Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled
In this image: The logo of The Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, or BCID
The Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, or BCID, is an Independent Living Center (or ILC).
BCID is one of the City’s oldest disability self-advocacy groups (in its lengthy roots, BCID is not unlike the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (see CIDNY), and BCID’s transformations and ups and downs reflect both the City’s history and the history of the City’s disability rights movement over the past 65-plus years.
Today’s BCID began in 1956. Originally known as the Recreation League for Muscular Dystrophy Children, it was founded by the parents of children with that illness, in particular Mary Weinberger, a Brooklynite who was also one of the founders of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (or MDA, best known for its annual fundraiser telethons, long hosted by Jerry Lewis).
Mrs. Weinberger separated from MDA and founded the Recreation League because of MDA’s emphasis on finding a cure as opposed to helping people who already had muscular dystrophy to build their best lives. No doubt her motivation was tied to her adopted son Richard, who later passed away from the disease.
After her son’s demise, the Recreation League’s focus gradually broadened. In addition to coordinating recreation for disabled children, it began providing services to adults as well, including assistance with finding suitable housing, home care, and applications for social services like Medicaid. In those pre-paratransit days, the Recreation League developed its own transportation service. It successfully removed several people from long-term stays at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center and placed them in an apartment with supportive services. It even worked with relocating people out of the infamous Willowbrook State School (see A Most Crucial And Paradoxical Place). The home care aspect of the organization’s work eventually spun off into a distinct organization, Home Care Services for Independent Living.
Reflecting the increasing importance of the adult services component, around 1972 the Recreation League renamed itself Independent Living for the Handicapped. In 1981 the group contracted with the State of New York to become an independent living center, and dubbed itself the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled. To be sure, it had already been functioning as an ILC in most respects, but the State contract provided funding that furthered its mission. The Recreation League’s transformation from a parent’s group into a peer-group ILC was complete.
BCID’s first Executive Director was Susan Fonfa, a veteran of the City’s disability rights movement. Upon her departure in 1984 (she later became ED of Fedcap, (see Federation of the Handicapped), she was succeeded by Denise McQuade.
McQuade was famous for her seven-hour sit-in on an M-104 bus in Manhattan in 1981, to protest the MTA’s failure to provide accessible busses, as it had long promised. The New York Times published a well-known photo of McQuade on the steps of the bus, and her action was memorialized by the DIA Singers’ tune, “Denise And The MTA.”
By the time McQuade moved on in 1992—she later served as disability liaison for the MTA—BCID had cemented a reputation as a capable provider of information and advocate for services to people with disabilities.
Sharon Shapiro was a long-term executive with Bronx Independent Living Services (BILS), and an experienced activist when she was hired as Executive Director of BCID, in 1996. She found herself at the head of an organization which had been rudderless since the previous ED departed, many months before. Tensions between the staff and the Board of Directors had mushroomed during that time, and the Board itself was divided between more confrontational, ex-DIA members and more middle of the road types.
Despite this difficult situation, during her four years as ED Sharon doubled BCID’s budget, created a Welfare to Work program, expanded a Youth in Transition pilot program (which provided career and educational advice to graduating students at a number of high schools), and brought a successful lawsuit against the then relatively new paratransit program, Access-A-Ride. BCID marshaled a delegation that picketed Princeton University over offering tenure to Professor Peter Singer, a bioethicist who was notorious for arguing that people with disabilities were “non-persons,” and that infanticide or euthanasia might be justifiable. As the DIA Singers put it, in “Peter Singer’s Wonderful World:”
Peter Singer is my given name
Bioethics is my claim to fame
Disabled people have no personhood
Think we should kill them quick
And if we could
What a wonderful world it would be.
Singer got tenure. Sharon got arrested.
Sharon’s successor was Zainab Jama, a capable administrator who later went on to become ED of the whole-state ILC system in Pennsylvania, then Minnesota. The next ED, however, left a far more mixed track record, and by the time she departed in 2008, BCID had lost several funding sources and was on probation with the State.
BCID recovered under Marvin Wasserman, who left the Board to become ED in 2008. Marvin came to the ED position through a career as an activist, not as an ILC administrator, but he quickly steered BCID to stability, and then to new heights. He got BCID out of probation, and engineered a move to a central location in downtown Brooklyn. An early sign of the organization’s return to visibility was a substantial delegation that went to the Atlantic Avenue subway complex to buttonhole the MTA’s then-new chair, Jay Walder.
Marvin had been married to the late Sandra Schnur, the founder of consumer-directed home care, and so it is not surprising that during his tenure as ED BCID finally separated itself from its non-consumer-oriented home care spinoff.
An expanded Board of Directors (including yours truly) approved the creation of a Parents’ Center during Marvin’s tenure. In its provision of counseling and support to parents of people with disabilities, the Parents’ Center brought BCID full circle: from a parent’s group ministering to disabled children, it was now a disability-run organization ministering to parents.
No doubt the most spectacular street action of Marvin’s tenure was a large demonstration at a McDonald’s in Sunset Park, which had violently ousted an Iraqi war veteran, Lt. Luis Montalvan, and his service dog Tuesday. Other highlights include a successful lawsuit that sought improved disaster and emergency planning for people with disabilities following Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy, and important breakthroughs in the thirty-year campaign for accessible taxicabs.
Marvin was succeeded by Joan Peters, a veteran of BILS, in 2012. Joan started a campaign to improve accessibility at local businesses (originally known as Barrier Busters, now Open Doors) and also won funding for an innovative peer counseling program that continues to this day.
Upon her departure in 2016, Joseph Rappaport, a transportation expert and consultant who had been much involved with the accessible taxicabs effort, took over as ED.
In the five years since then, BCID has grown significantly, adding new staffing and several new programs, including a voter participation project and an Access-A-Ride reform group (colorfully acronymed AARRG!). Recent or pending litigation includes a lawsuit against inaccessible vehicles operated by Uber and the like, a complaint concerning inaccessible police precincts, and another concerning the bizarrely poor wheelchair access to the Four Freedoms Park on Governor’s Island, which is dedicated to the memory of the USA’s disabled President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sharon Shapiro (now Shapiro-Lacks, the former ED and now a member of BCID’s Board), worked with Joe and a number of other disability groups to alter a New York City Council proposal to ban plastic straws, which some people need in order to drink independently, at New York City restaurants. The Council eventually passed legislation that limits their distribution but ensures their availability to those who need them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, disrupted BCID’s work and staffing to some degree, but it recently moved to new offices at 25 Elm Street in downtown Brooklyn, where it is sharing space with Independence Care System, or ICS. It plans to continue its programmatic expansion, including increased community involvement thanks to the improved accessibility at its new location.
(DHNYC thanks Joe Rappaport, Sharon Shapiro-Lacks, Marvin Wasserman and Allen Rosen for their assistance in the preparation of this entry).
by Warren Shaw
