Twenty years ago, the Smithsonian Institution received a donation of a wheelchair. It had belonged to Ed Roberts, who had recently died after an extraordinary life. The article is nominally about the wheelchair, but it’s really a tribute to Ed Roberts, an early leader in the disability rights movement who was called “the father of independent living.”
A post-polio quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on a respirator, Roberts was the first severely disabled student to attend the University of California at Berkeley, studying political science, earning a BA in 1964 and an MA in 1966, and nurturing there a nascent revolution. At UC Berkeley, Roberts and a cohort of friends pioneered a student-led disability services organization, the Physically Disabled Students Program, which was the first of its kind on a university campus and the model for Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living (CIL), where Roberts served as executive director from 1972 to 1975. Over time, from that first CIL, sprang hundreds of independent living centers across the country.
Roberts himself was a model—a joyful, positive model—of independence: He married, fathered a son, and divorced; he once swam with dolphins, rafted down the Stanislaus River in California, and studied karate.
None of these accomplishments were easy. For instance, the state didn’t want to confer his high school diploma because he didn’t pass P.E. or driver’s education. But Roberts learned to persevere against those who told him what he could or could not do. And he went on to fight battles on behalf of others, as a disabilities rights activist on campus, in the community, and in the legislatures that decided what accommodations people with disabilities would receive. Read the story of Ed Roberts at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: National Museum of American History)