Southeast ADA Center
History of Disabilities Webinar
Part 4: Civil Rights to Disability Rights
February 22, 2018, 1:00 P.M. EST

Barry Whaley: 
Let me go ahead and wish everybody a good afternoon. Welcome to the webinar series, History of Disabilities. This would be a good opportunity to adjust the volume on your computer. Keep in mind you can listen to the webinar either through your computer speaker or via the telephone conference numbers that were on the previous screen. The phone number can also be used if you experience audio difficulties. Please select the CC button which is found under audio and visuals and we recommend putting the captioning on and the webinar side by side. Before we get started just quick information regarding some frequently asked questions participating in today's session either by phone or using our web conferencing system, blackboard collaborate. The system makes it possible for us to conduct workshops over the Internet with just about any computer with an Internet connection or web browser. Unfortunately there may be computer issues inherent to your system that are beyond our control.  So please check your system prior to the situation. Our IT staff can be available to work with you in advance, but once we begin, we're unable to troubleshoot your technical issues. As I mentioned, this is being closed captioned and we talked about how to do that. Please make sure your microphones and your phone lines are muted. If you do have a question, please type it in the chat area. Dr. Logue relies heavily on your input and questions and we will make sure that he answers every one of those. So we also welcome your feedback and will be monitoring that chat window. So at this time-

Marsha Schwanke: 
Barry? There's a little bit of echo. 

Barry Whaley: 
From me?  
Marsha Schwanke:
Yes, but it should be okay because Larry is clear.  

Barry Whaley:
Okay. I will mute when I'm done. So at this time I suggest we close all your other applications on your computer that may interfere with your experience. Make sure any automatic systems checks are turned off so they don't interfere with your experience. You may want to wiggle your mouse or touch your keypad from time to time if your computer is idle for too long, it may go to sleep.  
 So with that, I want to welcome you again. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. This is our final installment of our webinar series. My name is Barry Whaley. I'm the project center of the southeast ADA center based in Atlanta Georgia. The Southeast ADA Center is a project of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University. We're funded by NIDILRR, the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, which is a center within the Administration for Community Living, Department of Health and Human Services. The Southeast ADA Center is one of ten centers that make up the ADA national network. Our purpose is to provide informal guidance, training, and information on all aspects of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Burton Blatt Institute is a leader in efforts to advance the civic, economic and social participation of people with disabilities in a global society.  
So welcome to episode four of our four-part series, the History of Disabilities. Today Dr. Logue’s topic is titled “Civil Rights to Disability Rights.” Dr. Logue is a senior fellow at the Burton Blatt institute. Prior to BBI he was a professor of history and political science at Mississippi College. His first book, A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah, was awarded the Francis and Emily Chipman Award for best first book. Since then Dr. Logue has turned his interests to the experiences of Civil War soldiers and veterans. His works include Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post-Civil War America authored with BBI chairman Dr. Peter Blanck, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace with Ivan R. Dee, along with Michael Barton, The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader, and finally The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader. At BBI Dr. Logue collaborates with Dr. Blanck exploring the psychological trauma suffered by union army veterans. This work will lead to their new monograph in the Cambridge disability law and policy series. That monograph is entitled “Civil War Veterans’ Psychological Illnesses and Suicide: Lessons from the Past”. Now it's my honor to introduce to you Dr. Larry Logue. Larry, good afternoon. I'll let you take over from here.  

