson’s midtown Manhattan office and blocked traffic on Sixth Avenue in the middle of a workday—WITHOUT a permit! Mayor Abraham Beame was furious with her.
When Ed Koch got elected Mayor, Eunice put in her notice. She went to Washington, and helped lead the Section 504 Sit-in protests in 1977, which again landed her in hot water with her employer. She became President of American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD), the most serious effort to date to create a national disability umbrella organization, formed largely on the outrage that followed President Nixon’s veto of the 1972 Rehabilitation Act. In 1980 she founded the League of Disabled Voters.
Eunice was a tall redhead, physically imposing and incredibly bold. She was a frequent visitor to my home growing up, and a guest at my bar mitzvah in 1971.
by Warren Shaw
