The first truly militant rhetoric for disability rights came in a time and place of surpassing unlikeliness: the tiny town of Imboden, Arkansas, in 1914. It originated from a no less improbable source—a severely disabled, largely self-educated Southerner who managed to get himself elected mayor of his hometown at the age of twenty years old, making him the youngest mayor in American history, to that time. His name was Joseph F. Sullivan, and after completing his two-year term as mayor of Imboden, he penned and published The Unheard Cry, a book-length essay that combined a screed against the prejudice of the nondisabled with a plea for understanding and some minimal accommodation for people with disabilities.
Sullivan pursued his subject with practically a preacher’s imperative. “The Spartans murdered by taking life; the Americans murder by taking all the hopes, ambitions, and aspirations of life–which means a more dreadful death.” Sullivan even presented an echo of Frederick Douglass’ famous address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in a chapter entitled “The Cripples’ Christmas:”
“It is the Canyon of the Cripple. See! Down yonder in those doomed and dismal depths are half a million poor, unhappy beings—human in body, though slightly deformed and distorted, humans in soul, human in heart, human in mind, human in ambition—but neglected, ostracized by the government, overlooked by the Christians, deserted by their own flesh and blood, outcasts of society, enthralled in a condition of physical and financial helplessness, burdened by a yoke of ignorance, and seemingly forgotten of Heaven! . . . there is nothing for them other than sighs from the heart and tears from the eyes when Christmas comes . . . No wonder that some doubt the existence of a loving, merciful and just God . . .”
Yet Sullivan was indignant rather than despairing, for he had an idea. The central problem was that “the Cripple has nothing but his brain to rely on—and his brain remains untrained.” Sullivan’s solution was an accessible school—the “Cripples’ Industrial College”—where people with disabilities might develop their minds and their skills.
By asserting that people with disabilities have a right, as citizens, to an opportunity to build satisfying lives, Sullivan formulated positions that would not bear fruit for almost half a century. But his book’s primary accomplishment, what makes it still worth reading, lay in articulating for the first time the accumulated rage of disabled people. In its thundering argumentation and frequent recourse to Scripture, The Unheard Cry is the Old Testament of the disability rights movement.
A few years later Sullivan moved north, seeking a degree in literature. How that quest fared is unclear, but his activism continued. Sullivan soon emerged as the editor of the Hospital School Journal, a professional periodical for medical practitioners working with people with disabilities. Its base in Detroit evidenced an emerging national consciousness for what was then coming to be known as “the rehabilitation movement.”
Sullivan became ideologue-in-chief, penning dozens of articles in which he profiled both disabled people who were undermined by pity (a poison, Sullivan called it), and others who successfully fought back, realized their ambitions, became self-supporting and, therefore, were no longer dependent.
The rehabilitation movement developed tremendous momentum over the next few years, adding schools, summer camps, medical facilities, and the new discipline of occupational therapy. By 1923, as Sullivan wrote, “The Unheard Cry Was Now Heard.” But even as Sullivan published that triumphant article, the moment that it celebrated was receding into history.
Punctured by the Great Polio Epidemic of 1916, the First World War, and the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the optimism of the early twentieth century shattered—and with it soon went the rehabilitation movement. In a sad rebuttal to Joseph Sullivan’s boast, there came a lowering of sights for people with disabilities, from full integration to a new segregation in which rote, low-wage jobs in sheltered workshops became the highest aspiration. By 1925 Sullivan had given up. He quit the movement, never to return.
The story trails off after this. I could not find any record of Sullivan’s subsequent life, nor even the date of his death. More than thirty-five years would pass before the modern chapter in disability liberation began to rise.
But as one of our nation’s first and most forceful disability activists, Joseph F. Sullivan of Imboden, Arkansas deserves our eternal respect, and an everlasting place in our memory.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please go to www.DisabilityHistoryNYC.com