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In 1959, a teenage Kitty Cone was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. The daughter of a well-off military family, she discovered that her disability often worked against her family’s wealth and political connections. She attended five different high schools, including the posh Holton-Arms School where her cousins had to carry her up the stairs so she could attend classes. At the Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C., the headmistress imposed certain rules on Cone: She had to bathe in her housemother’s bathroom under the supervision of an adult even though she couldn’t get out of the unwieldy tub. She improvised and began taking baths in her dorm suite on her own power, but “that was considered disobedience,” she would later say. She also walked down to the hockey field, another infraction. The school expelled her, a decision that humiliated her even though she didn’t think of it as discrimination — and neither did the law.

The world outside the Mount Vernon Seminary was hardly more progressive. Public schools could, and often did, force students with disabilities into separate classes regardless of their abilities. Businesses were not usually accessible to them, and employers could refuse to hire them. Many were forced into institutions where some were sterilized against their will. Cone came of age in a society that preferred not to think of her at all or, when it did, sought to wipe her out altogether. But Cone, a gay woman in a wheelchair, never surrendered her expectations, or her humanity, to anyone. By the time President Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 into law after vetoing it twice, she had become a professional organizer, and she would soon join the fight for disability rights.

Section 504 of the act barred publicly-funded entities from discriminating against people with disabilities. Yet by 1977, the federal government had not developed the regulations that would allow it to fully implement the law, which forced activists to take dramatic measures. That April, they launched nationwide sit-ins at the offices of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Cone and roughly 100 other demonstrators occupied HEW’s regional office in San Francisco for nearly a month, an effort that may have failed were it not for the participation of Brad Lomax, a member of the Black Panther Party who had multiple sclerosis. The Panthers kept the demonstrators fed, covered the protest in their official newspaper, and paid for Lomax and his attendant to join Cone and others in Washington, D.C., where they confronted top HEW officials. “We will no longer allow the government to oppress disabled individuals. We want the law enforced,” the prominent disability-rights activist Judith Heumann told one representative. HEW secretary Joseph Califano Jr. signed the regulations in the following weeks.

Lomax died a few years later, and as one contemporary would later tell the New York Times, “I don’t think that all of his aspirations were fulfilled, even after the demonstration. He really wanted more.” So did the disability-rights movement. In 1990, more than 1,000 activists descended upon Washington to demand passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which banned discrimination in employment on the basis of disability and expanded protections for the disabled in most areas of public life. After a speech, many climbed out of their wheelchairs or cast aside their assistive devices to pull themselves up the steps of the Capitol. The Capitol Crawl was strenuous, and activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins remembered years later that she had to stop several times so she could ask for water. Her mother, Cynthia, was arrested the next day as part of a mass demonstration in the Capitol Rotunda. The ADA passed shortly thereafter and President George H.W. Bush signed it into law that July. In a speech, he cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964, adding, “Today’s legislation brings us closer to that day when no Americans will ever again be deprived of their basic guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Thirty-five years later, the Trump administration has disability rights in its sights. The eradication of so-called “DEI” programs has already reduced accessibility for people with disabilities, as the White House itself made clear in an announcement earlier this month. Trump, it said, had signed a memo removing the “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” precept concerning tenure and promotion within the U.S. Foreign Service. Last week, the Department of Justice removed 11 guidelines that helped businesses comply with the ADA’s public-accommodations requirements. Though the requirements are still in effect, and Trump cannot overturn the ADA by fiat, the news is a warning. The president doesn’t have the constitutional authority to dismantle the Department of Education, either, but he’s ordered the firings of thousands of workers. “I don’t think most Americans recognize how much the Department of Education does for disabled students,” Jess Davidson of the American Association for People With Disabilities tells me. Many of the fired workers handled civil-rights investigations and, Davidson says, without them, disabled students “will fall through the cracks” and potentially suffer abuse.

Trump

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