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Introduction

Introduction

Disability activists and advocacy groups from New York have led the way in fights for equal access to employment, education, transportation, healthcare, and more.

We are actively collecting and preserving documents, photographs, media, and objects that tell these histories. Collections are housed at the College of Staten Island (CSI), CUNY Archives and Special Collections, and are available for research and study.

What are disability rights?

Disability rights are part of civil rights. They recognize that all people deserve equal access to opportunities and participation in society. Most people know about disability rights because of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which defines disabilities and establishes a framework for providing reasonable accommodations to end exclusion from employment, public services, public accommodations, and telecommunications.

Disability is a broad term that covers many different disabilities. Often, individuals and organizations advocate for specific needs. For example, they might ask for tactile indicators for people who are blind in transportation environments, wheelchair ramps for buildings, or captions for audio information. Sometimes, people with different disabilities have similar needs or work together in a coalition to address the community’s diverse needs.

New York Disability Activism Before the ADA

  • 1901: Elizabeth Farrell teaches the first special education class in a public school. She was a strong advocate for universal education.
  • 1935: The League of the Physically Handicapped staged a 9-day sit-in at the Emergency Relief Bureau (ERB) in New York City, eventually winning 5,000 jobs for disabled New Yorkers
  • 1944: The Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (EPVA; now called United Spinal) was formed to advocate for rehabilitation and services for disabled veterans.
  • 1948: The AHRC was started by Ann Greenberg, who brought together parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They wanted their children to have access to education, therapies, employment, and to live in the community.
  • 1959: The first Occupational Day Center for disabled adults was opened by AHRC in Manhattan. The center taught job and likfe skills.
  • 1968: The Committee on the Handicapped is established by Mayor John Lindsay. It was formalized as an office in 1973. Today it is called the Mayors Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD).
  • 1969: New York-New Jersey TTY phone company is founded to make teletype calls more affordable for deaf people in the region.
  • 1970: Disabled In Action is founded by disabled New Yorkers, including Judy Heumann, Denise McQuade, Bobbi Linn, Frieda Tankas, Fred Francis, Pat Figueroa, Larry Weissberger, Susan Marcus, Jimmy Lynch and Roni Stier.
  • 1978: The New York Chapter of the National Paraplegia Foundation founds the Center for the Independence of the Disabled New York (CIDNY), the first independent living center in the state.
  • 1986: The New York Institute for Special Education (NYISE) expanded its focus to include children with learning and emotional disabilities.

What’s in the archive?

Decades before the ADA, New Yorkers were at the forefront of a movement to combat disability discrimination in employment, public services, public accommodations, and communications.

Through collections from 11 donors, we have found at least 16 areas of advocacy and more than 75 organizations and government offices that have worked together in the past and must continue to work together to protect disability rights. Most of these topics and groups are not well-documented in the archive. In some cases, records have not been saved, but some records have been preserved by other archives or by organizations.

Records Donors

  • Susan Abdulezer
  • Amy Emerman (records of Ann Emerman)
  • Alan Goldblatt
  • Peggy Groce (personal records and records of Jack Gorelick)
  • Carr Massi
  • Nadina LaSpina (personal records and records of Danny Roberts)
  • Jean and Peter Mettam (records of Henry Niles)
  • Jean Ryan
  • Teriananda
  • James Weisman
  • United Spinal (formerly Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association)
  • AHRC, the country’s first parent-led organization for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, plans to donate its historical records to the archive in the future.
  • The Arc of New York, which grew out of AHRC, donated its historical records collection to the CSI Archives and Special Collections in September 2025.

Advocacy Areas

  • Transportation
  • Education
  • Employment
  • Architectural access
  • Communications access
  • Housing access and rights
  • Health care
  • Mental health care
  • Independent living rights
  • Voting rights
  • Government representation
  • Anti-eugenics and anti-euthanasia
  • Emergency management
  • Media and arts representation
  • Adaptive sports and accessible recreation
  • Disability studies

Goals for 2026 and Beyond

New York’s place in the disability rights movement is not well-known. Many of the successes here have been helped by New York’s Human Rights Law. Our first goal was to save records about the disability rights movement in the New York City area. We have learned about the important role of the New York State government in local disability issues and have grown our work to include this.

We have found topic areas with few records, and the people in our records don’t always show the racial and cultural diversity of New York City. We plan to keep reaching out and researching existing collections and invite organizations and people who fight for rights to look at their old records and think about giving them to the New York Disability Rights Archive. At the same time, we plan to create a big exhibition for the community, called New York Disability Rights: Past, Present, and Future. This will bring together organizations and government offices that have been important in shaping disability rights in New York and beyond.

By asking organizations to submit short histories and old pictures, and by choosing items from the New York Disability Rights archive and researching stories about current and past organizations, the exhibit will show the web of support for disability rights that has grown over the past 100 years.