Disability Studies Quarterty Q the first journal in the field of disability studies Lomax's Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, And The Black Power Of 504 Susan Schweik University Of California At Berkeley E-Mail:
[email protected] My title revises the title of a video produced by the Bay Area based Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund in 1997 to commemorate a critical event in American history.1 The occasion for that video was the twentieth anniversary of what has been called "perhaps the single most impressive act of civil disobedience in the United States over the last quarter-century," the twenty-five-day-long sit-in by disability rights activists at HEW's San Francisco office to push (successfully) for assertive enforcement of "Section 504" government regulations prohibiting disability discrimination.2 DREDF named the video "The Power of 504." Inserting the discourse of "Black power" into the discourse of "the power of 504," I mean to do two things: first, to call attention to the historiography of 504 activism as an example of what Chris Bell calls "whitewashed" or "white disability studies"; second, to suggest that in real and almost entirely unrecognized ways, the "power of 504" was enacted as and through a very particular seventies locus of Black power.3 In arguing this, I do not mean to reduce the complex, stubbornly hybrid, multiracial, cross-class, cross-ability culture of the 504 demonstration to a single axis. The "power" of 504, whatever it might be, may also quite productively be characterized as a queer power, a feminist power, a D/deaf power, and so on.