Schweik Lomax's Matrix

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. What I do hope to do here is mobilize another kind of memory, one which acknowledges an almost forgotten activism in profound engagement at the meeting ground of poverty, urban marginalization, disability and race. At the same time, I hope to raise a set of questions about the writing of the history of this social movement or rather of this specific conjunction of social movements. "[W]hen we [academics] fail to acknowledge the intellectual work of [activist] movements," Laura Briggs has written, "something crucial is lost," and at the same time, as Briggs makes clear, the risks of "self-righteous and obfuscating invocations of 'activism' are real enough."4 If, as Robin D. G. Kelley writes in a line that resonates in Briggs' analysis, "collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge," what kind of new knowledge — and for that matter what kind of incubator — are we to look for in the story of the black power of 504?5 For readers unfamiliar with the history of the event sometimes recorded in the shorthand "of 504," I will provide some background. Since 1920, when the first federal Rehabilitation Act was passed, Congress had at various junctures enacted amendments to the Act's provisions. The 1973 version of the Act included, buried in Section 504 of its Title V, a surprising and little-discussed clause, inserted by quietly activist congressional staffers, that prohibited recipients of federal aid from discriminating against any "otherwise qualified handicapped individual."6 Section 504 was modeled on, and its language directly derived from, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Adding a civil rights provision to a Rehabilitation Act "didn't make a lot of logical sense," notes disability activist Mary Lou Breslin in an oral history done two decades later, "because it should have been its own statute," but "the rehabilitation statute was a quick and dirty vehicle available to make 504 work." Because, as Breslin comments with dry humor, "issues affecting people with disabilities were thought to be understood by bureaucrats who were involved in health, education and welfare, as opposed to peace, freedom and justice," the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was charged with formulating guidelines for implementing the requirement that would then become templates for other federal agencies.7 Roberta Ann Johnson suggests that the government's "paternalistic generosity" in section 504 might actually "have undermined a social movement of the disabled had there not been a four year delay in the signing of the 'regs.'"8 For years HEW stalled, debating internally over the question of what discrimination meant in the context of disability. Jimmy Carter pledged during his presidential campaign to sign and enforce strong regulations, but he failed to follow up on that promise. When the national American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities, headed by charismatic Deaf leader Frank Bowe, got wind of federal plans to water down the already compromised regulations, they and other groups began organized to put pressure on the new Carter-appointed secretary of HEW, Joseph Califano. Bowe, ACCD's president Eunice Fiorito, Judith Heumann and the other members of the ACCD board gave Califano an ultimatum: sign a forceful, meaningful version of the intact regulations before April 5, 1977, or ACCD and its associates would take action. The groups planned sit-ins on that date at HEW headquarters in cities across the U.S. The sit-in, of course, was a civil-rights movement tactic; "it was a way of drawing the parallels between this issue and the civil rights movement of the sixties," organizer Kitty Cone explains.9 Most of the sit-ins on April 7th ended quickly when police starved out the demonstrators, but the occupation of the San Francisco HEW offices lasted for weeks, sustained by the large and deep network of community groups that the organizers had systematically developed. As a New York Times reporter put it in an April 17th article titled "Disabled in San Francisco Vow to Continue Sit-in": "One reason for the success of the occupation has been the staunch militancy and careful organization of the participants."10 Those participants — "an occupation army of cripples," one news broadcast called them — were a "very disparate group, a very wild and divergent community," as activist Corbett O'Toole recalls: "the Mill Valley Moms with a disabled child" next to "the street junkies."11 Within the HEW building during the occupation, Ed Roberts spoke of and to the group: "To see hundreds of people with disabilities roll, sign, using canes, the more severely retarded people for the first time joining us in an incredible struggle, is one that leads me to believe that we're going to win this."12 A transformative community developed in the offices on the fourth floor of the HEW building. "The whole thing was like a living role model," Mary Lou Breslin comments, "living out the purpose that you're trying to embody in those regulations — that purpose was being experienced and exercised in the building itself."13 At the end of the occupation, one activist, Ron Washington, described that community in his expression of regret at leaving the building: "Well, there's some hesitancy because of the relationship that was developed here — the comradeship around political needs and working together to get those needs taken care of."14 In their favor, in addition to this galvanized community, the demonstrators had several advantages: a strong consensus decision-making process, multiple and dispersed leadership, extraordinarily effective strategic planning (particularly the decision to move some of the protesters to Washington D.C. to pressure HEW more directly), and a San Francisco urban culture well-prepared to grasp actions for social justice (headed by mayor Moscone).15 By the time their demonstration finished, on April 28, 1977, Califano signed the Section 504 regulations, and, more importantly, the foundations of a national cross-disability rights movement were laid. Accounts of the action usually present that coalition as a remarkable, momentary cluster of support built out of the awareness and keen organizing skills of the demonstration's leaders. "[I]t was possible to enlist support from other political organizations that hadn't thought about disability before," Mary Lou Breslin says in her oral history of this network of allies. "A lot of people had individual connections. They were all brought to bear in one form or another, but Kitty [Cone] knew how to think about it as a matrix."16 That matrix included the Butterfly Brigade, "a group of gay men who patrolled city streets on the lookout for gay violence," who smuggled walkie-talkies into the occupied building; Glide Church; local and national labor organizations; members of Delancey Street, the famous grassroots rehab program for substance abusers and former felons, who brought breakfast into the building each day; the Chicano group Mission Rebels, who also provided food; and the Black Panthers, who publicly endorsed the action and provided hot dinners for the duration of the sit-in.17 Cone's skilled organizing and exemplary analysis, like Heumann's leadership and Roberts' eloquence, were critical factors in the action's success. But others also knew how to "think about it as a matrix." The model of "support" from "other movements" obscures some of the ways in which for various participants in the 504 demonstration these movements were not other. By this I mean more than simply the point that disabled queers, disabled radical black activists, disabled Chicanas and so on took part in occupying the fourth floor of the HEW building. Most histories have obscured the extent to which prior disability activism within these "other" movements laid the groundwork for the moment of alliance remembered as "504."18 I focus here on one example, the collaboration between the Black Panthers and disability organizers. In their quantitative study Disability Protests: Contentious Politics 1970-1999, Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch provide a schema for analysis of this coalition, drawing on D.A. Snow's analysis of how social movements build upon the "frames" created by prior successful movements: Frames provide meaningful reasons, within the context of a culture, for why a demand made by a social movement should be satisfied.… Earlier movements can be important for subsequent movements if the earlier movement still exists and can provide support to the subsequent movement.

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