The Legacy of Judith Heumann by Cai Cherry

On 4 March 2023, the disability rights movement lost its mother. Judith Heumann, aged 75, passed away at her home in Washington DC.

Born in 1947, to German Jewish immigrants, Heumann contracted polio at the age of 18 months, and used a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Over her life, she not only witnessed a revolution in the treatment of disabled people by society, but she led that revolution, even from a young age.

Judith was denied the right to attend public school, being called a “fire hazard” due to the fact she couldn’t walk. For three years, she was taught for two hours a week at home, while her mother, who had lost her family to the Holocaust, fought for her to be granted access to proper education. Eventually being allowed to attend a special school – situated in the basement of a ‘real’ school – Heumann’s mother again had to rally against the city of Philadelphia’s policy forcing high school students with disabilities to return to home instruction. Because of her mother, the school reversed the policy, and Heumann graduated from a public high school, and went on to receive bachelor’s and master’s degrees in speech therapy and public health.

From when she was 9 until she was 18, Judith attended Camp Jened, a summer camp for disabled children and the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp. Here, she made lifelong friends and fellow activists, with whom she would continue to work with and fight with against discrimination against people with disabilities. During her time at university, she organised protests and rallies demanding equal access to classrooms and the right to live in a dorm, as well as against the Vietnam War. When she graduated, Judith was then denied the right to teach in a public school, despite passing the oral and written exams, on the basis that she was, again, unable to evacuate in a fire.

The headlines read “You Can Be President, Not Teacher, With Polio” when she sued the Board of Education for discrimination, eventually forcing them to settle, and being granted her teaching licence as the first wheelchair user to teach in New York City.

With the notoriety brought about by her lawsuit, Heumann established ‘Disabled in Action’, an organisation aiming to protect the civil rights of disabled people. She fought for legislation which would have forbidden educational discrimination against children with disabilities, and when the law was eventually passed, she fought for its enforcement.

When the government official charged with enforcing the anti-discrimination law refused to do so, on the basis he needed extra time to ‘review’ it, Judith staged a sit-in with 150 others at the San Francisco Health, Education and Welfare Building. For days, she sat. There were no showers, the phone lines had been cut, and they survived on food donated by local restaurants and the Black Panthers (a Black civil rights organisation.)

“We want the law enforced. We want no more segregation. We will accept no more discussion of segregation,” she told a staffer.

24 days later, after the longest sit-in of a federal building in American history, the government finally relented.

The 1977 protest paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which extended the anti-discrimination rules to private sector workplaces.

Heumann went onto serve in the administrations of Presidents Clinton and Obama, and continued her work advocating for the rights of people with disabilities until her death. She advised the World Bank Group and the Ford Foundation.

While the laws Heumann fought for were restricted in scope to the US, she has travelled the world speaking up for the rights of those with disabilities. She pushed for international treaties on disability equality.

I was born in 2000 – 53 years after Judith Heumann, and thousands of miles away. I became disabled in 2019, 70 years after she did. When Heumann was eight years old, she was being pushed in her wheelchair to a sweetshop when a boy came up and asked if she was sick.

“I felt very upset… I didn’t yell at him, but I did say, No, I wasn’t sick,” she said. “The world thought I was sick.”

And yet, I still had people ask me if I was sick. “What happened?” they would ask, with a sympathetic head-tilt.

The world is not perfect. The UK followed the US with anti-discrimination legislation related to disability five years after the ADA, and the barriers facing disabled people too often feel like we haven’t moved an inch. But, because of Judith Heumann we no longer have to fight for the right to work, to be educated, to be allowed into shops and museums.

Because of everything she did, we have rights, and we have a voice to demand them.

At the MyPlus Annual Reception 2022, Cai was presented with The Best Disability Speaker / Advocate Award.