The protests, court cases, laws, and cultural moments that shaped disability rights — from the Ugly Laws to the UN CRPD.
Showing 20 results
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 13, 2006, and entered into force in 2008. It is the first binding international human rights treaty focused on disability. Developed with extensive input from disabled people's organisations, it operationalises the principle "Nothing About Us Without Us."
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law on July 26, 1990, by President George H.W. Bush. Before its passage, the Capitol Crawl of March 12, 1990 — in which disabled protesters abandoned their wheelchairs and crawled up the 83 marble steps of the US Capitol — became one of the most powerful acts of disability civil disobedience in American history.
In March 1988, students at Gallaudet University — the world's only university designed for Deaf students — shut down the campus for a week to protest the board of trustees' selection of a hearing president over two highly qualified Deaf candidates. The protest succeeded: the hearing appointee resigned, and I. King Jordan became Gallaudet's first Deaf president.
In April 1977, disabled activists occupied the San Francisco office of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for 28 days — the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in US history — to force the signing of Section 504 regulations that had been stalled for four years. It was a defining moment of the disability rights movement.
The Independent Living Movement began when Ed Roberts — a disability rights pioneer with severe post-polio disability who used an iron lung at night — enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1962 and began organising his fellow disabled students. By 1972, Roberts and his colleagues had founded the first Center for Independent Living, establishing a philosophy that disabled people should control their own lives and services.
The ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) of 2008 reversed two Supreme Court decisions that had dramatically narrowed the ADA's protections, restoring Congress's original broad intent. The Court had ruled in Sutton v. United Airlines (1999) and Toyota Motor Manufacturing v. Williams (2002) that mitigating measures should be considered in determining disability status, effectively excluding many people who experience discrimination from ADA protection.
In Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), the Supreme Court ruled that the unjustified institutionalisation of people with mental disabilities constitutes discrimination under Title II of the ADA. The decision affirmed that disabled people have the right to receive services in the most integrated setting appropriate, establishing a powerful legal basis for community integration.
Mad Pride began in Toronto in 1993, when psychiatric survivors organised an event to reclaim the word "mad" from its use as a term of stigma and shame. The movement asserts the dignity, validity, and political identity of people with lived experience of mental illness and psychiatric systems, challenging both involuntary treatment and the broader stigmatisation of mental difference.
"Nothing About Us Without Us" is the defining slogan of the global disability rights movement, asserting that disabled people must be centrally involved in decisions that affect them. The phrase was adopted as a rallying cry at international disability rights meetings in South Africa in the early 1990s and was popularised globally by James Charlton's 1998 book of the same name.
Disabled Peoples' International (DPI) was founded in Winnipeg, Canada, in November 1981 — the first international cross-disability organisation controlled and led by disabled people themselves. Its founding represented a direct challenge to the established Rehabilitation International, which was dominated by non-disabled professionals.
ADAPT (originally American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, later American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) was founded in Denver in 1978 by Wade Blank and a group of disabled activists. Known for dramatic direct action — blocking inaccessible buses and chaining themselves to vehicles — ADAPT became one of the most effective disability rights organisations in the US.
The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) of 1975 — later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — established for the first time the right of children with disabilities in the US to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment (LRE). Before its enactment, more than 1 million disabled children were excluded from public schools entirely.
In 1975, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) published "Fundamental Principles of Disability" — a short document that articulated what became known as the social model of disability. It drew a critical distinction between impairment and disability, arguing that disability is created by society's failure to accommodate people with impairments, not by the impairments themselves.
In January 1972, journalist Geraldo Rivera broadcast footage from the Willowbrook State School — a large New York institution for people with intellectual disabilities — revealing conditions of severe abuse, neglect, and squalor. The exposé shocked the nation, accelerated the deinstitutionalisation movement, and contributed directly to landmark legal settlements protecting the rights of institutionalised people.
Camp Jened was a summer camp in the Catskills for teenagers with disabilities that operated from the 1950s to the 1970s. For many campers, it was their first experience of community, agency, and political consciousness as disabled people. The 2020 Netflix documentary "Crip Camp" brought this history to a global audience, following several Jened alumni who became key figures in the disability rights movement.
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) was founded in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in November 1940 by Dr. Jacobus tenBroek. It became the largest organisation of blind people in the US, pioneering the philosophy that "blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future" and that the problem blind people face is not blindness itself but the misconceptions and inaccessibility of a sighted world.
In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that the forced sterilisation of people with intellectual disabilities was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." The decision has never been formally overturned and enabled the forced sterilisation of more than 60,000 Americans.
At the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan in 1880, hearing educators voted to adopt oral methods exclusively in Deaf education, effectively banning sign languages from schools for Deaf children worldwide. The decision devastated Deaf communities globally and set back Deaf education and culture for nearly a century.
From 1867 to 1974, several US cities and states maintained "ugly laws" — municipal ordinances that prohibited people who were "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed" from appearing in public spaces. Chicago was the last city to repeal its ordinance, in 1974. These laws codified the public exclusion of disabled people and shaped attitudes that the disability rights movement would spend decades dismantling.
Gallaudet University — the world's only university designed for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students — was established by an act of Congress signed by President Abraham Lincoln on April 8, 1864. It remains the most important centre of Deaf culture and Deaf Studies in the world, and has produced generations of Deaf leaders, scholars, and activists.