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Sure. In the mid 60s, as you previously heard from other people that you have spoken to
in the movement, there was a real upheaval in this country. There was a lot of questioning
of why we were doing a lot of things politically, and it was a perfect time for people with
disabilities to find themselves and to find their voice politically, and Ed was one of
those people who recognized very early on that in order to be successful in this country,
and to change policy in this country, you have to be politically active, and I think
a lot of us can do that conclusion very quickly. So, back in those days, it was a good time
for upheaval because we had people like Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann, and Max Starkloff,
and Charlie Carr, and Alex Friedman, and Marca Bristo, all beginning to question why people
with disabilities are relegated to second-class citizenship, and so it was a good time to
find their voice and speak up. There were no laws regulating housing, accessibility,
there were no laws for education for kids, and integrated programs, there was no ADA,
there was no funding for independent living centers where… there were no independent
living centers in early 60s. CIL was founded in 1970. But the kinds of opportunities that
people with disabilities experienced were really the opportunities that they pretty
much made for themselves. That’s not to discount the contributions that many people
made before that. Medical advancement had actually… the fact that medical advancement
had come so far and that rehabilitation, not only physical rehabilitation but vocational
rehabilitation must be gaining prominence in this country, as something that the people
with disabilities have the right to experience, really led to the opportunities for people
with disabilities to be healthy enough to go ahead and have a voice and speak and say,
hey, I can do my own thing. Because prior to that, if you didn’t have good health,
I mean, what you were gonna talking about? You weren’t even well enough to talk about
having rights. So this kind of advancement, I think, contributed greatly to people with
disabilities having/experiencing better quality of life and being able to begin to move on
from that. But what happened and what people spoke out load a lot in the early days was
the medical model of treating people with disabilities, and so at that time, social
policy and service problems were based pretty much on medical model as opposed to a social
construct of the civil rights construct. The idea that the people with disabilities had
civil rights was really something that came from people with disabilities saying that
we should have the same civil rights that all citizens have in this country. But the
medical model was a very predominate way of looking at dealing with the issue of disability.
There has been over time with the ..uh.. passing of critical laws that affect the rights of
disabled people and there has been a whole bunch of them, the IDEA being one of the most
recent ones, there was 94142 the Education for Handicapped Children Act, Section 5…
the 93112 Rehabilitation Act that was upgraded from what it had been previously, which provided
vocational training and opportunities for folks with disabilities. There were the Equal
Access Act, Civil Rights Act of 1964, there were a lot of things that didn’t touch people
with disabilities but it was a model and it was significant that people with disabilities
were not included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in protection, so there were a lot
of things that begin to lead to a shift in thinking, and it was really led by folks who
were disabled, who were speaking up and saying, “ Wait a minute, don’t set social policies
without consulting us and don’t try to determine what kind of services will affect our lives
without involving us”, and then it very quickly became involving us in a significant
decision making ways because initially all we got were invitations to sit on the advisory
committee while non-disabled consultants were hired to make recommendations on policy changes
and here we were, little members of advisory groups, and had to volunteer…