Judith Heumann – II I got out to Berkeley, I think I had said before that I’d been accepted at Columbia. So basically what happened was I had taken one course at Columbia and I kept teaching, School of Social Work, and because I was, I was one of the founders and President of Disabled In Action in New York City and so, at any rate, I taught three years in the New York school system and decided that it was too difficult to take classes while I was teaching, so I would go back to graduate school full-time, and then I had been accepted into School of Social Work Community Organizing Program at Columbia and was going to start that program in the Fall of, I think it was 1973, September of ’73, yeah, I was supposed to start school in September of ’73, at Columbia, and then I got a call in the Spring of ’73, from Ed Roberts, who had been one of the founders of the disabled students’ program and was, you know, one of the leaders in Berkeley and, you know, went on to become really one of the well-known icons in the field in the movement, and he called me in the Spring of ’73 and said they, Berkeley School of Public Health and the School of City and Regional Planning, that a professor in each one of those programs had decided that they were interested in recruiting disabled students to the program and, well, he knew of me because he was calling around the country and a lot of people told him to call me, and we didn’t know each other then. People in New York didn’t know anything about what was going on in California. I mean, I, no, Ed Roberts at that point was really not known outside of California really. I had met some people from Berkeley, from CIL in Berkeley, at a demonstration that we had had in Washington, D.C. when we had had a march to the Lincoln Memorial and it was Larry Biscamp and Dick Santos had come 1 from Berkeley, and that’s the first time anybody had heard of what was going on at Berkeley. The student support service started in the ‘60s, but CIL started in, I got out there I think it was August of ’73, CIL had started in like ’72, and Ed was recruiting activists to come out to Berkeley to get involved with the Berkeley CIL and to go to graduate school, and there was an expectation that people would then go back to the community they came from and continue doing work to set up the CIL. So when I got, so I applied to, well, I was told to apply to City and Regional Planning. So I applied to City and Regional Planning at UC-Berkeley. I think I might have mentioned this, but anyway, so I was accepted into the program and then about two weeks later I got a call and they said they accepted too many students into City and Regional Planning who had disabilities, so would I apply to the School of Public Health. So Fred Caligna, who was the professor at City and Regional Planning and Henrick Blum, was the professor at School of Public Health and I was really ______________ they sent my application from City and Regional Planning to Public Health at Berkeley. Well, the professor was at, of the two professors, as, you know, as Ed had said, Blum and Caligna were the two professors that were doing the outreach, so Blum was at Public Health and the other was at City and Regional Planning. So I got into Public Health and I went to Berkeley in August, I think, of ’73, and then I got involved with CIL. The Architectural Barriers Act was passed later. I think the Act was passed in the ‘70s. The first, there was a piece of legislation passed in ’67 or ’68, which was for curb cuts, but it wasn’t the broad access board. The access board came in the ‘70s. I went to Berkeley on an airplane and I had a power wheelchair. They had power wheelchairs in the ‘60s, and I was using the brand of Emerson Jennings. I think, no, it might have been 2 a motorette. Motorette, it was a motorized piece of equipment that went onto a wheelchair. It wasn’t together and you put it on a manual wheelchair. I’m trying to remember. Maybe at that time I had a regular motorized wheelchair. In the beginning, I had a motorette. The airline did same as they do now; nothing’s changed. You can’t sit on a plane in your wheelchair. It’s always been complicated because they, and plenty of times they broke my wheelchair. My wheelchair got broken plenty of times. I didn’t accept it and I sued them at one point then, TWA. It’s gotten, well, a couple of things have gotten better now. I think one is the wheelchairs are made better. Now there’s legislation, which requires that they handle wheelchairs, they get you your wheels, and they do things that they didn’t do before, and then I think the other thing, and the wheelchairs are stronger now and if they break it, you tell them that they have to pay for it, but they did, I mean at one point, it was later in the ‘80s, TWA completely destroyed my wheelchair, destroyed it, and sent me a check for $1,200. So I had a friend who worked for a big law firm in New York and their specialty was airline travel, airline accidents, so they wrote them a letter and said, well, I sent the check back and then they wrote and said, “You’ll pay for her wheelchair, you’ll pay for the rental of the wheelchair, and you’ll pay $1,000 in damages,” and they did, finished. But anyway, getting back to Berkeley. So I went out to Berkeley in 1973, in August of ’73, and at first I lived in Ed Roberts’ house for a while, while I was looking for a place to live, and then, I’m trying to remember, you know, that may not be right. I think I lived in his place when I got back from working in D.C. I lived in an apartment in California, which was in the same building as CIL was. CIL had moved from University Avenue to Haste Street and later 3 moved to Telegraph Avenue, which is where it is now, and I got on the Board and Ed and I became friends right away and I spent, I spent a lot of time with him over the years. I was, when I first came out there I was in school and then I was on the Board of Directors while I was in school and then I came as a, we had to do a, a placement, you know, an internship for graduate school, so I actually left Berkeley in May or June of ’74, and came to Washington. It was a two-year program. We were supposed to do a six-month placement and then go back to school, but I got a, they waived my having to come back to school because you had to have a minimum of 39 credits, which I had. So I had the 39 credits and they let me, I, they gave me permission to stay in my job in D.C. and count towards my graduate work, and then I had to take the comprehensives. So I stayed in Washington actually a year and a half and I worked for Senator Harrison Williams, who was from New Jersey, and I worked with a woman named Lisa Walker and a guy named Nick Eddis. Anyway, so when I was in Berkeley, the first year I was there, I had a roommate named Nancy D’Angelo. Nancy was from New York. We had moved out to California together and Nancy, she, she didn’t go to the University. She just decided she wanted to move and so we moved out there together. So we shared an apartment and I went to school, was on the Board at CIL, got involved in the disabled students’ program and it was a very, it was an important experience for me because it was different than being in New York. In New York, the work that we’d been doing through Disabled In Action and the disabled students’ program, because we had started a disabled students’ program at Long Island University when I was there and the University had hired a gentleman named, his name was Theodore Childs, Ted Childs, and he had been in the military. He was a physical therapist. He’d been very involved with the NAACP and he 4 got his Ph.D. in Special Education from Columbia and so he, he was the first Director of the disabled students’ program at Long Island University in Brooklyn and a group of us had worked to get the University to set up a disabled students’ program because they hadn’t had one before and then we had set up Disabled In Action, which was a result of the lawsuit that I had filed in New York to become a teacher. The lawsuit was in 1970, because I graduated in ’69, and the lawsuit was in the Spring of ’70, and so Disabled In Action, you know, had been, still is, but at that time was very activist, political, but we didn’t have any services and so CIL and the disabled students’ program in Berkeley, the disabled students’ program was different than the disabled students’ services at that time in the East Coast because the disabled students’ program at Berkeley had like wheelchair repair, attendant referral, assistance in finding housing, benefits counseling, which were many of the same services that got set up at the Berkeley Center, so one of the issues between the University’s disabled students’ program and the CIL is the community had started asking that the disabled students’ program serve non-students and the University didn’t want non-students to be served.