American School for the Deaf is founded

The American School for the Deaf, formerly the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, is founded in Hartford, CT. It’s the oldest extant “disability-specific institution” in the country, and became a model for others. Historian Kim E. Nielsen notes that the school’s impact was so significant that by mid-century, many Deaf people were no longer isolated and hidden away, and “deaf churches, publications, advocacy organizations, sports teams, literary societies, and residential schools had fostered a rich and growing deaf culture and community. With the expansion of deaf schools and communities in the nineteenth century, literacy, education rates, and economic success rates for deaf people rose significantly.”

As Nielsen also notes, this period in disability history is characterized by the ascendance of the medical model and the increasing hegemony of medical opinion and diagnosis to make determinations about fitness, which occurs concurrently with the “professionalization of medicine.” With exceptions for poor, unmarried mothers, people with epilepsy, and people experiencing mental illness, the early asylums and schools for Deaf people, blind people, and people with IDD were intended to rehabilitate, not warehouse, disabled people. It’s not until the Progressive Era of the United States, a century later, that institutions became increasingly custodial.

Perkins School for the Blind is founded

Established by John Dix Fisher and Samuel Gridley Howe in Boston, the Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, later renamed the Perkins School for the Blind, was the first school for blind people in the country. Anne Sullivan, who is famous for being Helen Keller’s teacher and companion, graduated from Perkins in 1886. Helen Keller would also study at Perkins for a few years before moving on to Radcliffe College, where she graduated in 1904.

Gallaudet University is established

Gallaudet University becomes the first institution of higher education in the world to serve Deaf and hard of hearing students. For several years prior to its chartering as a university, the campus served as a grade school for Deaf and Blind children, and was run by Edward Miner Gallaudet, the son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet who co-founded the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut. Today, the university enrolls over 800 undergraduate students, over 90% of whom are Deaf or hard of hearing.

San Francisco passes the first “Ugly Law”

Order No. 783, titled “To Prohibit Street Begging, and to Restrain Certain Persons from Appearing in Streets and Public Places,” states that “Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places in the City and County of San Francisco, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view.”

The scholar, Susan Schweik, notes that from 1867 to the early 20th century, cities across the country, from Portland to Chicago to New York, enacted or tried to enact similar ordinances. Schweik suggests that the disability community’s concerns about the Ugly Laws may have exceeded their actual impact, given the minimal enforcement of the laws historically, as well as their limited scope. However, as Simi Linton notes, the public sentiment behind the laws has long outlived the ordinances themselves. In 1986, for example, readers around the country responded hostilely to an Ann Landers advice column defending the rights of disabled people to eat at restaurants without being segregated or hidden from other diners.

Some of the comments were republished in Schweik’s book. A reader from California wrote: “Would you believe that there are many handicapped people who take great pleasure in flaunting their disability so they can make able-bodied people feel guilty? I, for one, refuse to fall into that trap.” And another reader from Mississippi wrote: “The sight of a woman in a wheelchair with food running down her chin would make me throw up. I believe my rights should be respected as much as the rights of the person in the wheelchair… maybe even more so, because I am normal and she is not.”

U.S. Supreme Court decides Carrie Buck v. John Hendren Bell, permitting forced sterilization

Content note: This article discusses sexual assault and assaults on women’s reproductive rights.

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization. Following 18 other states after Indiana, Virginia passed its forced sterilization law in 1924. Those targeted for sterilization included people categorized as “feebleminded,” “insane,” “criminalistic,” epileptic, blind, deaf, “deformed,” and “dependent.” However, the constitutionality for forced sterilization was still murky throughout this period.

Carrie Buck, who had been institutionalized at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded after being raped by a family member, became a target for forced sterilization under the new state law, as she was deemed “feebleminded.”

Buck brought a legal challenge against Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, who performed the sterilization procedures, and John Hendren Bell, the superintendent of the colony. The eugenicists had the case stacked against Buck, knowing that by winning in court, it would legitimize forced sterilization. They had Irving P. Whitehead, an attorney who was sympathetic to the eugenicists and a friend of Dr. Priddy, assigned to represent the plaintiff, Buck.

Buck v. Bell went to the Supreme Court, and based on dubious testimony from witnesses and a weak cross-examination from Whitehead, the Court determined that Buck was indeed “feebleminded” and should be sterilized. In his majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Carrie Buck was sterilized on October 19, 1927. Dozens more states passed laws legalizing forced sterilization after Buck v. Bell, and it is estimated that 70,000 women were forcibly sterilized in the U.S.

Forced sterilization and restrictive immigration policy, notes the historian, Kim Nielsen, were the two major prongs of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, coinciding with the nation’s “Progressive Era.”

