People all over the country, not just people shut in convalescence
homes, but everyone in this country has learned that disabled people have a
tremendous amount of strength, that we are capable of leading a struggle that
has won major gains from the government. There’s a great deal of
self-confidence, a great deal of pride, that we have given to ourselves and to
disabled people all over the country. But we’ve also shown that if you wage a
really effective struggle and you don’t give up, you can win a victory. (“Handicapped,”
1977, p. 6)
As one of the central organizers of the near-unprecedented feat of
political strategy and collaboration that went into the victory of the
struggle, Cone knew well the historic import of their achievement. With 120
disabled activists and supporters occupying the federal building inside,
hundreds more regularly rallying in support on the outside, and crucial extensions
of practical assistance forthcoming from sundry other social movements – including
that of labor unions, LGBT activists, feminist groups, and racial justice organizations
– the 504 victory was a paradigm of cross-movement, cross-cultural, and
collaborative solidarity in the fight against social oppression. Of particular
note in this vein, though reported and theorized to a lesser extent at the time,
was the intersectional positioning of Blackness and disability as mutually
reinforcing matrices of the struggle (Connelly, 2020; Erkulwater, 2018; Lukin,
2013; Schweik, 2011).
The Pre-History of 504 and the Politics of Solidarity
San Francisco in the 1970s was a seething ferment of radical, emancipatory
unrest. Activism against the U.S. war on Vietnam was widespread on the campuses
and amongst war veterans; disabled students at Berkeley College were agitating
against structural impediments to their equality; gender and sexual liberation
groups were challenging ingrained norms and roles; and the mass struggle for
Black freedom – personified by the movements associated with Martin Luther
King, Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and others – was upending virtually all
pre-existing relations of American society.
This was the crucible that shaped the personages, politics, and
characteristics of the 504 movement. Linkages made, lessons learned, and leaderships
forged amidst the general social upheaval preceding the 504 sit-in ultimately
proved indispensable to its success. Figures like Cone, who through her experience
as an organizer with the Socialist Workers Party, had spent many years involved
in campaigns against racial segregation and had developed a sense of the utmost
importance of building coalitions and networks of solidarity across social
struggles (Dash,
2009; Landes, 2000).
Another key figure was Donald Galloway, one of the first Black
people to occupy a leading position within the Berkeley Independent Living
Center (ILC) movement in the mid-1970s. Galloway had long been pressuring the
ILC to take a more active role in the politics of racism and the life of the
Black community. Galloway was keenly aware of the fact that disability activism
surrounding the ILC had been negligent toward the specific experience of Black
disabled people in San Francisco and nearby Oakland. This negligence, Galloway argued,
was to the detriment of both the ILC and the Black disabled population who
could benefit from the resources, politics, and activist opportunities offered by the former (Erkulwater, 2018; Lukin, 2013;
Pelka, 2012, pp. 218-222).
I didn’t see very many black people. I was the first black person that I knew of at the Center, hired on the staff full-time. I was the only black, and I started bringing black people into the center as drivers and attendants, and bringing in professional types.... There was just a handful of us that came in, but we came together and decided that we needed some input into this system....
We were in a predominantly black community.... The movement was predominantly white. We needed to reach out to the black community in Oakland, get the Black Panthers involved, and any other group that would like to be involved. (Pelka, 2012, p. 220)
Although Galloway ultimately felt frustrated in his attempts to
establish overt connections between the disability movement and the local Black
population, his efforts were not without significant posterior effect. As
Galloway later recalled:
There was a severely
disabled man in the Black Panther Party[2]
named Brad [Lomax], and Brad was our link to the Black Panthers. We would go
and provide him with attendant care and transportation because we had a small
transportation system going, a fleet of vans going out to the community. Ed
[Roberts, the ILC director] made a decision that he wanted us to get more
involved with the Black Panthers and with Oakland. So we would go to some of
their meetings and explain our programs. Because Brad, one of their members, had
a severe disability, we were quite accepted. (Pelka, 2012, pp. 221-222)
This connection with Bradley Lomax and the
Black Panther Party (BPP) would prove to be eminently pivotal in the 504
struggle to come.