Larry Logue:
Good afternoon, everybody and welcome back. What I'm going do to start is to prove that Barry was telling the truth and answer some questions from last time that I promised to look through. We have four of them. The first question was, and this time I transcribed them so I can give you more of an idea. This question is “How and why is the subminimum wage laws get passed? Was there a negative response from the disability community?” Well the first time it appears nationwide is in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, part of the new deal which specified industry by industry committees that would set hours of work, quality standards, minimum wages, and the like. And they did include a lower wage for people with disabilities. The Supreme Court threw out that law as unconstitutional in 1935. So the Roosevelt administration redid the policy and in 1938 Congress adopted the Fair Labor Standards Act and in it we have this provision. I’ll read it to you. “The administrator, who was an official appointed by the secretary of labor, to the extent necessary in order to prevent curtailment of opportunities for employment shall, by regulations or by orders, provide for the employment of individuals whose earning capacity is impaired by age or physical or mental deficiency or injury under special certificates issued by the administrator at such wages lower than the minimum wage applicable under section 6 and for such period as shall be fixed in such certificates. Minimum wage at that point was the initial minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act was 25 cents an hour. 
The second part of the question is, what this does before I leave it, this provision says the why and how. Look at the first part: “To the extent necessary in order to curtail opportunities for employment.” There was an idea that employees wouldn't hire people with disabilities and they needed this incentive. So the rest of it talks about incentive. The second part of the question is was during negative response. There's not so much in the historical record about this, but I did find something, criticism of the department of labor's double standard. What I mean is that the standard minimum wage for people with disabilities was 75% of the mandated minimum for most people, but for those working in sheltered workshops, that minimum wage was set lower than that. And the president of the National Federation of the Blind in 1940, when the organization is founded, called that workshop wage starvation wages. So there was at least this much negative reaction.  
Another question I promised to look into was “Is there data on the number of disabled hired in specific war industries that were dangerous such as bomb making?” Once again there's not a whole lot of detail in Department of Labor publications but they do hint at least at an answer. One report noted that especially hazardous or heavy industries believed they cannot use handicapped person. Another report analyzed 11,000 workers with disabilities during World War II and they did mention munitions work, but that was only one of hundreds of job classifications. What we can say with some confidence is that representation in these jobs was probably minimal.  
Third question we'll take up is “Did you come across initiatives to hire disabled people alongside disabled veterans by the military?” If the question is dealing with military bureaucracy, I couldn't find any specific information, but we do know that veterans with disabilities received preference for working in the military bureaucracies and we certainly know that the number of disabilities produced by that war, World War II, may have given an adequate supply of veterans with disabilities.  
And finally, a request to create a timeline of the organizations that I talked about and when they were active. So I split a timeline into three parts. I’m hoping this is as legible as possible. The first part is the 19th century timeline which has three things: the founding of the National Association for the Deaf, the federal law that denied immigration to those with mental illness that I talked about last time passed in 1892, and then the infamous likely to become a public charge prohibition passed by Congress in 1891. Then I split the next timeline from 1900 to 1950 and we find eight different dates. Most of them are founding of organizations such as the National Fraternal Society for the Deaf which was founded as a kind of alternative to the National Federation in 1901. Then rehabilitation laws for World War I veterans and for civilians passed respectively in 1917 and 1920. And then a group of organizations and their founding that we talked about also, the League of the Physically Handicapped, National Association of the Blind, American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, and the likes. Most of these come from last week, but we do have one that I'll talk about in just a bit. Finally I have a timeline that goes from 1950 to 1990 and these are mostly things that I'm going to talk about today so I'll put those off for a bit but you'll be able to see a visual comparison of the founding of them.  
So those are questions but I still have something more I want to talk about before I take up the actual title of today's talk because I want to do something that I've looked forward to and I hope I can get you to look forward to it too and I hope you have looked forward to it. A sort of show and tell about historians' toolkit and how historians do their job. Last time I talked about how historians can dig for evidence. We looked for evidence of death rates in the great flu pandemic. When we do that digging, we answer four of the five famous W questions; the digging answers who, what, when and where something happened. This time I'm going to take on the question that's most appealing to historians, but at the same time more challenging, the fifth W or why. That is, how do we explain the evidence that we dug up? And much of today's presentation and probably more than the previous ones is going to deal with explanation.
So I just mentioned challenges. It's appealing but it's also challenging. There's a number of challenges, but one important example of them is the ex post facto explanation which is pronouncing a cause motivation for a historical event and leaving it at that. The problem is, that such an explanation runs afoul of the logic of inquiry which requires that any theory that is put forward should also be put at risk and tested against appropriate evidence. So there's two options to stay within the logic. One is to do the test, to test an explanation with fresh evidence. I'll give you an example of what Peter Blanck and I did in our first book. We found that physicians recommended fewer AfricanAmericans than they did for whites for pensions. An obvious explanation is race and racism but how do we know? If we leave it at that, maybe there was something else. Maybe it was due to black veterans' shorter participation in the war and less chance to be disabled in the service. So we can't just leave it there. So what we did was we brought in fresh evidence and conducted a test. What we said was if physicians were prejudiced, they should have rejected more AfricanAmericans the darker their skin, if it was really a racial prejudice, and it turns out they did.  That the darker the skin of the applicant, and physicians saw them face to face, the more they were likely to be rejected. So we can have more confidence in the races and explanation having done the test. But I said there's two options. What if no test is feasible?  Option two is to clearly qualify the proposed explanation as a best and educated guess. So we'll see how these rules play out in today's presentation. I'll come back to them. Okay.  
 On to the title of today's work. Actually I did have, and actually I will replace and put in again, a question mark after that title. Instead of making a statement, I would make it a question: “From Civil Rights to Disability Rights?” I should have put it there because if you've been with us, you've heard me refer from time to time to a master narrative about disability rights. The narrative begins with a premise that disability rights movement began in the 1970s, maybe the 1960s, the late 1960s at the earliest, most likely in the 1970s, and the narrative rests on two cornerstones. The first cornerstone is that activism on behalf of people with disabilities was hampered by a kind of tribalism. That means activists represented the blind or the deaf or veterans and they've gotten a lot of attention, that is, each of the individual groups, and they supposedly were working separately rather than together. The second cornerstone is that only when they saw examples set by the civil rights movement and the women's movement did disability rights activists put aside their differences and work together to achieve policy breakthroughs that culminated in the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. So that's a short view of the master narrative. 
