What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement by Fred Pelka (review)

While much of America was following the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement, there was another civil rights movement brewing that has received far less attention. The disability rights movement gave birth to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—civil rights legislation for persons with disabilities—that President George H. W. Bush signed in July of 1990. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the act will be celebrated this year (2015).

The preface to Fred Pelka’s What We Have Done begins appropriately with the mantra of the disability rights movement, “Nothing about us without us,” and the book chronicles the development of the disability rights movement through the voices of disability rights advocates. The book covers a broad spectrum of disability rights advocacy, from the founding of organizations like the Little People of America in the 1950s through the passage and signing the of Americans with Disabilities Act. The book’s broad spectrum is significant because it is a large part of the story. One of the major challenges in the disability rights movement was getting the various communities—the deaf, the blind, the mobility impaired, and those with cognitive and psychological disabilities—to work toward a common goal.

Pelka draws on three sources for his work: interviews he conducted himself, interviews that the University of California at Berkeley conducted, and interviews that the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund conducted. The interviews are arranged to illuminate major themes in the story, including the discrimination that gave rise to the movement, the abuses that took place at institutions, the development of the disability press, and the development and passage of the ADA. Rather than presenting interviews in their totality as individual documents, Pelka has distributed excerpts from interviews throughout various portions of the book, allowing the narrators to comment on the various themes in the book and various aspects and events from the movement. The excerpts are accompanied by headnotes providing background and context on each narrator and topic.

Pelka devotes considerable space to the rise of the independent living movement—tracing its beginnings at Berkeley—and to the institutional abuses endured by persons with disabilities at Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. The story of those abuses and the fight to shut down places like Willowbrook provide some of the more moving narratives in the book.

Two of the stories told in the book will be perhaps more familiar to those who did not follow the disability rights movement closely. The first is the story of the protestors who occupied federal offices in San Francisco for twenty-five days in a successful effort to force Health Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano to issue regulations enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, legislation that served as a precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act. The second is the story of the Deaf President Now! protests at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, in March, 1988. Those protests at the school that had served deaf students since 1864, but never with a deaf educator at the helm, resulted in the rejection of a hearing candidate for the top spot at the university and the installation of Dr. I. King Jordan as Gallaudet’s first deaf president.

What We Have Done is a story of how a constellation of individuals, organizations, and groups, including Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) and Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), developed and came together, learning the ropes of advocacy, the use of political levers, and a few tactics from Saul Alinsky to effect a sweeping change in American society through the courts and through Congress. It concludes with the lobbying effort and legislative drama leading up to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the aftermath. Illustrating the work are black and white photos depicting major events in the disability rights struggle, including...