The same year that the rights of disabled people were codified in federal law, the right to discriminate based on psychiatric disability was also asserted by the APA.
![Frank Kameny, center holding sign, at New York City’s 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade [Photo by Kay Tobin @Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library]](https://ableist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/frank-kameny-300x200.jpg)
Author: Bowen Cho
May 4, 1949. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign admits the first class of physically disabled students
Despite the country’s renewed awareness of disability issues as a result of the hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans returning from the war, as well as the increasing population of newly disabled civilians from ongoing polio outbreaks across the country, the prevailing belief was still that disabled people belonged in nursing homes, not on college campuses. Many believed that a college education would be wasted on people who “would forever be relegated to a position on a porch, watching life go by.”
April 5, 1977. The 504 Sit-in
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.
Is Mental Health the new hydration?
Today, the privilege to practice “good mental health” has become a way to resegregate white people from the historically marginalized communities that disproportionately experience “poor mental health.”
What the media gets wrong about houselessness, mental illness, and crime
Reagan-era policies of welfare retrenchment and the War on Drugs targeted a different generation of primarily young Black men to fill the void left after one carceral system (the asylum) closed down and another (prisons and jails) expanded.
Framing Chelsea Manning: a study on media coverage of disability and dissent
Media characterizations of political dissidents that include symptoms of mental illness influence the public to believe that the dissident’s personal problems explain their actions rather than a legitimate grievance or concern for the public interest.