Now in the last session I followed the master narrative and looked at history of disabilities through the end of World War II. What I found was more activism than the master narrative would admit which leaves roughly a quarter century after the end of the World War II and to 1970 to investigate the agreed upon start of the disability rights movement, and when we're done we're ready for an overview of disability rights Providence. Now if you look carefully at the years I talked about, during the end of World War II and the 1970s, they were hardly a dormant time for disability rights activism like the master narrative might suggest. In fact, I think we can characterize that quarter century as more of a time of continuation for the struggle of disability rights. 
 One example of what I mean is that in the late 1950s representatives of the National Federation of Blind went to congress with two proposals. First, to mandate that blind people be allowed to join the National Federation without losing any benefits they have. Second, to require service providers to include blind people on their boards of directors. They didn't get Congress to act, as it turns out in the end, but several states did adopt the Federation’s proposals so they were partly a success. And certainly active. Advocates also demonstrated a willingness, to use a later phrase, to speak truth to power. For one thing, activists criticized the authoritarian arrogance, as they called it, of rehabilitation professionals. I mentioned this before, but it falls within the period, in the early 1950s, the president of the National Federation of the Blind demanded that dogooders, as he called them, “get off our backs,” and he emphasized that phrase. For another, activists brought ordinary blind people to Congressional hearings that way they could tell about their ability to hold productive jobs. Both of these, both the criticism and the testimony, gave signs of an active rights effort. All this might be discounted as advocacy by a single disability interest group but the National Federation of the Blind wasn't alone in its advocacy. 
    Also in the 1950s, the American Federation of People with Handicaps, that is, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, that we talked about last time. I meant to put this slide up but I forgot. This group tried to get changes in federal laws. You can see what this slide shows is the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, their logo, and what they wanted. Basically they wanted- it shows three people, one is a veteran, another is a woman in a wheelchair, the third is amputee- and they want the gate opened to employment which would give them home, happiness and security. They tried, in the 1950s, to get changes to federal laws. The group tried to be inclusive, that is, reached out to deaf and blind people as well as those with mobility limitations. And now leaders of the group urged Congress to create a new rehabilitation agency and to authorize pensions for people with severe disabilities. They also wanted new rules for making public buildings accessible. This all in the 1950s. They got a little of what they wanted, but not quite all. No new agency was created just dealing with rehabilitation, no new pensions were granted, and no new accessibility was ordered. But once again, disability advocates demonstrated a widespread commitment to equal rights.  
In this time, which was far from a dormant period, other developments involved people with mental illness and intellectual disabilities. Most people with these disabilities were in institutions, mainly hospitals or special schools, but advocacy groups arose there too, especially the National Association for Retarded Children which was founded in the early 1950s. This group consisted mostly of parents who focused on such priorities as serving as support groups at the local level, lobbying for more research at the national level, and advocating improved conditions in institutions. The last objective, improving institutions, is especially significant here because it shows that sometimes a jolt must take place for any kind of change to occur. This time the jolt came from exposes of conditions in mental hospitals. These hospitals were actually improving somewhat by the mid-20th century; they were less overcrowded, they employed more psychiatrists than before, psychiatrists who were more devoted to treatment and less satisfied with simple custody. But these improvements say a whole lot more about what the institutions were before than what they were now. Conditions in mental hospitals were still appalling. 
The problem was no secret. Investigators, reporters, and politicians called attention to it, but the real jolt came in the form of Burton Blatt. He might be familiar to you. He was a professor of education and he and a photographer went, in the early 1960s, to several institutions in New England for mental illness and they published in 1966, Christmas in Purgatory, which was then reprinted in Life magazine. So what we see on this slide is Burton Blatt on the left and just one of the photos in Christmas in Purgatory which is basically a compilation of photographs, some of which are more disturbing than this one as this one shows several people, one of them doesn't seem to have any clothes on, the other curled up on the floor. Of the conditions under which people with mental illness were kept. These kinds of pictures invoked public revulsion and helped set the stage for the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s. Now mentioning the 1970s brings us to the period that some people see as the genesis of the modern disability rights movement. And we have to note that the late 1960s and the 1970s did see an acceleration of developments involving people with disabilities such as the emergence of the Independent Living Advocacy Center at University of California, Berkeley. It saw Congress pass the Architectural Barriers Act for Greater Accessibility in 1968 and the New Rehabilitation Act of 1973 had, as one of its major provisions, a prohibition of discrimination against people with disabilities. All these developments were crucial but I'm going to leave that account there because my friend and coauthor Peter blank has written extensively about the modern disability rights movement and I'll refer you to his publications.
What I want to do is to explore the provenance and context of this movement and especially to address the common presumption that you see, I've seen it in college textbooks, that the disability rights was the last civil rights movement. You might have an inkling of my answer from the way I’ve been treating it but now it's time to summarize my case. To begin with, let's take a closer look at that assumption that this was the last civil rights movement. For one thing, it implies a comparison of disability rights with the AfricanAmerican and women's rights movements. And the assumption hinges- as I said before, it’s corner stones on one major distinction between the AfricanAmerican civil rights campaign and the disability rights. The distinction is that the best known activism and achievements of the black movement happened in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s while the best known activism of the disability rights movement happened in the 1970s through the 1980s. And the best known achievement, of course the ADA, happened in 1990. So it must have been the last. 
All this is accurate enough to cite these things but the last movement assumption becomes more puzzling when we compare the disability rights movement to the women's movement. Women's activism was sporadic before the late 1960s. Only then can we start calling it a movement. The key catalyst of this movement was the founding of a local group, the New York Radical Women, in 1967. The best known activity of this group was the protests that they staged at the Miss America pageant in 1968 at which, despite all the urban legend, no bras were burned. By the way, that's the same year as the Architecture Barriers Act and the activism at Berkeley for independent living were happening. What really made women's rights a movement though, was New York Radical Women’s pioneering of something much more important than Miss America protests: the pioneering of consciousness raising. And I've got just one picture for it. Consciousness raising was getting people together, getting women together, in small groups at which leaders promoted awareness of shared problems and possible solutions for women.   Consciousness raising began at the same time as disability rights activists were forming more cross-disability organizations such as Disabled in Action. Here you see them in New York City such as the Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, also founded in the early 1970s. That's all on the timeline. And you can see- here is a comparison for you. It shows several activists in front of buses and one of them on the back of his wheelchair it says “I can't even get to the back of the bus.” And we have another group: American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities. And this shows a group holding a protest, actually a victory celebration in the 1970s. 
