It’s time to proclaim your own “Ed Roberts Day”

It’s time to proclaim your own “Ed Roberts Day”

EdRoberts

Most of us did not observe “Ed Roberts Day” on January 23rd, but we should have.  Roberts, one of the founders of the independent living movement, lived a bold life “out-loud,”as one of a cadre of activists who catalyzed the movement for disability rights. That movement empowered people with disabilities to take control of their own lives and demand a world free of barriers to access and opportunity.  In public spaces and workplaces, all of us have benefitted from the philosophy and practice of universal access and inclusion advanced by Roberts and the disability rights movement.

The short film “Free Wheeling” tells the story of Ed Roberts’ evolution as a trailblazing disability rights activist.  After contracting polio when he was fourteen, he became paralyzed and lived from then on with technical assistance from an iron lung and, eventually, a power wheelchair.  When, after graduating from UC Berkeley in the 1960’s, Roberts sought help finding employment from the California Department of Rehabilitation, the counselor told him that he was “too disabled to work.”

Thirteen years later, Governor Brown (then in his first term) appointed Roberts to head the very agency that had sent him packing.   Governor Brown’s appointment of a person with severe disabilities to head the Rehab Department was considered by many a radical act.

In fact, Roberts was an avowed and proud radical.  He was on a mission to force a paradigm change in both how people with disabilities viewed themselves and how we as a society view people with disabilities.

Most people never thought of independence as a possibility when they thought of us. But we knew what we wanted, and we set up CIL to provide the vision and resources to get people out into the community. The Berkeley CIL was also revolutionary as a model for advocacy based organizations: no longer would we tolerate being spoken for.

The Berkeley Center for Independent Living, founded by Roberts and other activists in the 1960’s, is now housed within the ultra-accessible, and aptly named, Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley.   This magnificent building is the epicenter of disability activism, housing, under one roof, many of the most important disability rights organizations in the country, if not the world, including the World Institute on Disability (co-founded by Roberts) and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

Last week I served as a volunteer attorney at the Ed Roberts Campus, staffing the workers’ rights disability law clinic offered by the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco-Employment Law Center.  People with disabilities often seek help from the legal clinic because, like Ed Roberts, someone in power thinks that they are too disabled to work.  And when they walk or wheel through front doors, they enter a place that embodies the vision of the independent living and disability rights movements of which Roberts was so much a part.

ramp-up-3.ed robertsThe Ed Roberts Campus exemplifies the concept of “universal design,” the idea that what designers refer to as the “built environment” should be “more usable by as many people as possible at little or no extra cost.” Barriers have fallen away as curving ramps offering smooth travel from the first to the second floor and elevators can be called with the press of a wheelchair footrest.  The Ed Roberts Campus is a beautiful symbol of how far we have come in the struggle for a barrier-free world. The work that happens in that beautiful space is a reminder of how far we have yet to go to achieve Robert’s goal of a barrier-free world.

The Ed Roberts campus is a place where people with and without disabilities are inspired to action.  It is a fitting tribute to the man who inspired a movement to get us there.   And really there’s no reason to wait until Governor Brown issues next year’s “Ed Roberts Day” proclamation to move from inspiration to action.

 

About Jean Hyams

Jean K. Hyams is a founding partner of Levy Vinick Burrell Hyams LLP, a Bay Area boutique law firm focused on representing employees in employment disputes. She left a career as a manager in high-tech companies to pursue her dream of becoming a civil rights lawyer. She has been named by Northern California Super Lawyers as one of the Top 50 Women Lawyers in Northern California for the past five years and her firm has been rated one of the Best Law Firms (Tier 1 – Employment Law) by U.S. News and World Report. After almost a quarter-century in practice, she now also serves as a court-appointed and private mediator of employment disputes. Jean is Co-Chair of the CELA VOICE.

