ABSTRACT
In April 1977, a coordinated group of disability rights activists staged protest actions at the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare in Washington, D.C. and in eight of its regional offices across the country. These demonstrators, many of whom used wheelchairs or mechanical ventilators, were fighting for the full-scale implementation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and its significant Section 504, which was established to extend civil rights legislation of the 1960s by prohibiting programs that received federal funding from discriminating against people with disabilities. Historically, people with disabilities had been either segregated within or isolated from the social world for so long that their public presence typically solicited pity rather than registering recognition. In San Francisco, disabled activists deliberately defied that history by occupying the Health, Education, and Welfare offices for twenty-five days, fed and cared for by their friends and attendants as well as by local unions, Bay Area countercultural groups, and Oakland’s Black Panthers that recognized in their struggle much of what other civil rights organizations, both radical and mainstream, had tried to achieve in the 1960s and early 1970s (Johnson 1983, Shapiro 1993).
