Ed Roberts (activist)

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Edward Verne Roberts (born January 23, 1939 - March 14, 1995 ) was an American activist of the independent living movement and the first student with severe disabilities ( paraplegia ) at Berkeley University in California, USA. He was a pioneer at the forefront of the disability movement in the United States in the 1970s.

Life

Early years

In 1953, at the age of fourteen, he contracted polio , two years before the polio vaccine from Dr. Salk put an end to the epidemics. When he came home after 18 months in hospitals, he was paralyzed from the neck down, except for two fingers on one hand and a few toes. He spent the nights at the iron lung and often rested there during the day. After breathing with the iron lung , he survived with frog breathing, a technique for swallowing air using the muscles of the face and neck.

He attended school by phone until his mother insisted that he go to school for a few hours once a week. At school he was confronted with a deep fear of being stared at and transformed his self-esteem. He gave up thinking of himself as a "helpless cripple" and decided to see himself as a star . He benefited from the example of his mother teaching him to fight for what is needed when the school administration objected to his graduation for failing to meet the requirements of physical education and driving license training.

activism

Ed Roberts is often called the father of the disability movement (in the US) . His career as an advocate (of human rights) began when an official threatened to deny him his high school diploma for failing to take driver's license and physical education classes. After attending the College of San Mateo , he was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley . He had to fight hard to get the support he needed from the California Office of Professional Rehabilitation for admission to college because his rehabilitation advisor thought he was too severely disabled to get a job. One of the deans of the university famously remarked, upon learning of Roberts' severe disability, "We tried cripples before and it didn't work," but others supported him and said the university should do more.

1962 Roberts was enrolled, two years before the Free Speech Movement (FSM movement for freedom of expression ) Berkeley turned into a hotbed of student protests.
When he encountered resistance in his search for an apartment because of his 800- pound Iron Lung, the director of campus health services offered him a room in the vacant wing of Cowell Hospital. Roberts accepted his condition that the area where he lived should be used as a dormitory and not a medical facility. His admission "broke the ice" for other students with severe disabilities who joined him over the next few years. From this the Cowell living program developed.

The group developed a sense of identity and began to vigorously write a political analysis of disability , calling themselves the Rolling Quads , to the surprise of some able-bodied observers who had never heard such expressions of positive disabled self-image before. In 1968, when two of the Rolling Quads were threatened with eviction from the Cowell Residence Program by an authoritarian rehabilitation advisor, the Rolling Quads organized a successful revolt, resulting in the transfer of that advisor.

Their success on campus inspired the group to begin advocating for curb drawdowns to provide access to the general public and for the creation of the Physically Disabled Student's Program (PDSP), an advancement program for physically disabled students, initiated by the first student was directed. Ed Roberts flew 3,000 miles from California to Washington DC with no breathing assistance to attend a conference to launch the federal TRIO program , for which the PDSP later secured funding. The PDSP provided services to the university's students, including arranging companions and wheelchair repairs, but calls were soon coming in from people with disabilities who were not students with the same problems.

Ed Roberts earned a bachelor's degree in 1964 and a master's degree in political science from Berkeley University in 1966 . In 1969 he became an official Ph.D. Applicant (C. Phil.) In Political Science at Berkeley, but without a degree.

The need to serve the wider community led to the establishment of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (CIL), the first independent living service and advocacy program led by and for people with disabilities. Contrary to popular belief, Roberts was neither the founder of the Berkeley CIL nor its first managing director. He taught political science at an alternative college, then returned to Berkeley to take over the leadership of the fledgling organization. He led the CIL to rapid growth at a crucial time for the emerging disability movement. The CIL provided a model for a new type of community organization specifically designed to meet the needs and requirements of people with a wide variety of disabilities. Newly-elected Governor Jerry Brown in 1976 appointed Ed Roberts to head the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation - the same agency that once labeled him too severely disabled to work. He held the post until 1983 and when politics turned right in California, he returned to Berkeley, where he founded the World Institute on Disability with Judy Heumann and Joan Leondas .

Roberts died of a heart attack on March 14, 1995, at the age of 56.

His treatises are held in the Bancroft Library, the University of California's premier specialty library.

Honors

  • 1984 MacArthur Fellows Program
  • Ed Roberts Day: In 2010, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law making January 23 of each year Ed Roberts Day.
  • Ed Roberts Campus : In 2011, an independent living center known as Ed Roberts Campus opened.
  • Inducted into the 2011 California Hall of Fame .

See also

literature

  • Joseph P. Shapiro: No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (de: No pity: People with disabilities forging a new civil rights movement ). Times Books, New York NY 1993, ISBN 0-8129-1964-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ J. Michael Elliott: Edward V. Roberts, 56, Hero of the Disabled. The New York Times , March 16, 1995
  2. ↑ @cal, great minds online
  3. ↑ Curb Cuts. In: 99% Invisible. Retrieved March 10, 2019 (American English).
  4. ^ Finding Aid to the Edward V. Roberts Papers , The Bancroft Library
  5. ^ Ed Roberts Day Act , accessed December 31, 2011
  6. ^ Ed Roberts Campus
  7. ↑ cforat.org
  8. ↑ mercurynews.com
  9. ↑ 2011 California Hall of Fame Inductees ( Memento from January 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Retrieved 11/12/2011
personal data
SURNAME Roberts, Ed
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roberts, Edward Verne (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American activist of the independent living movement
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1939
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1995
Place of death Berkeley