Lomax had been a member of the BPP for nearly a decade by the time
of the 504 sit-in. He had joined in the late 1960s in Washington where he was
actively involved as an organizer. In the mid-1970s, Lomax moved to Oakland
where he became acutely conscious of the parallel forms of oppression he
experienced as a Black person as well a disabled person. Writing in a belated
obituary for the New York Times’ “Overlooked” feature, Connelly (2020) recounts:
In Oakland, Lomax struggled
to navigate its transit system. To board a bus, his brother, Glenn, would have
to lift him out of his wheelchair, carry him up the steps and place him in a
seat, then go back to retrieve the wheelchair. Such indignities galvanized
Lomax to consider the plight of people with disabilities in a world that didn’t
make it easy for them.
In short order, Lomax became an active participant in the Oakland BPP’s
“serve the people” community organizing efforts (Schweik, 2011). This included, among other things,
setting up free food and medical care clinics for the poor and working-class
Black residents of the city. As part of this initiative, Lomax wanted to bring
disability politics and services into the picture. He began collaborating with
Ed Roberts and Donald Galloway in the attempt to integrate an ILC outreach
center into the life of Oakland. The BPP in turn grew more aware and active
around issues pertaining to the discrimination against disabled and elderly
people in the realm of transportation and housing, which enjoyed increased
coverage in the party newspaper, The Black Panther.
Later,
when a coalition began to materialize around the plan to occupy the HEW
building as an agitational pressure in support of Section 504, the BPP and
Lomax were well acquainted with the nature of the struggle for disability
justice and its immanence to the oppression of countless members of the Black
community. As a result, Lomax, fellow BPP member and Lomax’s attendant Chuck
Jackson, Dennis Billups, and other Black disabled activists both inside and
outside of the BPP were centrally involved with the 504 struggle from the start
(Schweik, 2011).
It is
no exaggeration to say that the success of the 504 sit-in owes just as much to
the involvement of the BPP and other Black activists as it does to movement
leaders like Cone, Judy Heumann, and myriad other supporting social movements.
At key junctures, the BPP mobilized to save the sit-in from collapsing under
the weight of state repression and countermovement measures. At one point early
in the occupation of the HEW building, federal police blocked off the entrances
to any further incoming participants; they also prohibited the delivery of any
food into the protesters. Corbett O’Toole, one of the HEW occupants, recalls:
One of the people with us
was a black man who was part of the Black Panthers. He called up the Panthers
and said, “I’m here in this demonstration.” ... They thought that anybody that challenged
the federal government’s domain over their lives and were fighting for
self-sufficiency and rights were cool people. And they had one guy in there and
so they showed up.
They were running a soup kitchen for
their black community in East Oakland and they showed up every single night and
brought us dinner. The FBI [guarding the building entrance] was like, “What the
hell are you doing?” They answered, “Listen, we’re the Panthers. You want to
starve these people out, fine, we’ll go tell the media that that’s what you’re
doing, and we’ll show up with our guns to match your guns and we’ll talk about
who’s going to talk to who about the food. Otherwise, just let us feed these
people and we won’t give you any trouble” – and that’s basically what they did.
I think the secret history of the 504
sit-in is that we never, ever would
have made it without the Black Panthers. Th Black Panthers fed us dinner – they
fed 150 people of which only one was a Panther – every single night for the
whole demonstration. We never would have survived without them. (Pelka, 2012, pp.
272-273)
Beyond providing crucial logistical assistance and a powerful boost
of moral solidarity to the cause of the 504 protesters, the BPP helped to
publicize, agitate, and solicit community support for the struggle. The Black
Panther regularly featured news items on the progress of the struggle and
explained the issues at stake to its readership. For instance, one issue of the
newspaper carried an interview with Dennis Billups, “a young blind Black man
from San Francisco ... one of the active and enthusiastic participants in the
ongoing occupation of the HEW offices by handicapped and disabled people
fighting for their civil and human rights” (Schweik, 2011). Billups’s interview reads like a
stunning call to action:
To my brothers and
sisters that are Black and that are handicapped: Get out there, we need you.
