The success of Proposition One on this year’s ballot means that people with disabilities are going to be added to the roster of groups covered by the equal protection clause of the New York State Constitution. If you feel that it’s about time this happened, you are even more right than you think you are. There was another effort to get constitutional protections for our community, almost sixty years ago.
It began in 1965, when voters across the State of New York approved a proposal to hold a Constitutional Convention. Very much in the “times they are a-changing” spirit of the 1960s, for the first time since 1938, the State’s most fundamental law would get a full airing-out, a top to bottom re-think.
One hundred and eighty-six people became delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Among them was one of the founders of the City’s Democratic Reform Movement, District Leader Dorothy Walasek, the head of the reform-minded Ansonia Independent Democratic Club.
With offices on West 72nd Street, right across the street from where I grew up, one of its Executive Committee members was my father, Julie Shaw, a pioneer of the City’s disability rights movement. In early 1967, at my parents’ insistence, Dorothy introduced an amendment to extend equal rights protections to people with disabilities. No state in the Union then provided constitutional protections to their disabled citizens, and with the Americans with Disabilities Act utterly undreamed-of and decades in the future, the amendment would have been a mammoth accomplishment.
Julie gave full-throated support to the new Constitution. On June 8, 1967, he spoke at a public meeting of the New York Constitutional Convention’s Human Rights and Suffrage Committee, at 270 Broadway. To begin with, as Julie observed, two million New York State residents were disabled. Despite their individual qualifications and abilities, access to work, education, most buildings and society at large was cut off by a mixture of prejudice, resistance and architectural barriers. Progress had been growing across the nation, but not yet in New York, and an important part of the reason was that there wasn’t a legal basis upon which the fight could be waged.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the mother and father of the Civil Rights Movement, my father used to say—but it had failed to include people with disabilities. Here, now, New Yorkers had a chance to correct that omission. “If this amendment to the State Constitution is adopted,” Julie concluded, “we will be able to obtain our legal due. The Commission will move two million from life under a savage cloud of incapacity and waste, taking them off the welfare rolls and making them tax payers instead of tax eaters.”
Unfortunately, it was not to be. On November 7, 1967, the people of the State of New York voted on the proposed new State Constitution, and by the overwhelming margin of almost 3 to 1, the document was rejected. It was a stunning defeat that was largely unexpected.
Trying to piece together the causes, the most radical part of the proposed Constitution had been another proposal by Dorothy Walasek. It would have repealed the “Blaine Amendment,” an ancient ban on using public funds to transport parochial school students, which had clear roots in the anti-Catholicism of the 19th century. It was speculated that this provision led to the defeat. Amazingly enough, despite its endorsement by Senator Bobby Kennedy, even most Catholics came out against the proposed Constitution. As Tom Wicker put in the New York Times, “Americans are not yet and may never be ready to lower very far the traditional barriers against state support of religious schools.”
It is truly remarkable how poorly Wicker’s observation has aged. But the fact remains that more than half a century would pass before equal protection for people with disabilities would come up for another vote in New York State.
For more of Warren Shaw’s work in disability history, please go to DisabilityHistoryNYC.com