Freaks premiers in the U.S.

This controversial film by Tod Browning was not well received during its initial run in the United States in 1932, though it enjoyed a second life during the counter-cultural ‘60s, developing a cult following. Despite being characterized as a horror film, the scholar, John Thomas, observes that “Freaks is not really a horror film at all, though it contains some horrifying sequences.” Modern admirers of the film praise Freaks for its authentic casting and humanizing portrayal of disability.

The disabled film critic, Angelo Muredda, writes that “[r]evisited from a cultural moment where disabled performers are still largely absent from the films that ostensibly tell their stories, Browning’s film maintains its incredible distinction as an ensemble film about disability that actually features performers whose embodied experiences of the world match those of their characters.”

However, Muredda suggests that perhaps the best way to describe the disability community’s relationship with Freaks is “complicated.” Despite more nuanced, contemporary appreciation for the film, there is no denying that the film has exploitative elements and pushes recurrent disability tropes, including that of the “menacing and vengeful disabled.” Many of the disabled cast members were also kept segregated from nondisabled cast and crew on the MGM studio lot during filming.

Ed Roberts is born

Ed Roberts attended UC Berkeley for undergraduate and then graduate studies in the 1960s, paving the way for other disabled students to follow. With other members of the “Rolling Quads,” Roberts helped to establish the Physically Disabled Students’ Program at Berkeley, which is still active on campus as the Disabled Students’ Program. Ed’s mom, Zona Roberts, served as a counselor for the program, and would become a disability rights icon in her own right.

Ed Roberts became executive director of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, and was instrumental in getting Berkeley to build curb cuts into its sidewalks, helping to establish Berkeley’s reputation as one of the most disability-friendly cities in the country. Ed Roberts was appointed as Director of the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in 1975, and later co-founded the World Institute on Disability with Judy Heumann in 1983. In 1984, Roberts was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

Harold Russell wins two Academy Awards for The Best Years of Our Lives

A drama about the struggles of World War II veterans returning to civilian life, the film’s honest portrayal of disability and its authentic casting of Russell as a disabled veteran, makes the film still resonate today. The character of Homer Parrish, a petty officer in the Navy who loses both hands in the war, is played by Russell, a disabled non-professional actor who lost both hands in an accident while serving as an Army instructor.

About the film’s lasting impact, the disability advocate and artist, Lawrence Carter-Long, writes, “At its core the film rests on a principle that remains essential. You cannot tell the truth about disability unless you treat disabled people as full human beings with all the messiness that comes with it. Not as metaphors. Not plot devices. Full people with desires, and contradictions. People who laugh, cry, feel fear, and have work left to do.”

“We are still talking about it seventy nine years later because, to a large degree, the challenge it revealed remains unfinished,” writes Carter-Long.

Along with Russell’s win for Best Supporting Actor, the film won six other Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Because the Academy was worried that Russell might not win for Supporting Actor, the Board of Governors arranged for Russell to receive an honorary award at the ceremony, causing Russell to receive two awards at the Oscars for the same performance.

After The Best Years of Our Lives, Russell became a veterans and disability advocate, serving in leadership positions in AMVETS and the President’s Commission on Employment of the Handicapped.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign admits the first class of physically disabled students

In October, 1948, Tim Nugent, a 24-year-old disabled WWII veteran and graduate student in education psychology at University of Wisconsin, established the Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) program at the University of Illinois. The program was housed at Galesburg, a newly constructed, accessible campus with only single-story buildings connected by wheelchair-friendly corridors. While there were three other campuses in the country that could accommodate physically disabled students at the time, the University of Illinois had “the only complete program in the nation of corrective therapy and rehabilitation” for wheelchair users.

Thirteen disabled students enrolled full-time at Galesburg in the fall of 1948, while one additional student had started earlier, in the spring semester. Nugent and his students accomplished an impressive amount in that first year, establishing both the Delta Sigma Omicron Rehabilitation Service Fraternity for students with disabilities, and the first National Wheelchair Basketball Tournament. Unfortunately, the governor of Illinois announced that he would be closing the program in order to convert the Galesburg campus into a medical center to relieve some of the overcrowding at the state-run institutions. Some of the current Galesburg students were allowed to apply for transfer admission to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but there were no plans to admit more students to the program.

