Disability History C’est Arrive!
In this image: a photograph by Kipp Watson, a combination of newspaper articles and political buttons drawn mostly though not exclusively from different periods of the New York City Disability Rights Movement.
I grew up in the New York City Disability Rights Movement—my parents, Julius and Mollie Shaw, were among the movement’s founders during the 1960s and 1970s. As an adult I became preoccupied if not obsessed by the City’s past. I spent decades writing and lecturing about its architectural, governmental and cultural history. Finally, about fifteen years ago I turned to the disability side of things.
To my surprise, I found an almost complete vacuum. Disability history is not a subject commonly met with in the United States, except insofar as relatively recent political activism is concerned—and even there, my native City has generally gone unrecognized. Over the years I have made quite some progress putting in the story together, and a book is in the works, but most of the time I’ve felt like a lonely prospector mining an unknown gold deposit.
Until now.
Suddenly, I have company. Two new projects targeting the history of the New York City Disability Rights Movement are taking shape, and although they overlap, they are nonetheless quite distinct.
The first is known as the Disability Rights Archive of Metropolitan New York, or DRAMNY. It is headed by Kipp Watson, a Camp Jened alum, a founder of the Queens Independent Living Center, and a past President of the 504 Democratic Club and Disabled in Action.
DRAMNY’s mission is twofold: to provide an on-line resource where information and materials can be uploaded and downloaded, and to furnish a place for discussion and sharing. As Kipp described it, “I don’t think people today have a clear idea of our past successes and failures as a community. You don’t want people to reinvent things unnecessarily, or repeat any mistakes.” He politely declined to identify any such repeats or reinventions, but simply said that DRAMNY is essential “to preserve our legacy and the memory of individuals without whom we wouldn’t have what we now take for granted, whether it’s bus rides, curb cuts, and so on.
“Material uploaded onto DRAMNY,” Kipp elaborated, “newspaper articles, photographs, meeting minutes or whatever, will be viewable and open for discussion. It will be moderated by volunteers who have expertise in the movement and no allegiance other than the imperative to get information out quickly.
“Back in the day, DIA had regular consciousness-raising meetings—we borrowed that from the women’s movement. Those meetings produced a lot of solidarity and direction. I hope the DRAMNY on-line community forum will do something similar.”
The DRAMNY website is presently in process. “We are working with one of the most advanced systems for content management, the Drupal 9, and a web company that has experience with accessibility, so the site will be easy to use. We hope to launch in a few months.”
If the goal of DRAMNY is to cast an on-line open-source fishing net, the mission of the second new disability history project—the New York City Disability Rights Archive, or NYC-DRA—has a different focus. It is spearheaded by Jessica Murray, a native Texan who became interested in accessible mass transit while pursuing a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her newcomer’s bafflement at the City’s incomplete subway access and famously frustrating Access-A-Ride was reinforced by getting to know activists like Simi Linton (one of the plaintiffs in the Taxis For All Campaign’s famed class action lawsuit). The idea of creating an archive of the City’s disability rights history came from Peggy Groce, an influential educator who had assembled a disability rights timeline for her students with disabilities.
They began searching for a location to house the hoped-for collection--somewhere that would have the file drawers and the conservation skills needed to stabilize and store ephemeral material, documents and photographs. After knocking on a number of doors, they approached the College of Staten Island, or CSI. Located on the former site of the Willowbrook State School, it has unusually ample cubic space, and already has a disability-related archive focused on the history of Willowbrook and Halloran Hospital. CSI’s archivist, James Kaser, agreed to take on the new project.
The next step was acquiring funding, and in 2021 a grant proposal to the New York State Archives was accepted. NYC-DRA is now engaged in refining the project’s definition and geographic scope, and is beginning to search for relevant materials (which are presumably mostly in scattered caches in homes and storage closets). Once source materials have been identified, Jessica says, the team will collect and transport them to CSI, where they will be described, catalogued, and indexed.
Archival research can be awkward. Some years ago I flew all the way to a college in San Francisco to comb the files of a deceased disability scholar. I found some very useful material, but the trip was expensive and time-consuming. With that in mind, a second, more long-range goal is create a digital representation of the collection and make it available on-line.
More immediately, Jessica says, the project has a grant renewal deadline in March of 2022. It needs to identify documentary stakeholders, quantify their expected donations, and draft an historical overview to define the strands of the topics—influential organizations, fights for transportation, education, health care, housing, and so forth—that comprise the subject.
Anyone with relevant materials is invited to go to bit.ly/NYC-DRA to share information about their holdings or volunteer to help with the project.
Clearly, these two projects overlap. Both are seeking to organize and preserve the history of the Disability Rights Movement in the Greater New York area. Their advisory boards share a number of members (including Yours Truly). And they are in frequent communication. But DRAMNY is entirely in cyberspace and is aiming at something like a Reddit on-line community model, whereas NYC-DRA is working towards establishing a permanent scholarly resource. Both are deeply exciting additions to what has frequently been a lonely enterprise, and to them I say: “Welcome! Glad to have you!”
by Warren Shaw
