History of Disability Rights: Going Forward by Knowing Where We’ve Been
by H.M. Cauley
With as much fanfare and celebration as befits the arrival of a new landmark, the opening of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta heralded a new kind of history center. Part museum, part blueprint for the future, the Center is remarkable on many levels, but one particular aspect sets this destination apart from others: its content is inclusive.
That design was entirely intentional, said the Center's CEO, Doug Shipman, who has been working to breathe life into the $100 million project since 2005. "Very early on, we knew one of the big ideas was to build a place where a lot of different rights movements were in one place – that had not been done," explained Shipman. "In our initial report, we wrote that we wanted to be very inclusive. And as we went about the design, we asked, 'How do we make disability rights part of that?' "
After consulting with key Georgians who understand the challenges and victories around disability rights, Shipman was convinced that the issue deserved a prominent place in the Center's story.
Disability rights activist Bob Kafka's panel opens the Human Rights Gallery in the "Spark of Conviction: The Global Human Rights Movement" exhibition enabling visitors to make connections to the world of human rights. Through his work with ADAPT, a national grass-roots community that organizes disability rights activists to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom, Kafka helped drive ADAPT's WE WILL RIDE victory for lifts on buses and ADA and later worked to support community services for people with disabilities instead of catering to the nursing home industry.
He also has an interview that is featured in the exhibition in the "Who Like Me" section. Here, visitors are asked to choose a trait that describes some aspect of themselves and then they "meet" someone, via an interactive mirror, who tells a story of being discriminated against or persecuted for the very trait they share. Disability rights is one of the 12 featured "traits" – in addition to Black, White, Worker, Girl, Woman, Advocate, Blogger, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Artist.
That is where visitors can meet Giorgi Ahkmeteli from the Republic of Georgia. He became a wheelchair user at the age of 21 after an accident and found that people in his country had virtually no access to public institutions. Children, in particular, were often hidden away by their families and denied an education. When he came to experience firsthand what it is to be a person with disabilities in Georgia, he realized that people with disabilities represented one of the most marginalized minorities in his country. So he founded a nongovernmental organization called Accessible Environment for Everyone.
"It's a rights movement to really learn from," he said, "because it's the most diverse of any movement. It can [involve] anyone – not just someone of a certain color, religion or ethnicity. You may be born into it or come into it. We want to show the diversity of the disability rights movement – how it's led, how it's sustained. We've talked about what it is and tried to educate people on it; now, the Center is a natural place to talk about it and to say there's a lot more to this than you think."
NCCHR continues the conversation of intertwining disability with human and civil rights by featuring stories including one of Boaz Muhumuza, a disability rights advocate from Uganda. He has become a leading champion of accessibility rights. Despite being blind since childhood, Muhumuza earned a law degree. Having wrestled with challenges himself, he speaks with experience about the difficulties that Ugandans with disabilities face in accessing public services. He argues that creating a more accessible environment would improve life for everyone in Uganda.
The stories continue by taking visitors to Australia where there was a policy of forcing women with disabilities to be sterilized. Although no longer legally required, the practice still occurs prompting human and civil rights activists to state this is denying women a fundamental right to decide if and when they want to have children. The Center displays the universal impact of civil and human rights through the "Voice to the Voiceless: The Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection" that presents a rare collection of King's personal papers and items; and, "Rolls Down Like Water: The American Civil Rights Movement" exhibition displaying the modern American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The worldwide struggle for disability rights weaves a complex story. Georgia's disability history is no exception. Elements of the story can be found throughout communities around the State and arriving at a consensus about where it has been and where it is going is as varied as each group or organization involved in the work. Recording the story is now the goal of the Georgia Disability History Alliance, a two-year-old group with representatives from around the State who are compiling artifacts, personal stories, historical documents and media articles.
The collected data will be housed at the University of Georgia Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library in Athens. Among those participating in the project is Gillian Grable of UGA's Institute on Human Development and Disability. "We called it an alliance because it's informal; it's people allied together," said Grable. "There's no budget or structured workspace. It's a free-standing network. We decided to gather people we thought would be interested, and we've had about five meetings so far to tell stories and share information. And of course, there's been a lot of conversation about the Civil and Human Rights Center coming to Atlanta."
The idea to create an Alliance charged with capturing the state's story of disability rights grew out of conversations around how various groups will mark the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that was signed into law in July 1990. The act was based largely on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and is considered a significant piece of civil rights law that promises people with disabilities the chance to participate in every aspect of mainstream life. That connection between disability and civil rights is unique to Georgia, which gave rise to some of the Civil Rights era's most prominent activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and US Congressman John Lewis.
"So much of the disability rights movement has mirrored what happened in the Civil Rights movement," said Grable. "For those of us who have been working on it here for years, it's important to offer the histories and stories so people can learn from them, learn about what brings people with and without disabilities together, even how people get around and what they do during the day. My goal is to listen to communities: What do people care about enough to act upon? How can we strengthen habits of welcome and create activities for people with and without disabilities to come together and know each other better?"