But the reason why I talk about them now is that these groups also did a kind of consciousness raising. They didn't so much have to convince people with disabilities that they shared a problem, but they did visit with them and make them aware of their power to demand change. Now, the women's movement also continued through the 1980s.  Activists focused on race and economic issues and reproductive rights and the disability rights activism also continued through the 1980s, focusing on enforcement of recent laws, removing accessibility obstacles, and getting representatives, getting representation. We heard this just a bit before, and still, people with disabilities didn't have much representation and often none in the institutions that housed them. So these movements are running parallel and it makes one wonder which of them is later. Actually, that's not even a very productive question. For two reasons, first, is that last implies a value judgment. That is, it suggests that whatever movement is labeled last, it was some kind of afterthought or copycat of others and you can see the master narrative that there's some of that in there. The second problem with this question of which was last is that focusing on a climatic decade ignores decades and generations of historical developments. 
So what should we do instead? Here's what I propose. I recommend looking at all these movements, from rather than the first and last and copycat, applying a supply and demand perspective to them. And here's what I mean by that. We might say instead of multiple movements, that there was a single long human rights crusade stretching back to the 19th century that was clearly aimed at supplying, that is supplied activism on behalf of AfricanAmericans, on behalf of women, on behalf of people with disabilities, on behalf lesbians, gays, and bisexual and transgendered people. It's applied, that is, to audiences that consisted of the public and politicians. And activists hoped that would be perceptive, but for a long time they weren't receptive. They passed a law here, an act here, and presidents might appoint a commission to study discrimination, but nothing transformative happened until the second half of the 20th century. Recognizing this, those who still insist on the disability rights being the last one, point to deep divisions in disability rights activism. They're talking about single issue groups that apparently precluded a clear message about what people with disabilities wanted. Now to be sure, there were differences in membership and goals among disability rights groups but we need to remember two perspectives on these differences. The first perspective is that disability activists did form groups that cut across disabilities. We talked about one two sessions ago, the League of the Physically Handicapped and the one we just mentioned, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, both of which aimed to cut across disability groups and disability types. 
The second perspective on this question was that if divisions always delayed movements, then what about divisions in the other ones? Civil rights movement and women's movement, if we used the division perspective, might well have come after the disability rights movement if that was the problem because they had serious divisions too. What I mean is that in civil rights movement there were significant divisions between those who favored integration such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, those who wanted empowerment through voting, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee versus those who favored change through litigation, such as the NAACP. And then in the women's movement, there were divisions between those who prioritized reform of laws, such as the National Organization for Women, and attitudes at the national level, and those who favored local consciousness raising taking on race and economic issues in a different way. So there was no clear message from these movements either. It's hard to single out the disability rights movement for its divisions. So what I'm suggesting is that pure focus on the supply of activism raises more questions than it does answers. What it really does is it’s emphasizing the trees, that is, organizational details, over the forest and I would say the forest is a question of why now.  
Now, I'll have to admit that the approach to these presentations throughout has favored supply of activism over demand mostly because that's where most of the scholarship takes us. We talked about this last time, how we see a lot more about organizations than we do about individual people. But I think taking a demand approach puts the scholarship, especially the scholarship on organizations, in perspective. And what this perspective does is it helps us to understand why the movements we've talked about caught on fairly suddenly. Each of them did, each description of them did. I say this knowing it is possible to focus too much on climatic decades and not enough on the deep roots that led to those decades. But nor should we ignore the peak of the AfricanAmerican movements in 1960s, it did, and then followed by breakthroughs in feminism, followed by the critical decade of disability rights movement in the 1980s. Those periods still work, but a demand approach proposes an explanation for why. By a shift in public acceptance of social change. But the approach should also be able to address the questions why then and why this ordering of movements. So clearly it's sort of common sense that a shift in public acceptance took place, but why in that order?
    We can start trying an answer by recognizing the more or less obvious. That is, the 1960s was a decade of extraordinary awareness of social change. The new left, the civil rights movement, the counter culture, saw young people directing anger and ridicule at the status quo. Now to be sure, some of the broader public pushed back, but a remarkable number of people who hadn't been willing were now willing to listen to activists in the 1960s and especially willing to listen to black people who were demanding rights. Why would this have been? Possibly because black people had come to symbolize subjugation and denial of citizenship. That makes sense, but what about those tests I talked about? One possible test is to look at language. If the public was especially conscious of race, at the 1960s, they should have been reflected, consciousness should have been reflected in language, and it was. Prejudice and bigotry have always been paired most readily with racial prejudice and racial bigotry. Not to mention an extraordinarily wide range of racial slurs. But for the first time in modern history, the public was willing to be shamed out of some of that prejudice in the 1960s. The women's movement, for its part, work with both supply and demand.  They recruited potential activists and in doing so, they ensured future supply of advocates. But by educating people about sexism with a goal of making a broader public willing to listen, they were also trying to create a demand. The process took longer than AfricanAmerican civil rights, but the public was eventually willing to demand change to listen. It also took longer for disability rights and to understand why, what we can do is envision a culture of tolerance that began in the 1960s and steadily expanded until the public was ready to be shamed out of this prejudice too. Again, we can apply the language test. If the public began dropping its slurs and its assumptions in the 1960s about races, they should have been- we should be able to see the same sort of process happening with disabilities. And we more or less do. Terms such as cripple and dumb and retarded lasted longer than racial ones, but eventually the public was ready to see people with disabilities as citizens deserving of opportunities. 
We take an approach like this, we can reboot our view of these movements. Instead of seeing them as separate enterprises in the marketplace of public perception, we can understand them as part of a long human rights campaign, one that had no fixed dates of birth and death. One that had as many similarities and interactions as it did have competition and the master narrative certainly focuses on the competition but overlooks the similarities in their interactions. What I mean is things we might recognize from previous sessions, things such as disability rights groups' early use of tactics that were more later associated with other movements, tactics like sitins as a protest tactic. Interactions such as the Blinded veterans Association’s advocacy of AfricanAmericans rights; it was mostly a white group who were strongly outspoken about black people's rights. And here's an interaction I haven't mentioned but it's also striking. The NAACP borrowed essays by the president of the National Federation of Blind to use in its argument in Brown versus Board of Education. So we need to pay attention to those things too. 
Now we can substitute a better title than the questionable one we started with. There might have been good reason to use the title I gave, but now it makes sense to call this a “Disability Rights and Long Human Rights Struggle”. That takes into account the things I've been talking about much more readily. I admit that's a mouthful, but it better reflects the road that we've traveled together and now that road has come to an end. I thank you for tuning in and I certainly welcome your questions. In fact, what I'll do is if there's any questions I can't answer or questions that you don't think of, I'm going to put my email address here, you can always email them. Barry said I depend heavily on questions. If you give me any questions, I'll do my best. 