A year later, with pledged support from the Veterans Administration, Nugent convinced the University of Illinois to allow the DRES program to continue on the Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) campus, though without university funding. On May 4, 1949, the fourteen Galesburg students were notified that they were officially admitted to UIUC. The incoming students represented diverse backgrounds. One student was 49 years old. Many were disabled veterans. Some students had only recently become disabled while others had been hidden in their homes or in nursing homes for most of their lives. Read more…

Premier of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The character of Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers in this Stanley Kubrick film, is a wheelchair user who has alien hand syndrome, which causes his right arm, covered in a black glove, to gesticulate the Nazi salute, apparently uncontrollably. All of these representations of disability are meant to make the audience uncomfortable. As Fred Pelka notes, wheelchairs, prosthetics, and other disabilities have been used throughout the history of cinema and in other storytelling to signify evil. Professor of Sociology, Ronald J. Berger, calls this the “demonic cripple” theme.

Willowbrook Exposé by Geraldo Rivera

WABC-TV airs an investigative series by Geraldo Rivera into the systemic abuses at Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York. Willowbrook becomes a national scandal and catalyzes the country’s reckoning with mass institutionalization. Fred Pelka reports that “a resident at Willowbrook was statistically more likely to be assaulted, raped, or murdered than in any other neighborhood in New York City.”

Dr. William Bronston, who worked at Willowbrook and is one of the whistleblowers who helped to expose the abuses there, recalls, “The place was absolutely inhumane in the extreme. It had been that way for three or four decades. There was a group of people sitting at the top who drove around in chauffeur-driven limousines and black suits, all the way up to the governor, in league with the banks making millions and millions of dollars on the suffering of all these people. And on the other end of the spectrum was the horror that Geraldo was hammering into people day after day on the television.”

Parents of Willowbrook residents filed a class-action lawsuit, New York State ARC v. Rockefeller in 1972. Willowbrook would not officially shut down until 1987, after which the buildings and grounds were converted into the new campus of the Staten Island Community College.

Bob Hall becomes the first wheelchair champion of the Boston Marathon

Bob Hall, a polio survivor, became the first official wheelchair competitor in the Boston Marathon on April 21, 1975. Hall wasn’t the first wheelchair athlete to finish the race, however.

On April 20, 1970, Eugene Roberts, a Vietnam veteran who lost both legs in the war, crossed the finish line in seven hours as an unofficial entrant in the Boston Marathon. In 1975, Bob Hall, using only a modified hospital wheelchair, finished the race in 2 hours and 58 minutes, becoming the marathon’s first official wheelchair competitor and wheelchair champion. Today, Hall is remembered as “the father of wheelchair racing” who opened the way for inclusion of other wheelchair athletes and also helped to improve the design of early racing chairs.

Hall went on to serve as the coordinator for the Boston Marathon’s Wheelchair Division, which the Boston Athletic Association created in 1977. In 1978, Hall filed a lawsuit against the New York Road Runners, who refused to allow him to compete in the New York City Marathon, and lost the case on appeal (New York Roadrunners Club v. State Division of Human Rights, 1982). In 2000, the New York City Marathon finally created a wheelchair division.

In 1977, Sharon Hedrick became the first woman wheelchair athlete to finish the Boston Marathon, in 3 hours and 48 minutes.

The 504 Sit-in

Historically, although the disability rights movement had been gestating for years, the 504 sit-in is widely considered the “public birth of the disability civil rights movement.” It was a sophisticated operation of civil disobedience worthy of its predecessors in the larger civil rights movement, and most importantly, it was highly visible and received mainstream press coverage depicting disabled people as political activists, leaders, and constituents with agency and political influence.

Disabled people were no longer in the shadows — passive objects of the public’s capricious imaginations, to be pitied, hidden away, or villainized. The 504 sit-in represented the movement’s maturity and the transcendence of disability “as an issue of civil rights rather than as an issue of charity and rehabilitation at the best, pity at the worst,” said Cone. Read more…

Stacey Park Milbern is born

Stacey Park Milbern was a queer, biracial person born with congenital muscular dystrophy. Milbern was one of the co-founders of the disability justice movement, which centered disabled BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people in disability advocacy.

As part of the ADA generation, Milbern began organizing on disability issues at a young age, creating disability community in physical and online spaces, including the 2000s blogosphere. After moving to the Bay Area in 2011, Milbern established the Disability Justice Culture Club, opening up her home to the disability community as a place for organizing, mutual aid, and communal care.

Milbern served as a disability policy advisor to the Obama administration in 2014. In 2025, Milbern was one of twenty women featured on newly minted quarters in recognition of the lives and accomplishments of unsung women in U.S. history.

Members of ADAPT organize the Capitol Crawl

Although Patrisha Wright, aka “The General of the ADA,” and other Washington insiders were making progress in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed through the House, to outsiders unfamiliar or impatient with the glacial pace of Congress, it appeared that the bill had been stalled. Members of ADAPT, a militant protest group founded by the Reverend Wade Blank, decided that the moment called for direct action. Converging hundreds of people at the base of the steps of the Capitol Building, the disabled protesters shouted, “What do we want? ADA! When do we want it? Now!” Then, leaving behind their mobility aids and wheelchairs, the protesters began crawling up the steep steps of the Capitol.

