Julius and Mollie Shaw, my parents, played a fundamental role in redefining New Yorkers with disabilities as a minority group, with issues of its own and an agenda that would no longer be kept silent. As much as anyone, beginning in 1961. Mollie and Julie catalyzed, organized and articulated into being the New York City Disability Rights Movement—right in the living room of my childhood home.
Julie was a Bronx boy, born in 1924, who contracted polio at less than a year old. He became a part of the Old Left, and acquired political and leadership skills running a Communist-front political group in the 1940s. In 1955 he met my mother, Mollie Rose, who was seemingly able-bodied but in fact had a severe case of epilepsy, a so-called hidden disability. Soon they moved in together. A few years later, there were kids.
In the early 1960s, a critical mass of people with disabilities came together at an accessible swimming pool in Great Neck, New York. Their first political target was an exemption from paying parking meter fees. Led by my parents, after a fight lasting more than five years, on October 10, 1966, Mayor John Lindsay signed into law a bill allowing disabled drivers to park free at meters throughout the City. It was the very first law in New York State meant to protect a right special to people living with disabilities.
A few months later, on January 24, 1967, came a hastily organized but highly effective and well-publicized picket at City Hall, meant to protest a new plan to ease congestion in Midtown by prohibiting parking and towing away all parked cars—including those belonging to people with disabilities. No one had ever before heard the case for disability rights put so plainly, and within about ten days the City backed down.
The towaway picket was the breakout moment. Landing at the intersection of community self-definition, the media, and politics, it put the new cause firmly onto all these maps for the first time, all at once—and, as it turned out, permanently—and created a space that simply hadn’t existed before. It led directly to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, which preceded the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, the first-ever permanent governmental disability body. Julie became one of the inaugural members.
These early activists created a political model that still holds today: build a cross-disability coalition and engage in lobbying and civil action—up to and including civil disobedience—to promote changes in the physical, legal, and cultural fabric.
One of my parents’ most important accomplishments reached fruition on December 27, 1977, when an elevator began operating in City Hall. Providing physical access for the first time in the City’s history, it meant that people with disabilities could participate in public deliberations, like all other citizens. Not long after, Julie succeeded Eunice Fiorito and became the second Director of the Mayor’s Office for the Handicapped.
My parents retired in 1979, and led largely quiet lives thereafter, until they passed away in 1984 and 1996. Their positive impact continues to reverberate throughout York City’s disability community.
Read all 35 stories of the New York-based leaders profiled in our ADA 35 edition.