The Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (or MOPD) is a longtime fixture in New York City government, and in the city’s disability community. But this now taken-for-granted office was the dream and aspiration of some of our first and most radical leaders.
Pressure for an agency focused on the disability community dates to the earliest days of our movement. Back in 1966, as Julie and Mollie Shaw put it in correspondence with City Hall, such an office was essential for “the emancipation of the handicapped,” to “secure and protect for handicapped citizens their right to function as members of a democratic society.”
The push for a city agency was, in part, a workaround for a crucial omission from the then–recent federal Civil Rights Acts, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the like. Those statutes were designed to enhance the cause of freedom and opportunity, but as Mollie and Julie noted, “the groups specified were race, religion, sex and age.” Disability was left out. “It is apparent that none of our legislators were aware that the handicapped are also a special sub-group of the American scene; the most defenseless and most needful group of citizens denied equal opportunity” (this federal omission would, of course, not be finally corrected until the Americans with Disabilities Act, in 1990).
The campaign for a city disability agency went on for several years, slowly accumulating support and momentum. By January 1968, a report on a Mayor’s Committee on the Handicapped was on Mayor John Lindsay’s desk. Activists had been urging that such a Committee had to have membership from the disability community itself, and the Mayor evidently agreed, because on February 26 Julie was invited to serve on the new Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped (or MAC), the first iteration of what is now MOPD.
As Mayor Lindsay’s invitation put it, “the work confronting the Committee is of great importance to me and to the large number of handicapped people in our city; and I look forward to the benefit of your thinking on how we can help accomplish the work which must be done.”
The community importance of the office was then universally understood—as the pivotal movement leader Eunice Fiorito later put it, this wouldn’t simply be “another government authority. It represents the history of a social movement.”
But following the thrilling invitation to join MAC, Julie and Mollie heard . . . nothing.
Creation of the office seemed suspended in midair.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., the last great civil rights bill of the 1960s was being debated—the Fair Housing Act. If it passed, for the first time it would become illegal to discriminate in the sale or rental of housing. Civil rights legislation had so far avoided the subject of housing policy, because it was just too controversial. President Lyndon Johnson’s advisers warned him that housing was a political loser, and that it would be literally incendiary to legislate what sorts of people could live near each other.
The enormity of the Fair Housing Act was then universally understood. Congress had in fact already rejected an earlier version of the law.
A revised fair housing bill was introduced in 1967, by Senator Walter Mondale. In a summer marked by widespread urban riots, Senate conservatives mounted a filibuster. Efforts to break the filibuster were unsuccessful until after March 1, 1968, when the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, better known as the Kerner Commission, issued its report.
The Kerner Report’s primary finding was the oft-quoted warning that “America is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It urged concerted and massive public intervention. Prodded by Kerner, ten days later the Senate passed Mondale’s fair housing bill. It then went to the House, where many supporters thought it would be defeated.
While the fair housing bill languished in the House, back in New York City, on April 3, 1968, Julie and Mollie wrote to Lindsay to complain about City Hall’s failure to act on the new Advisory Committee for the Handicapped.
The next day, Thursday, April 4, the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King was shot and killed.
Just as an atom bomb makes craters, American cities blew up the night of King’s death. As the news of King’s death broke, residents of Harlem flooded the streets. Mayor Lindsay was at a Broadway show but left immediately when the news was brought to him. Over his aides’ objections, Lindsay headed uptown. “Somebody just has to go up there,” he said. “Somebody white just has to face that emotion and say that we’re sorry.” Lindsay remained in Harlem for several hours, and as Jimmy Breslin put it the next day, the people “understood the truth of John Lindsay. And there was no riot in New York.”
Amazingly, King’s assassination broke the stalemate, both in D.C. and in New York. That Monday, April 8, Lindsay finally issued the long-awaited Executive Order and constituted the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped.
On Thursday, April 11, exactly one week after King’s death, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act. On the very same day, at approximately the same time, up in New York City John Lindsay formally presented certificates of appointment for the new Mayor’s Advisory Committee and called into being the nation’s very first permanent public body focused on the disability community.
Very likely this timing was no accident. Lindsay had been Deputy Chair of the Kerner Commission and was one of the Report’s most prominent signatories. In convening MAC at the same time as the Fair Housing Act was signed, the two were symbolically paired, as great moves towards freedom in the United States.
This April 11 will be the 58th anniversary of what is now MOPD. Let us remember the fiery hopes and dreams which kindled that body into being.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please go to www.DisabilityHistoryNYC.com