Additional momentum to capture the state's history of disability rights grew out of a meeting last year at the Shepherd Center in Buckhead. The ADA25 Summit established the ADA Legacy Project with the goal of connecting various records on the history of the movement in anticipation of next year's ADA anniversary.
Mark Johnson, director of advocacy at the Shepherd Center, spearheads the Legacy Project and supports the efforts of Georgia's History Alliance as well. His 27 years working in the field has given him opportunities to hear countless stories and witness personal triumphs and tragedies that are now being recorded for the first time.
"I remember several years ago screening a documentary called 'Lives Worth Living,' and people kept asking where they'd found the stories," recalled Johnson. "That got a conversation going about how much of our history had already been lost and how important it was to start preserving it. So once we had the ADA initiative, the question was, 'What are we doing in Georgia?' and the answer was to create the History Alliance. We already had this world-class venue in Athens, so we talked to them about starting a collection." Johnson dug into his own history to come up with items for the Athens vault. "I gave them 35 years of T-shirts and buttons I wore at rallies, newspaper clippings of stories that might ultimately be an exhibit. It may even wind up at the Center downtown because Georgia's got a really good story – the problem is, it isn't in one place yet."
One group is working diligently to corral the state's disability rights history in an organized progression. Mark Crenshaw, director of interdisciplinary training at Georgia State's Center for Leadership in Disability, represents that Center at the History Alliance and has taken on the task of creating a timeline of milestones in Georgia's disability rights story.
"I have been working with children and adults with disabilities for the last dozen years, and that experience has allowed me to interact with folks who did some pretty important work fighting for rights in Georgia," said Crenshaw. "I feel a responsibility to make sure their stories are captured and heard and their contributions are respected. I am convinced there's a lot to be proud of in the fight for disability rights, and the whole community needs to know the stories I've been privileged to hear."
The first begins in 1915 with the birth of Waddie Welcome. The Savannah man with cerebral palsy and limited movement and speech spent most of his life in Savannah, but when his parents died, Adult Protection Services placed him in a nursing home. When that facility closed in 1986, he was moved to another home three hours away. His repeated requests to move back to Savannah inspired the formation of an advocacy group dedicated to bringing him home, but the group struggled for 10 years to make Welcome's dream come true.
Welcome, who was named one of Savannah's most influential people in 1999, died in 2001.
"One of first laws they advocated for was a community services act in 1970," said Crenshaw. "It was one of the first public laws to say we need to default first to community services instead of putting people with disabilities into institutions."
One of the most important legislative pieces in disability rights had its roots in Georgia: The Olmstead decision. The high court ordered states to comply with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act by establishing community-based services for those with disabilities and clarified the ADA by saying exactly where services should be provided. The landmark case, argued by Atlanta Legal Aid attorney Sue Jamieson, was initially aimed at getting Georgia to comply with the ADA.
"The most exciting and significant aspect of the Olmstead case, in my opinion, is that prior to that case the segregation of people with disabilities had been identified as a problem, but there was no legal obligation on the part of the State to remedy the problem," said Jamieson, now the former director of Legal Aid's Mental Health and Disability Rights Project. "The segregation of people with disabilities was finally identified as a form of discrimination, and then it came under civil rights and became a movement specifically for people with disabilities."
Other victories in the state's disability rights campaign have come on a smaller scale, said Tom Kohler, a 31-year veteran of Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy and author of Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community.
"In the mid-1970s, when normalization principles were transmitted through a training process called PASS (program analysis of service systems), that was a milestone," he said. "It was a set of ideas developed in Scandinavia, and in response to President Kennedy's Council on Retardation, two men went there and saw people with disabilities living in their home communities. That was not what existed in the US at the time, but we soon were training
people on those ideas."
The 1970s was also a period when values-based training took hold. "It was a moment of innovation," said Kohler. "We went back to the fundamental set of assumptions of who people are and what they deserve, challenging typical assumptions and the notion of low expectations for people with disabilities. It offered ways to make people's lives better, to help them have the support necessary to live in their own homes, find real work and participate in community life as contributing citizens. Those ideas were bubbling in the State of Georgia, and people came from other places to see what was going on here. It was a rich learning moment."
"Those stories, both big and small, will find their way into the ongoing story being told at the Center for Civil and Human Rights," said Johnson. "For the first time, people with disabilities and the struggle for disability rights will be included." he said. "It's not an add-on, or one special day, but something every guest who goes through the doors will see as part of the bigger narrative."
And visitors at the Center are invited to be part of the narrative, explained Shipman.
"You can leave your own testimony, talk about issues you care about and tell your story," he said. "We hope any individual will be inspired to be involved in rights issues and to take them personally. So many people feel it's all about the few heroes out front, but my hope is every visitor sees that the real story is that any individual can be one of those people."
You can be a part of the ADA Legacy Project. Visit www.adalegacy.com/preserve and learn how you can become a part of history.
For more information on tickets, group tours and more on the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, visit www.civilandhumanrights.org
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