Stigma persists like an incurable cancer, penalizing persons with disabilities generation after generation, yet historians, sociologists, and psychologists have never come together in a concerted way to investigate why public attitudes toward disabled persons reflect fear and discomfort. The only recent documentation of unbridled prejudice and hate was compiled by Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich as it systematically murdered thousands of helpless disabled persons. That horror has inspired disability rights activists for more than 60 years.
The United Nations declared 1980 a global “Year of The Disabled Person,” to recognize the desperate plight of millions of physically, mentally and developmentally challenged men, women and children, chiefly in developing nations, shunned by their governments, ignored by their neighbors, and often abandoned by their families.
In the United States that year, a White House Conference on The Disabled Person was convened to address issues of parity in education and employment. Conferees recommended reasonable workplace accommodations and special equipment to enable qualified disabled persons to attend classes, seek employment in factories, shops and offices, and enter all the professions.
The conference, designed and directed by disabled persons, was attended by thousands of other disabled persons from every corner of the nation. The National Organization on Disability was born of that effort, and directed by its founder, Alan Reich, until his death in 2005. It was Reich, scholar and former athlete, a quadriplegic from a diving accident, who addressed the United Nations General Assembly in his wheelchair and won approval for, “The Year of The Disabled Person.”
That international surge encouraged disabled persons to believe years of second class citizenship, blatant and subtle denial of opportunity, and inaccessible office buildings, restaurants and hotels, were coming to an end. But it would take another decade to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, and a second decade to assure its compliance. It is still a work in progress.
Even the government dragged its heels. It wasn’t until 1968 that the late Hugh Gregory Gallagher, then administrative assistant to Senator Bob Bartlett of Alaska, drafted legislation assuring access to federal buildings for persons with disabilities. Gallagher had tired of being stranded in the Senate parking garage until a passerby would hoist his wheelchair over a curb. A ramp was installed. That ramp was a symbol, for all progress has come slowly, and with great effort.
In 2002, James D. Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank and former chairman of the board of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, observed that 400 million disabled people in the world’s developing countries – about 20 percent of their populations - lived in poverty, isolation and despair. Childhood diseases erased by inoculations in the United States continued to kill millions of infants in developing nations before their first birthday, he said, and polio, eradicated in the U.S. through vaccinations in the 1950s, still paralyzed and maimed thousands of children around the world despite the indefatigable efforts of the World Health Organization and Rotary International.
Unless disabled people are brought into the mainstream, Wolfensohn warned, it would be impossible to cut poverty or give every boy and girl the chance to receive a primary education. More than 180 world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September, 2000, set those two goals for 2015. In 2011, prospects seem slim. What is clear is that addressing disability issues is a significant part of reducing poverty.
Even in the United States, discrimination and stigma still burden the lives of disabled persons, impeding their entry into the workplace, and limiting their access to transportation, housing, restaurants and places of entertainment. They are restricted in ways that never occur to able-bodied people, and sometimes denied rights non-disabled persons take for granted.
On Maryland’s Mid Shore, the disAbility Coalition of Talbot County, Chesapeake Voyagers, the Chesapeake and Caroline Centers for developmental disabilities, the Mid Shore Mental Health Systems. The Mental Health Association in Talbot County, and other service-provider organizations seek to improve the lives of persons with disabilities. The Hugh Gregory Gallagher Motivational Theatre, Inc. raises public awareness of disability issues through dramatizations of real life experiences.
But we still have not established an ongoing international dialogue among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians and disability advocates, with periodic summit meetings, to lift the burden of stigma from future generations.
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Carlton E. Spitzer
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