Marsha Schwanke: 
Thank you all for joining us for today's broadcast. Part four in the History of Disability webinar series. Thank you to our presenter Larry, Logue, the Burton Blatt institute, and the southeast ADA center. As Larry waits for questions, your feedback is important. Please complete the online evaluation form. The link is posted in the chat. Archives and recording will be available online. That link is also posted in the chat. In addition, continuing education credits are available and if you do want to receive the education credits of six CCR clock hours you have to complete all four of the sessions verified by archive and there will be additional information sent by email to complete that. So thank you very much, Larry. 

Barry Whaley: 
Larry, there was a question at 1:38 from James who asks, “How does the fact that people with disability included blacks, whites, women, LGBT, et cetera, play into it?” James, I'm not sure what the context of the question was, if you could reframe that that might be helpful. 

Larry Logue:
Yeah, I’m not exactly sure but I’ll give it my best. What I was trying to say is that these were not such disparate, separate movements and they did interact. They did learn from each other, including, as I would suggest, those other movements learning tactics such as sitins. So they were separate and it's easier to compartmentalize them but it's also, I think, helpful to look at them together and look at them as part of one long human rights struggle. That's why I tried to use them together and to mention that. That's the thing, and of course, characterizing the disability rights movement as the last movement invites comparison of all the others.  If we view them together like this, I think we're in much better shape. I hope that addresses the question. Do we have any others? 

