I don’t know that anyone would have picked out Richard Match as the man to get the disability rights movement started. There was little in his background that pointed in that direction. His activism is barely remembered by anyone, including his immediate family; few members of the disability community even know his name. Nonetheless I am convinced that, as much as anyone, this is the man who invented the modern disability rights movement in the tristate area.
Match created venues for free association by wheelchair users, and brought together personalities that fanned out across the Metro area, seeding activism along the way. He achieved pioneering changes in Nassau County, while his followers brought what is now United Spinal into civilian disability activism for the first time, and all but single-handedly started disability activism in New York City. If anyone deserves the title of founder, Richard Albert Match does.
Match was born in 1920 and grew up in Brooklyn. At the age of fifteen he broke his neck in a swimming accident; he emerged an incomplete quadriplegic, unable to stand or walk. Undaunted, Match graduated high school at age 18 with an almost perfect academic record. His accomplishment was reported in an eight-paragraph piece in The New York Times. The article proved to be the start of a unique life-long relationship between the young Match and that newspaper.
Match became a writer. Over the next 25 years some 150 articles appeared in the Times, and a similar number can be found scattered across the pages of periodicals like Popular Science, Reader’s Digest, The New Republic, and the Herald Tribune. His pieces focused on reviews of historical novels, science topics, and stories of action and courage in faraway times and exotic locales.
Match never disclosed his disability in his writings. Not that he didn’t leave hints—he certainly reviewed more books with a disability angle than mere happenstance can account for—but it is fair to say that even though Match lived a creative life in the pages of newspapers and magazines, he was a rather private fellow.
Nonetheless, it seems that life as a magazine writer eventually lost momentum, and the upshot was a turn towards action instead of reflection. On May 25, 1956, readers of The New York Times found an eighth-of-a-page article entitled “Portable Ramp for Library Aids the Disabled.” The gist was that a disabled freelance writer named Richard Match had persuaded the main branch of the New York Public Library to design and procure a portable ramp, so that wheelchair users could enter and make use of the library without having to make arrangements in advance. In those days such accommodations were rare if not nonexistent, even for major public buildings in large cities. Ramping the library was something like an unprecedented accomplishment, and it meant that wheelchair users could access one of the world’s great libraries whenever they wanted, just like anyone else.
This was Match’s coming out. Twenty-one years after his accident, Richard announced to the world that this well-known writer was a man in a wheelchair.
Some months after the Times article, Richard moved from Brooklyn to a ranch house in Great Neck, and over the next several years his quiet conversion to disability activism accelerated. Match applied to the National Paraplegia Foundation, and obtained a charter to found a Long Island chapter. Armed with that institutional credential, Richard persuaded the Great Neck public school system to approve evening swim sessions for disabled adults at large—at what was then the one and only accessible swimming pool in the entire Metropolitan area.
I believe that it was Match, with his writer’s imagination and facility with ideas, who first put together this crucial logic:
- People with disabilities cannot use architectural features such as stairs and narrow doorways. They are architectural barriers.
- The world is full of architectural barriers.
- People with disabilities must therefore fight to change the world, so they may live freer and more meaningful lives.
It was a call to direct action. Match went on to a number of pioneering accomplishments in and around Nassau County, including wheelchair access at Jones Beach, an accessible county office building, and a Nassau County advisory committee. But it was the Great Neck pool that gave rise to his most enduring legacy, for the pool randomly brought together a critical mass of together dozens of people with disabilities.
Among these was Donald Broderick, a Navy veteran who went on to re-invigorate activism at the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (now United Spinal), and Bobbi Wailes, a Paralympics champion and longtime Director of Lincoln Center’s Department of Programs and Services for People with Disabilities. Two others were Julius and Mollie Shaw, who would become among the earliest and most important founders of the New York City Disability Rights Movement.
The pool at Great Neck became a primary point of development as a group consciousness began to coalesce among the disability population during the early 1960s. Within a few years it gathered enough energy and organization to force lasting changes in both our political culture and the built environment.
Match surely deserves to be memorialized by a statue, an endowed chair at a university, a major annual award, or some such thing. But instead he is completely forgotten, even among disability activists.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please go to disabilityhistorynyc.com