Our fight for disability rights -- and why we're not done yet | Judith Heumann
Four decades ago, Judith Heumann helped to lead a groundbreaking protest called the Section 504 sit-in -- in which disabled-rights activists occupied a federal building for almost a month,...
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I was born in 1947, a long time ago, and when I was 18 months old, I had polio. I was in an iron lung for three months and in and out of the hospital for three years. Now, we had lots of neighbors in our Brooklyn neighborhood, and some of them were really very helpful for my parents. Some of them were really afraid of contagion, and they wouldn't even walk in front of our house. They would literally walk across the street. I think this was a time when my family really began to realize what disability meant to some people: fear. And it wasn't even a sure thing that I would live at home, although I didn't learn about this until I was 36 years old. I was having a discussion with my father one night, and he said, "You know, when you were tw...
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I was born in 1947, a long time ago, and when I was 18 months old, I had polio. I was in an iron lung for three months and in and out of the hospital for three years. Now, we had lots of neighbors in our Brooklyn neighborhood, and some of them were really very helpful for my parents. Some of them were really afraid of contagion, and they wouldn't even walk in front of our house. They would literally walk across the street. I think this was a time when my family really began to realize what disability meant to some people: fear. And it wasn't even a sure thing that I would live at home, although I didn't learn about this until I was 36 years old. I was having a discussion with my father one night, and he said, "You know, when you were tw...
