Judy Heumann never felt ashamed to use a wheelchair. Rather, what she felt most consistently throughout her life was fury at the many ways she was routinely excluded by a world that treated disabled people as second-class citizens.
“Disability isn’t a tragedy,” she said in 1990. “The tragedy is being excluded from contributing to society because of a narrow doorway, or lack of a diploma or job.”
Heumann knew all about being excluded. After losing her ability to walk in 1949 after a bout of polio at 18 months old, the New Yorker was denied a place in her local school because the administration there considered her “a fire hazard.” At 9 or 10, she was permitted to join special education classes in the basement of a Brooklyn school. (“We respected each other,” Huemann later said of her classmates, but “in some way, even when we were that young, we all knew we were being sidelined.”) In 1970, despite being qualified to receive her teaching license, the New York City Board of Education deemed her too much of a risk to allow in classrooms.
Heumann quickly realized that even organizations set up to battle discrimination might exclude her. When she called the ACLU for legal assistance in her fight against the Board of Education, the 22-year-old was told that being denied a teaching license for “medical reasons” didn’t count as discrimination. Heumann wrote in her 2020 autobiography Being Heumann, that she was frustrated to realize that even the 1964 Civil Rights Act excluded her.
“[The act is] intended to end discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and natural origin, but made no mention of disability. There was no law I could quote or legal precedent to cite … There were no disability rights organizations.”
It was then that Heumann began her lifelong work to methodically and systematically transform America for people with disabilities. She refused to be daunted in the face of much more powerful forces. She refused to back down from any of her battles, no matter what blocked her path. And by the time of her death in 2023, at the age of 75, Heumann’s impact was seismic.
Heumann’s life of activism began when she decided to ignore the ACLU’s assessment that she wasn’t being discriminated against. Instead, she sued the Board of Education and won. As a result, Heumann became the first wheelchair-using teacher in New York. In the course of that battle, she also founded and became president of Disabled in Action (DIA). The disability rights organization used protests, letter-writing campaigns, statements at public hearings and calls to public officials to make headway with their struggles. Its members absolutely refused to blend into the background.
“We didn’t just come to meetings,” Heumann said in the 2020 documentary Crip Camp. “We yelled out at meetings, we challenged people. We were definitely considered a militant organization because we were very strong in our actions; because we disrupted things.”
Heumann brought that energy with her when she first came to study at UC Berkeley. After earning a degree in speech therapy from Long Island University in 1969, Heumann got her master’s in public health at Berkeley in 1975. On campus, she was energized by the wealth of student organizing taking place during the era and joined the board of the Center for Independent Living (CIL) in 1973. CIL had been founded a year earlier by Ed Roberts, the first wheelchair user to attend UC Berkeley.
The organization was determined to act as a support network for people with disabilities, offering accessible transit, personal assistant referrals, help locating suitable housing and jobs, and even running a wheelchair repair shop. CIL’s end goal was self-sufficiency for all disabled people. Heumann’s focus, as always, was turning community frustration into positive action. Her talent for doing so would become abundantly clear in April 1977, when she and around 100 other protesters staged a 24-day sit-in at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare inside San Francisco’s Federal Building.
The lengthy protest was all part of an effort to get Section 504 of 1973’s Rehabilitation Act signed and enacted by the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Section 504 prohibited discrimination by any organization that was receiving federal funds. (Incidentally, President Nixon only signed the Rehabilitation Act after Heumann and 50 other protesters shut down a major intersection of Manhattan with a protest outside Nixon’s New York headquarters.)
Heumann and her cohorts knew that getting the measure signed would force a major change in how public transport, public buildings, schools and a variety of other institutions accommodated people with disabilities. The sit-in was especially arduous for the protesters due to their reliance on medications, assistants and therapeutic equipment. Nevertheless, they persisted, with Heumann often singing to keep spirits lifted.
Heumann and her friends had outside support too. Civil rights groups across the Bay Area rushed to support the sit-in. The Black Panthers brought the protesters hot meals on a nightly basis. Union members, multiple civil rights organizations and key leaders at GLIDE (including Rev. Cecil Williams) were vocal supporters who stepped up to offer assistance in whatever way they could.
After a lengthy standoff — including attempts to cut off protesters’ access to phones, hot water and food (several, including Heumann, had opted to go on hunger strike regardless) — Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano finally signed Section 504. Heumann highlighted to the press that the sustained protest was proof of disabled people’s “stamina, strength [and] intelligence.” She understood how limited public perceptions were at the time.
Elated at their victory, Heumann and her fellow protesters knew there was still much to be done. Though on paper, Section 504 meant federally funded entities must accommodate disabled people, excuses were made repeatedly about why action would not be taken immediately. (The American Public Transit Association, for example, said it couldn’t afford to put wheelchair lifts into buses, even though the cost was the same as installing air conditioning). To make matters worse, better legal protections were still badly needed at a federal level to make all public places more accessible, and to make employer discrimination illegal.
During this period, Heumann continued to campaign in earnest as CIL’s senior deputy director. In Oakland, she co-founded the World Institute on Disability (WID) to begin advocating for disability rights around the globe. CIL also set up a new organization to better handle ongoing legal matters. The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) was the first legal organization run by and for people with disabilities. As such, it was inundated with calls from people all over the U.S. seeking advice on how to make their own towns and cities more accessible. But DREDF had already begun formulating a big idea to touch every corner of America in one swoop: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
It took until 1988 for the first version of the ADA to reach Congress. It failed to pass. A second version arrived in May 1989, but when it still hadn’t passed 10 months later, 1,000 protesters descended on Washington, D.C. to make their voices heard. Scores of disabled activists dropped to the ground and literally dragged themselves up the 83 inaccessible steps of the Capitol building. It was an image that lawmakers wouldn’t soon forget.
On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush finally signed the ADA into law. “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down,” he declared.
Just three years later, Heumann would take on the role of assistant secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in Bill Clinton’s Department of Education. She served for the duration of the president’s term, as she did when Barack Obama gave her the role of special advisor for international disability rights in the Department of State.
For the rest of her life, Heumann never, ever stopped advocating for people with disabilities. And when she received praise for the multitude of ways she helped change countless lives for the better, her response was always rooted in humility.
As she wrote in her 2021 book, Rolling Warrior: “All we did was refuse to believe that we were the problem.”
To learn about other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, visit the Rebel Girls homepage.