The Capitol Crawl was a powerful, paradoxical display of vulnerability and determination, and has become one of the iconic images of the disability rights movement. As Lennard Davis notes, it’s debatable whether the Capitol protesters actually helped to push the ADA through Congress, but the historical “importance of these events to building disability identity and consciousness cannot be underestimated.”

Leonardo DiCaprio is nominated for his portrayal of IDD in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape at the 66th Academy Awards

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape may not be one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s more well-known films, although DiCaprio certainly received lots of attention when the film came out in 1993 for his “convincing” portrayal of Arnie, a teenager with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The film is also notable for its empathetic portrayal of an underprivileged family “stuck in a rut” in a small town in Iowa. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, and wrote that “One of the movie’s best qualities is its way of looking at the [disabled characters] with sympathy, not pity.” While the casting of DiCaprio as a disabled person wasn’t considered problematic in the 1990s, it would certainly raise more questions today.

Justin Dart Jr. receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Justin Dart, a polio survivor and wheelchair user, served as vice chair of the National Council on Disability during the Reagan administration, and was instrumental in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990. In 1988, Dart and Robert Burgdorf co-drafted the first version of the ADA bill.

In 1995, Dart became a co-founder of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD). Dart, who understood cross-disability advocacy, was an ally to the psychiatric survivor movement. In 2002 he gave one of his last speeches at the National Council on Independent Living conference in D.C., during which he said, “No forced treatment ever!”

The disability scholar, Lennard J. Davis, says that “Justin Dart was, more than any other person, the spokesperson and inspiration for the disability activist movement.”

Greta Thunberg is born

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate change and social justice activist. She has described her autism as a superpower, but has also been open about her struggles with depression and other mental health issues. Thunberg won the Right Livelihood Award (aka the “Alternative Nobel Prize”) on September 25, 2019.

Disabled people protest Me Before You

Content note: This article discusses physician-assisted suicide.

Me Before You, a film released in 2016, based on the book of the same title by Jojo Moyes, features the main protagonist choosing to end his life after he develops quadriplegia.

On May 25, 2016, members of Not Dead Yet UK urged people to boycott the film for its pro-physician-assisted suicide message. Not Dead Yet in the US picked up the call and organized protests around the country, at which disabled people picketed screenings, handed out flyers, and urged ticket buyers not to see the film. Unfortunately, despite being panned by critics, the film still performed well at the box office, receiving an A from moviegoers on CinemaScore.

Me Before You wasn’t the first Hollywood film (and probably won’t be the last, sadly) to harm disabled people by perpetuating the ableist belief that disabled people are “better off dead.” For example, Million Dollar Baby, which came out in 2004, caused a similar uproar. But, as Jennifer Baker notes in Forbes, what was different this time was that social media allowed the disability community to have a platform to voice their collective anger and to bypass traditional media, which often invisibilizes us.

First case of Coronavirus is confirmed in the United States

On January 19, 2020, a person with flu-like symptoms checks into an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, WA. The next day the patient’s samples test positive for COVID-19, the first confirmed case in the U.S. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declares COVID-19 a pandemic, and the country will soon enter partial shutdown and begin social distancing.

On March 16, 2020, state health departments, facing supply shortages, begin prioritizing nondisabled patients for critical care. Alabama’s exclusion criteria include people with intellectual disabilities and people with dementia.

The pandemic exacerbates the health disparities experienced by racially marginalized and disabled people. People living with long COVID continue to feel dismissed and abandoned, reports the Los Angeles Times.

John Davidson shouts the N-word at BAFTAs

John Davidson, a Tourette syndrome activist who is a guest at the 79th British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) ceremony, shouts the N-word at two Black actors, Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, while they are on stage. The incident ignited worldwide discussion about ableism and racism, with many incorrectly framing inclusion as a dichotomy between Black people’s safety and disabled people’s accommodations. In the end, many advocates seemed to agree that BBC and the BAFTA organizers held the most responsibility for failing to apologize and check in on Jordan, Lindo, and others in the Black community who were harmed by the slur. Two months later, BAFTA finally issued a formal apology to the Black community and the disability community, after an independent review commissioned by BAFTA found “a number of structural weaknesses in Bafta’s planning, escalation procedures and crisis coordination arrangements.”

John Davidson was attending the BAFTAs to support the film, I Swear, a drama based on Davidson’s life as a person living with Tourette syndrome. As the title of the film suggests, Davidson experiences coprolalia, which causes him to shout curse words and other offensive words involuntarily. The film won two awards at the BAFTAs.