Come here, we need you. Wherever you are, we need you. Get out of your bed, get
into your wheelchair. Get out of your crutches, get into your canes. If you
can't walk, call somebody, talk to somebody over the telephone; if you can't
talk, write; if you can't write use sign language .... We need to do all we
can. We need to show the government that we can have more force than they can
ever deal with ... (Schweik,
2011)
After
the signing of the 504 regulations and the declaration of victory by the HEW
protesters, The Black Panther ran a special issue devoted to the
struggle, including interviews, analysis, and a primer on the legal details of
“504: Civil Rights for the Disabled” (“Handicapped,”
1977). The front-page headline screamed in capital letters, “HANDICAPPED
WIN DEMANDS – END H.E.W. OCCUPATION.” The lead article, notwithstanding the
relative unfamiliarity with a disability-positive framework betrayed by its
word choice, presented a touching assessment of the significance of the struggle
itself, noting that in addition to the victory that was the actual signing of
the 504 regulations by the U.S. Secretary of the HEW, there was also
another victory, a
triumph of the human will, actually, achieved here in the Bay Area. It is the
type of victory that can’t be pinpointed by any one single act ... Its
expression came in many ways; for instance ... when a young Black woman came up
to Brad Lomax, a Black Panther Party member victimized by multiple sclerosis
... and embracing him in his wheelchair, remarked, “Thank you for setting an
example for all of us;”
In a very real sense, ending the HEW
occupation was like breaking up a family – a farewell to the tightly knit,
caring, human community the disabled demonstrators and their aides formed among
themselves....
Over and over the significant themes were
repeated at the rally – “human rights,” “equal access,” “and end to
segregation,” “finally feeling like a human being” – all summed up by Kitty
Cone when she simply yelled into the microphone the one thought behind all the
smiling emotions, “WE WON, WE WON, WE WON!” (“Handicapped,” 1977, p. 6)
Theorizing Blackness and Disability
The 504 struggle epitomized the possibilities of a reified
politics of solidarity between the struggles for disability and racial justice.
The theoretical implications embodied by the history of 504 continue to feature
prominently in the ideations of scholars and activists concerned with the
overlapping, intersecting, and underappreciated epistemologies of a disability Black
studies (Artiles, 2013; Campbell, 2008; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Erkulwater,
2018; Liasidou, 2014; Mollow, 2017; Schweik, 2011).
Building on the novel work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in advancing the
theory of intersectional forms of oppression, Erevelles and Minear (2013) have written
about the contemporary relevance of a theoretical model for understanding the unique
phenomenology of simultaneously embodied Blackness and disability. In
particular, Erevelles and Minear reference the fact that throughout the
nation’s public schools, Black children tend to be disproportionately affixed
with medicalized disability diagnoses and consequently overrepresented within
special education programs.
This theme also figures in the writings of Artiles (2013) and Liasidou
(2014). Artiles considers the complicated nature of the discourse surrounding
the “racialization of disabilities” as demonstrated by the foregoing trend, in
which the “double bind” of inherited racial oppression and acquired disability
oppression “further compounds the structural disadvantages that each group has historically
endured” (2013, pp. 329, 330). Meanwhile, Liasidou argues that a convergence of
Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies enables a coherent framework for
understanding such a “double bind” (or triple, quadruple, etc.). Referencing
Guillaume (2011), Liasidou argues that “the racial and disabled identity of a
person cannot be disentangled, precisely because the experience of disability
and racism cannot be addressed separately.... [This] analysis focuses on
criticizing antidiscrimination legislation and education policies that address
separately issues of disability and racism while ignoring the ways in which
certain individuals might experience intersectional forms of unequal and
discriminatory treatment” (as cited in Liasidou, 2014, p. 732).