The March for Jobs and Freedom continues: A daughter walks in her mother’s footsteps

The March for Jobs and Freedom continues: A daughter walks in her mother's footsteps

By Tiren Angela Steinbach

march

My mother grew up in a middle class African American family in Hyde Park, Chicago.  She graduated from high school in 1963 and was enrolled in Skidmore College for the fall. As a girl, she was a dancer, so she convinced her parents to send her to dance school in Paris the summer before she started college.  Paris in the early 60s was the mecca of cool, the epicenter for Black intellectuals and artists who had left the United States to find greater acceptance in the City of Lights.  So, in the summer of ‘63, eighteen years old, my mom flew off alone to Paris, which was horribly romantic in theory but rather lonely in reality. This was particularly true if your French was less that exemplary, which was, unfortunately true for my mother.

My mother was alone and desperate for her mother tongue, so she read the International Herald Tribune every day cover to cover. One day, there was a notice on the back pages: “Interested in Civil Rights?  Want to talk with other folks about the March on Washington? Come to Café Blah de blah blah at 4 p.m.” It was signed J.B.  My mother circled the notice and went to Café Blah de blah at 4 o’clock.  The café was overflowing with dozens of American ex pats, many African American, all sitting around drinking café lattes and discussing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that was planned for the following week.  The small café was filled with a cacophony of American-accented voices speaking at once, asking, “What was it all about?”  “What should we do?” “What does this all mean for Negros – is this really going to make a difference?”  Finally the host of the meeting, J.B. – James Baldwin – stood up and said simply, “It’s time to go home.  Our people need us.”

My mom went home.  She changed her ticket and flew back to Chicago the day before the march.  But when she got there, her parents’ house was empty. She went to her aunt’s place next door – empty. It was like the whole of Hyde Park was empty, all gone to Washington DC to take part in history. No one had been expecting her so there was no message, no instructions, nothing.  Finally she found a scrap of paper written in her twin sister’s handwriting that had a name and number. She called it and a man on the other end said that the last chartered train to DC was leaving in two hours and she better get to the station if she wanted to get on board. So she did.

podiumShe arrived in DC with hundreds of thousands of people there to march to support civil rights. My mother was swept out of the train station into the crowd flowing like a human river towards the Lincoln Memorial.  There, a queue of speakers took the stage to address the crowd, among them Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered a thoughtful speech about the emancipation proclamation and the national legacy of racism.  Some say that it was gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing nearby on the stage, who called out, “tell them about your dream, Martin!” And my mom stood in a crowd of over 200,000 listening to the speech that would later be recognized as a transforming moment of the Civil Rights Movement.  That day, my mom never found her mother or father or her twin sister or aunts, uncles, cousins, grandfather, and neighbors, but she knew that they were there with her somewhere in the crowd.  And she knew that her world had changed forever.

My mother started college several weeks later.  She joined SNCC – the Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee She joined SDS – Students for a Democratic Society.  She joined the MOVEMENT…and never looked back.  A couple years later, in 1965, while organizing for another march on Washington to oppose the Vietnam War, my mom got a call from a graduate student at Rochester, saying that he had three busloads of people for the march but needed to connect to an organization to get them to DC. My mother told the grad student to come to a planning meeting in New York City, and he did. That man was my father. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I share this story as a call to us all, J.B.’s call that my mother answered, “to go home, our people need us.”  And home is not only our home, but the streets and jails and prisons and homeless shelters and veterans homes and community centers and clinics and legal aids and public defender offices and all places we are needed to advocate for justice. And our people are all people whose voices are silenced and stories vilified and humanity stolen – all people for whom the law has been wielded as a weapon against them rather than a tool for their equality.  And on this journey for justice, we will sometimes feel alone and scared and far from comfort, but our spirits will be buoyed by the many others who have also answered the call, and comforted by knowledge that we are part of global movement – people raising hands up and voices loud and putting lives at risk for justice.  And we will need to be lifted by words and wisdom of those who preach proudly to the choir because they know the power of their sermons is what inspires the choir to sing our loud and proud and powerfully for justice – justice that looks like love in public. And we must answer this call and never look back because today, more than ever, our people need us.

Tirien Angela Steinbach is the executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center, the community-based clinic for Berkeley Law School, where she graduated from law school in 1999. This post was written from her life experiences in hopes of inspiring a call to justice.  It originally appeared on the EBCLC blog under the title “J.B.’s Call and the March for Jobs and Freedom.”