The Disability Rights Movement

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The Disability Rights Movement The disability rights movement, over the last couple of decades, has made the injustices faced by people with disabilities visible to the American public and to politicians. This required reversing the centuries-long history of segregation and discrimination toward disabled people. Arlene Mayerson, the author of The History of the ADA: A Movement Perspective, claims “the disability rights movement adopted many of the same strategies that the civil rights movement used. Like the African-Americans who refused to move to the back of the bus, people with disabilities obstructed the movement of inaccessible buses and marched through the streets to protest injustice,” (Mayerson,…show more content…
((Mayerson, 1992). Since the mid 1900s, people with disabilities have pushed for the recognition of disability as an aspect of identity that influences the experiences of an individual, not as the sole-defining feature of a person (Mayerson, 1992). According to Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer, the author of Disabled Rights: American Policy and the Fight for Equality, Discrimination during this period was based on societies concept of "spread"; she defines the term "spread" as: “people are likely to take a single characteristic of a person, such as a physical disability, and infer other traits such as the inability to learn or make intelligent decisions...having a disability is often regarded as being feebleminded" (Switzer 2003 p.37). The common belief that a disabled person was a noncontributing member of society, an economic drain on society, and was a threat to society, lead to the sterilization of "feebleminded" individuals and/or institutionalization to extremely poor facilities and treatment; moreover, between the late 20s and mid 60s, an estimated 63,000 Disabled Americans were forced sterilized simply because they had a disability (Switzer 2003). As demonstrated above, people with disabilities have been discriminated…show more content…
For the first time, the exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities was viewed as discrimination. Previously, it had been assumed that the problems faced by people with disabilities, such as unemployment and lack of education, were inevitable consequences of the physical or mental limitations imposed by the disability itself (Fleischer; Zames 2011). As with racial minorities and women, Congress recognized that legislation was necessary to eradicate discriminatory policies and practices. The Rehabilitation Act contains five sections that address different aspects of equal opportunity for people with disabilities. First, Section 501 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in themfederal government and requires affirmative action in the hiring of people with disabilities by government agencies (Fleischer; Zames 2011). secondly, Section 502 establishes the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board and gives the board authority to enforce the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968
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