The efficacy of a theory and praxis informed by a model of racial-disablist
oppression is in its ability to elucidate the real lived experiences and
encounters of discrimination of people who are both Black and disabled. That is
to say, in the realms of employment, education, and civil society, there are
instances in which a person may face oppression exclusively because they are both
Black and disabled. Imagine a person applying for a job with an employer who
harbors the prevailing social prejudices against Black people and disabled
people. Perhaps if the person was Black but not disabled, they may fall just
short of the discriminatory threshold of the employer and be offered the
position. Likewise if the person was disabled but White. However, the
cumulative prejudices that the employer holds towards Black people and,
separately, towards disabled people, may be sufficient to surpass the discriminatory
threshold when embodied in a job applicant who is both Black and disabled.
Consequently, the person who has suffered the discrimination in this instance is
neither the victim of racial discrimination, as such, or disability
discrimination, as such, but rather a uniquely racial-disablist discrimination.
In other words, they were not denied the job simply because they are
Black or simply because they are disabled; rather, they were denied the
job because they are both Black and disabled.
This hearkens to some of the thoughts discussed by Johnnie Lacy, a
Black disabled woman who was inspired into political activism by the events of
the 504 sit-in. Lacy, who held a leading position within the California ILC
movement in the 1980s, speaks of first beginning to self-consciously integrate her
various identities into a multiple whole in the context of the 504 milieu:
I believe that African
Americans see [people with] disabilities in the same way that everybody else
sees us—worthless, mindless—without realizing that this is the same attitude
held by others toward African Americans. This belief in effect cancels out the
black identity they share with a disabled black person, both socially and
culturally, because the disability experience is not viewed in the same context
as if one were only black, and not disabled. Because of this myopic view, I as
a black disabled person could not share in the intellectual dialogue viewed as
exclusive to black folk. In other words, I could be one or the other but not
both....
One of the things that I’ve learned is
that I cannot allow myself to fall into the trap of being identified by others,
that I have to have a sense of my own personal identity. And that sense is very
much tied into who I am as a woman of color and as a disabled person, and I try
not to distinguish between the three identities anymore. (Pelka, 2012, pp.
352-353)
Conclusion and Further Areas of Study
There is much to learn from the experience of the 504 struggle,
both theoretical and practical. The analytical implications and potential areas
of study of a racial-disablist model of oppression are myriad. Mollow (2017) provides
an urgent and contemporary example of this in their discussion of the Black
Lives Matter movement and the instances of police violence for which it has
sought redress. Mollow notes that in the cases of Eric Garner, Barbara Dawson,
and Tamir Rice (to name a few), all of whom were killed by police, their deaths
were painted by police apologists as a consequence of, variously, their
obesity, their asthma, or their heart condition. As one cop wrote in an online
forum apropos of Garner’s death, “Let’s stop making excuses for criminal behavior
because they are black. This guy would have died going up a flight of stairs. His
diet killed him” (quoted in Perry, 2014, as cited in Mollow, 2017, p. 107). Here
we see a perfect illustration of how racism and disablism are brought together
in order to articulate a narrative that attempts to blame the victim for their
own oppression at the hands of an armed agent of state repression.
Despite the advent of our putatively post-racial era in the
aftermath of the Obama presidency, and a post-disability discrimination era in
the aftermath of the ADA, the scourges of racism and disability oppression
persist; as does the scourge of racialized-disability oppression. The capacity
of new and emergent social struggles to affect the type of fundamental,
structural change necessary to truly win justice in twenty-first century
America will henceforth depend upon the centering and cultivating of an
intersectional framework as diverse, varied, and multiple as really-existing
society and the oppressions it stubbornly persists in reproducing.
References
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Campbell, F. A. K. (2008). Exploring internalized ableism using
critical race theory. Disability & Society, 23(2), 151-162.
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[1]
The 504 sit-in remains, to date, the longest sit-in ever to take place at a federal
building (Livingstone, 2020).
[2]
The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary, socialist, Black liberation
organization that emerged and grew rapidly throughout the 1970s.
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