Barry Whaley: 
Not yet. But I  is there another question in the chat box that I missed?  

Larry Logue:
I don't see one. 

Barry Whaley:
Let me ask this question. This is kind of a simplistic question, but one that I ponder a lot. And I guess for lack of a better way of saying it, why the 1960s and the 1970s? What about that era was so different from the 1930s, I mean in terms of public perceptions, public consciousness, media. I'm just wondering what the spark was in the '60s and '70s as opposed to the '40s or '80s or whatever.

Larry Logue:  
Yeah, you’re going after the why question again. I guess I could’ve pursued that a little bit further but you brought it up so it gives me a chance. If there's a spark, if there's something we could really pin the point to, I would say it's that huge generation of baby boomers that came along. The number of people in their late teens and early 20s increased by 50% which has never happened in American history and may well never happen again. And these were young people who- the best way to approach this is to read a statement of Students for Democratic Society who said, “We are people of this generation bred in comfort.” They were welltended and huge and they could have an influence that previous generations hadn't. If we could look at a spark, that might be it. So they helped to increase, I think, the demand for looking at rights and that may be the best answer I can give you for the spark that lit a fire under the 1960s is that huge generation of baby boomers. So there you go. Keep those questions coming, folks, including Barry. 

Barry Whaley: 
While we're waiting, and this was the other thing I think about often, I think you're exactly right in pointing to that large demographic of the baby boomers and as you mentioned the statement from SDS. I'm wondering how we see in the 1960s, '70s, we see the way we get information changed or information delivered to us. We viewed World War II through news reels and here we have almost instantaneous news in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and especially I think the sitin at the federal building in San Francisco, I'm wondering how media influenced these movements in this era. 

