Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

by Judith Heumann

THE ACLU‘S REACTION cemented my decision to fight. If even the ACLU couldn’t understand how the Board of Ed’s actions were discriminatory, then we had to blow my story up. We had to use my case to make it crystal clear that the barriers we faced to education, employment, transportation, to just living our lives, were not one-off problems. They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex. So allowing schools and employers and city councils to design policies or buildings or buses in such a way that we couldn’t participate was a violation of our civil rights. Which the government had a responsibility to protect. But it wouldn’t happen—the government would not take any responsibility—unless we made it impossible for them to ignore us.