ROHO Disabilities Symposium Highlights Civil Rights Intersections
To inaugurate the new Bancroft collection on disability rights history, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) hosted a daylong symposium entitled, "Intersections of Civil Rights and Social Movements: Putting Disability in Its Place" on November 3, 2000, in Pauley Ballroom.
David Landos (left), ROHO interviewer, talks with Charles Cobb, civil rights activist. |
The planning team well knew that disability history is the least visible among the social movements of the last half century, rarely making the standard list of civil rights groups. The team was aware also of the common image of disability as one framed with archaic stereotypes of pathos and helplessness. |
These stereotypes were shattered by those who have led the fight for national policy reform such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). The group wanted the symposium to spotlight this shift in consciousness and social policy, and to encourage the use of the new collection for scholarly research into disability as a social and civil rights movement.
In the keynote address, Jonathan Young, associate director for disability outreach at the White House Office of Public Liaison and doctoral candidate in history at the University of North Carolina, made the case that although not identical, the disability movement shared much in common with other movements.
Ruth Rosen, professor of history at UC Davis and author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, continued that theme in the first panel of the morning. A social movement names the obstacles, stirs up debate, indeed changes the nature of the debate, and sees backlash as an indicator of success, she said.
Paul Longmore, professor of history at San Francisco State University, told of his uneasy feeling of stigma as a child with a disability and the relief of finally naming it as discrimination as he grew older.
Similarly, the personal experiences of Waldo Martin, professor of history and co-editor of Civil Rights in the United States: An Encyclopedia, and Horacio Roque Ramirez, doctoral candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies, both at Berkeley, gave texture and immediacy to presentations on black civil rights and the gay Latino community, respectively.
Katherine Ott, curator at The Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History, used paired slides to illustrate the curious history of collecting artifacts of twentieth century social movements at the Smithsonian. In pairing the Greensboro Woolworth's lunchcounter (site of the first sit-in for integration in 1960), and Berkeley pioneer Ed Roberts' wheelchair, she noted that unremarkable objects can become platforms for social change, some actually become icons, linking us to memories and the public meanings of events.
Three groundbreaking organizers of early civil rights actions held a spellbound audience in an afternoon panel on organizing strategies and tactics. Diane Nash, leader of the first lunch counter sitin in Nashville in 1960 and cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), recounted details of coordinating the Freedom Rides to integrate interstate transportation. Charles Cobb, an organizer of black voter registration in Mississippi in the 1960s and field secretary of SNCC, talked of the organizing tradition of the black civil rights movement, the quiet organizing as well as the mass protests in public spaces. Kitty Cone, principal organizer of the 26-day sit-in by disabled people for federal accessibility regulations (Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973) in 1977, described the strategies of that sit-in, saying that "at every moment, we felt ourselves direct descendants of the civil rights movement of the sixties."
The day concluded with the opening of the new Bancroft collection, the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement (DRILM), an ongoing series of 50 oral histories of disability movement leaders and two hundred linear feet of documents, photographs, and personal papers from individuals and Berkeley disability organizations.
The DRILM collection is now available for research purposes. Videos of the symposium are available from Wrap Up Productions (510-886-5183). Highlights from the video and a selection of written transcriptions of symposium speakers will be available soon on the ROHO website.
—Susan O'Hara
Disability Rights Project Consultant
Volume 118
Spring 2001
Table of Contents
With the Free Speech Movement Collections, You are There
From the Director: The Bancroft–Wells Fargo Audiotape Project
A Wrong Turn Led to a Half-Century of Service
Latin American Treasures on Display at the Bancroft
Collecting the California Feminist Press Materials
Bernard Rosenthal, the Antiquarian, Scholar, and Friend of The Bancroft Library
David Ross Brower, Leader of the Environmental Movement
Home at Last—Four Manuscript Chapters of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad Come to Bancroft
Willa Baum, ROHO Director, is Honored on Her Retirement
Wedding Bells and Fond Farewells