Larry Logue:
There's no doubt that it did and maybe the civil rights movement more than others as you say. But eventually, even the other movements too, though the old fashioned way, the consciousness raising was especially important to the women's movement. So I think it varies and as you say the disability rights movement was important and depended a lot on the visual representation, after all, and so I think media and media immediacy, as we suggest, did play a part in the awareness of these movements and the success of them. So you're absolutely right. 
Now we've got some questions coming in. So if I've answered that okay, let me see what we have here. “It was a generation that lived in a booming economy, they had the luxury of examining quality of life, not just surviving.” That's exactly right and one of the conclusions of a sociologist who studied the baby boomer generation was that their parents were determined not to subject them to the shortages and the deprivation that they had suffered through. 
And now here's another: “Were the influx of Vietnam veterans disabled?” Let me take a little excursion into this. And I just thought of this and otherwise I would have included it. One of the most serious criticisms of tribalism in disability rights is the distinction between veterans and civilians. And it's true that there is- a lot of times veterans’ organizations, much of that criticism is directed at the veterans. They tried to restrict themselves just to veterans. So that was often used as a conclusion for the late start of the disability rights movement. However, it's a little more simplistic, that's a little simplistic, and the relation between them is a little more complex because the- there was, we talked about last time, the Blinded Veterans Association that spoke out on behalf of AfricanAmerican rights. There is a Jewish War Veterans organization that also fights anti-Semitism, general anti-Semitism. There's also a Paralyzed Veterans of America, I just came across this, who had a major hand in making the latest Super Bowl venue wheelchair accessible. So that benefitted not just them. I don't think- veterans certainly have, from time to time, especially after a war, have advocated separate treatment, separate and special treatment, but in reality and practice, the relationship is a little more complex. A little less contentious.  
All right. Here's one. “Since we're focusing on why, do you have any theories why, if I understand you correctly, the master narrative has emphasized divisions among people with disabilities in a sort of delayed or copycat nature of the timing of it?” That's a very good question and it's a question I've asked too. I think part of it is that people are reasoning from results to cause. So since the ADA came after most of the major legislation that affected the other groups, such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act for black People, Title 9 for the women's movements, and I always emphasize in my classes how important Title 9 is, since they came earlier and the ADA didn't come until 1990, then you would go looking for causes.  And the causes in this case you look for divisions, you look for anything that would explain the result that we have, and that's perfectly acceptable, except it needs to be subject to those tests I talked about. So if there were divisions, then they should be wholesale and across the board. What I'm suggesting is divisions were less severe than might be assumed. “I see this as an independent consciousness raising from all of humanity.” Yes, that’s what it is. That's certainly what disability rights activists were trying to do, especially say the group for the Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit. They were certainly trying to raise people's awareness of a basic need that they have that wasn't being met. That’s a great commentary on civil rights movement where the one activist said they can't even get to the back of the bus. The disability rights movement has depended deeply on consciousness raising of a different sort, but it's sort of a reverse consciousness raising. They've depending on recruiting activists but they've also done a major job of educating a broader society. So it's a very different kind of consciousness raising but the idea is still the same. But if you make people aware of a problem and you make people aware of possible solutions, where they haven't been before, then actually, that's a good way- would have pointed that out that that's why I like these questions. This is a consciousness raising of sort of projecting outward rather than just dealing with the group itself, such as the women's consciousness raising. So that's an excellent comment. I like that. Okay. Keep them coming.  
 I went back and looked at the previous question and I think the first question I think I botched that a little bit. The fact that all these groups, blacks, whites, women, LGBT people, the way that it cuts across demographics, as much as it cuts across disabilities.  And I don't know- I think maybe- that's a- I feel bad about misunderstanding that question, but let me try again. Here's the question again. “How does the fact that people with disabilities included blacks, whites, women, LGBT, et cetera play into it?” I think that cutting across the demographics might have delayed the movement somewhat, and this is just pure speculation. It's something that would have to be tested, but it could be that these other issues sort of collided with the disability issues and a disability question. So it might have slowed down the progress of disability rights, the fact that people often belong to two different groups and one was pushing for inclusion more or less than the other. So I apologize for misinterpreting that question but it's actually a quite good one. And it could have slowed down the progress and the achievements of the disability rights movement. So possibly. 
Here comes another one. “Impactful advocacy in the ‘60s and ‘70s sees people in media coverage, pictures and video.” This is somebody picking up on what Barry said. “To be effective in disability rights advocacy today, I wonder what new methods need to be employed since society is so saturated in media outlets.” Very true. And of course these days, it’s social media that people turn to so I'm sure disability groups are on top of the social media trend. So I don't know. That's a good question and the questioner, I don't think, has any position herself, but maybe different uses and better uses of social media might help. 
 Here's one. “I'm trying to make sense of the master narrative which I understand why it's discussed with what I know about the league, the programs at Kalamazoo in the 1940s, the University of Illinois program, and parents’ movements. I don't know if this is as much a question but contemplation but interested.” Okay. That's the thing. I'm limited by time and so I'm hoping that the groups and the movements and the developments I talked about are representative of other things such as the University of Illinois and the parents’ movements that we did talk about those with the National Association for Retarded Children. So yeah. I mean, these things I'm hoping are largely representative and largely complementary to each other. So I appreciate that remark. There's plenty I left out, no doubt about it and if I do something more extensive in the future, I'll try to be more inclusive of events because a lot of those events do help the understanding of the larger movement. 
“Social media tends to be ableist in nature.” That’s right and when we see great stuff encouraging disabilities- this is on my question, my suggestion about social media. Social media is a great way to project outward. That's a problem. And it's, I don't know. I'm skeptical, even before the election I was skeptical of social media, and more skeptical of it now. So yeah. It's a possibility and it's the one everybody suggests when they talk about new media. But I'm skeptical.  
Here's one more question. “What difference do you think it has made that the advocates for those with intellectual disabilities have been primarily parents or professionals while those with physical, sensory, and/or mental illness have been persons with the disabilities?” My guess would be it's just- we're not used to in this society, listening to people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities. We tend to shy away from that, where if somebody, if you could just listen to somebody who is in a wheelchair or is blind, then people can relate to that. But we still shun people with mental illness and it's a shame, but we do, and that's one of the reasons why Burton Blatt's book was so impressive that it brought people- I would say it's just shunning. That's one of the reasons why these institutions existed in the first place, to get people with intellectual disabilities and mental illness just out of our way and warehoused and these turned into warehouses by the late 19th century to just keep custody of people so that we didn't have to look at them. So it's a really good question and I think that's a reasonable response.  
Again, it's one, now that I raised that issue about testing an ex post facto, a number of things I said today could stand some more testing and I'm going to pursue some of them. I've been asked to do a sort of written version of what I did, an expanded version. I will take all of these questions into account. You folks have raised questions that I didn't think of, and I wish I had. Okay. What else do we have? A written version… I'm going try. We'll see. I raced through some things. Yeah I see some positive- I'm opening myself up for more work, but if it's got a good audience, then I would give it a shot. So we'll see. I would certainly- the thing is I would have the advantage of these questions and I think I can get at them all and transcribe them and use them as a guide. I gained at least as much, and this is always my teaching experience, I gain at least as much from my students as they gain from me. So I'm very grateful to all of you. I'll keep going as long as you want to. 

