Be Heumann

Imagine a world in which children with disabilities cannot go to public school because they are a “fire hazard.”

Imagine a world where there is no requirement that public buildings have ramps, streets have curb cuts, or public transit be accessible.

And imagine living in some American cities where it was a crime for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.”

This is the world in which Judy Heumann (appropriately pronounced “human”) lived, and the world she changed. Often called “the mother of the disability rights movement,” Judy died on March 4 at age 75, after a lifetime of fighting, and of winning. We owe her a great debt of gratitude. Without her, our lives would be very different.

Judy was born in 1947, and contracted polio at age 2. At first, she was denied the American privilege of public education, but her parents did not give up. Inspired by their determination, she became a fierce advocate for disability rights and an inspiration to others.

Decades before the ADA became law, Judy fought for the passage of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated, “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States, shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

4 years later, it had yet to be implemented. Officials argued that the cost of retrofitting and fixing federally funded buildings would be enormous, and therefore took no action. Judy and other brave and determined individuals led a weeks-long sit-in at the San Francisco office of the Department of Health Education and Welfare (now HHS) to get action.

And from there, Judy never gave up. Judy never stopped.

After years of fighting from the outside, Judy moved to Washington in 1993 to work for the Education Department, as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Later, President Barack Obama later appointed her as the State Department’s first special adviser for international disability rights.

It is not too much to say that Judy not only led the disability community, she was a major force in creating it. “We were creating a community that hadn’t existed earlier,” she once said. “We stayed together because people were recognizing and really were believing that we could make a difference.”

Judy Heumann changed laws and changed the physical world in which we all live. But perhaps even more importantly, Judy Heumann changed attitudes. “People weren’t used to thinking of us as fighters — when they thought about us at all,” she recalled in a 2020 memoir, “Being Heumann.”