In 2015, Mayor Bill DeBlasio declared that henceforth July was going to be Disability Pride Month in New York City. The declaration was celebrated with a parade and the first-ever museum exhibit about disability activism in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum (curated by Yours Truly).
There have been debates about whether the parades held in and after 2015 were the first Disability Pride parades in the City, or whether certain earlier marches, held in the 1990s under a different name, were also disability pride events. I am not about to wade into any definitional debates. But even though the term “Disability Pride” wasn’t widely in use before 2015, the idea of taking pride in the accomplishments and the strength of the City’s disability community goes back long before. Let’s talk about some of the precursors to Disability Pride in New York City.
There was pride on January 27, 1967, when a group of disabled citizens picketed City Hall to protest Mayor Lindsay’s plan to invalidate parking permits in Midtown.
Pride was rolling when activists like Vincent Marchiselli got legislation passed to outlaw discrimination against people with disabilities, via a bill that defined a person with a disability as someone who relied upon a device, appliance, or seeing-eye dog in the performance of “daily responsibilities as a self-sufficient, productive and complete human being.”
Pride and bawdy humanity inspired a late-1960s bumper sticker that commanded fellow motorists to “Honk If You’re A Horny Handicapper.”
Pride motivated my father, Julius Shaw, when he submitted a paper for publication in the extremely academic American Journal of Occupational Therapy, in 1971. As usual, the table of contents for the issue was going to be filled with professors and authors with credentials like “Ph.D,” “O.T.R.,” and “M.D.”— except for Julie, who hadn’t even had a day of college at that point. Instead, he requested a “p.h.” after his name, meaning “physically handicapped,” which he called the most relevant of all credentials.
Pride and swagger led Julie to joke, a few years later, that his new column in the Soho Weekly News should be entitled “A Crutch In Your Crotch.”
Pride was on the page when Eunice Fiorito, the first Director of the Mayor’s Office of the Handicapped, wrote that her first report to the Mayor was “not merely the annual report of another government authority. It represents…the history of a social movement.”
It was pride that led the Disabled In Action (DIA) Singers to compose and perform “Let The Children Stare” and “Walking On My Wheels,” and to parody disability bigotry in songs like “Peter Singer’s Wonderful World,” with its ironic lyrics: “Disabled people have no personhood/Think we should kill them quick, and if we could/What a wonderful world it would be.”
It was pride that underscored 1990s slogans like “Nothing About Us Without Us” and “Free Our People;” pride that climbed up the steps of the Capitol in 1990; and pride that occupied the offices of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1977.
I love the term Disability Pride, and I love celebrating Disability Pride Month. But pride is no newcomer to the disability community. This July, let us take pride in all the innovators and activists who’ve come before. Let us celebrate the great chain of being that has brought us to this month, in this year, in this City.
For more of Warren’s work in disability history, please go to DisabilityHistoryNYC.com.