Barry Whaley: 
While we're waiting, you had referenced a couple of times Burton Blatt and Christmas in Purgatory. I'm wondering the impact that it's hard to put into context today just how significant that impact of Christmas in Purgatory was. There was nothing like it before. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the influence of Burton Blatt and his work.

Larry Logue:  
I lost you, Barry.

Barry Whaley:
Sorry about that. What I was saying is Christmas in Purgatory. 

Larry Logue:
I think I got the gist of the question, what is happening is I'm getting a delay. Let me say that there had been some reporters and politicians and hearings talking about the conditions in institutions, but again, going back to that previous question where you would love to hear from people, and occasionally some written things from the 19th century by people who lived in these institutions or went to the institution, they were pretty appalling. Since we can't and don't really want to hear from people very much who have mental illness or intellectual disabilities, seeing them and seeing the conditions under which they lived was powerful. It gets back to your question about media. And I will put in a plug for the way I used to do things. There are photographs that changed history, images that changed history that came out in the second half of the 20th century that are amazing such as the picture of Emmett Chills in his casket. Such as the picture of the people directing hateful venom at students trying to register at Little Rock High School. Such as the picture of the police chief of South Vietnam shooting a Viet Cong soldier in the head. Those pictures changed history. Images can change history like nothing else. I would say to Barry's question that that's it. Images have a power that nothing else does and Burton Blatt was the person who, and I've never seen the name of the photographer, I'm sure it's in there, they carried it out. They supplied the images. And again, this is supply and demand, that if you supply the images, and sometimes if they change history, then that means there's a curiosity. It means there is a willingness to see and learn out there that is fundamental. And so there are of course billions of pictures taken but only a handful changed history. And I would say Burton Blatt’s certainly did; it touched off the institutionalization of the 1970s and it shocked an awful lot of people. I hope that answers your question.  
We have another one. “Did these civil rights events coincide with events occurring in other countries?” Sorry? Let me do this question. Yes, they did. Many other countries saw ferment and saw activism by young people in the 1960s and there were civil rights movements in other countries. There was the effort to throw the British out of India. There were some parallels from time to time. And so some of these things, just like Arab Spring, say, for example, seem to be panoramic. Seem to cross boundaries sometimes and borders and we don't always know that folks are aware of each other, but we do. A major influence, to think of it, a major influence on the activism in the 1960s was a book written by an African activist called the Retched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. So there is a great deal of cross-fertilization. We have to necessarily be careful sometimes about taking it too far but the general answer is, yes, there were events occurring in other countries that paralleled some of the movements that we're seeing here.  
“Christmas in Purgatory was a visual reality to those of us who had visited state institutions and cemented the resolve of advocates and parents as I know it in New York City. A more modern photographer of the disability rights movement is Tom Olin who captured many a historic image in the 1980s.” Yes indeed. I didn't go too much into that because of Peter Blanck's work. He has extensive work on the runup to the ADA and so he may mention him. I'm not sure. But yeah, the images that we looked at of Disabled in Action and so forth were powerful too and they helped to change history. I've always been impressed by the one, the public transit folks in there. “I can't even get to the back of the bus.” That's a short comment. So a very good question. And this was really- there we go. The adapt photo that I put in is Tom's. I suspected that might be and so that was probably from the '80s. It may not be strictly from the '70s, but it's a striking image.  

Barry Whaley:
We have one more minute or two for questions, Larry, and then if not, we'll wrap up.  

Larry Logue:
Okay. 

Barry Whaley: 
I'm not seeing any, so Larry, first of all, I want to thank you. You have been a fabulous lecturer and we appreciate you taking us on this journey over the last four episodes. Speaking for myself, it was wonderful. I learned a lot. Additionally I want to thank Nicole, our closed captioner, thank you so much for all your work. Celestia Ohrazda and Marsha Schwanke, our producers, thank you. And as a reminder to those of us who are still in the room, the commissioner on rehabilitation counselor certification has approved History of Disabilities for 6 CRCC clock hours. These hours are approved from today until January 10, 2019. In order to earn this credit you have to attend all four live or archived sessions and have requested verification from the Southeast ADA Center. Additionally your feedback is important to us. I know that Marsha has a couple of times put up the evaluation link. Please take a few minutes to complete that evaluation. It helps us improve the work that we do at Southeast ADA center. Thank you for being with us today, as Peggy says, it's been time well spent and I totally agree with that, Peggy. We hope you've enjoyed this webinar series. If you have questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act, please contact your regional center at 18009494232 or you can call the Southeast ADA Center directly, 1-404-5419001, or our project email at adasoutheast@syr.edu and as a shameless plug or commercial in March we will present a threepart webinar series on financial inclusion that will include representatives from FDIC as well as a number of national banks and people representing able accounts. So I hope you have a great afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you soon.