Ed Roberts (activist)
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Edward Verne Roberts (January 23, 1939- March 14, 1995) was the first severely-disabled student to attend the University of California, Berkeley. He became one of the founders and one of the greatest leaders of the disability rights movement.
Early life
Ed Roberts contracted polio as an adolescent in 1953. For the first year of his illness, he spent all of his time in a hospital. Eventually he left the hospital, but had to spend vast expanses of time in an iron lung. For a while, he thought of himself as a "helpless cripple," but eventually he graduated from high school after he and his mother worked to have the physical education and drivers licence requirements of graduation waived. He noticed the large amount of attention that his disability gained him, and decided to use this attention for positive purposes.Activism
Ed Roberts had to work hard to get Berkeley to accept him, because, as a dean explained, "We've tried cripples before and it didn't work." Instead of living in a dorm, the university housed him in the student infirmary, as it was the only room on campus with a floor that could support the weight of his iron lung.Roberts spearheaded the drive for such basic accommodations such as curb cuts at Berkeley. With the addition of five other severely-disabled students, who called themselves the "rolling quads," he lobbied for the creation for the first disabled students program at a university. In addition, he was one of the founding members of and directors of the [Center for Independent Living] and [World Institute on Disability].
He earned B.A. (1964) and M.A. (1966) degrees from UC Berkeley in Political Science. He became an official Ph.D. Candidate (C.Phil.) in political science at Berkeley in 1969, but did not complete his Ph.D. [link]
See also
References
- Shapiro, Joseph P. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. Random House, 1993.
External links
- [World Institute on Disability article by Joan Leon]
- [Ed Roberts tribute from the Center for Independent Living]
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