Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Phil Rocco tell (one version of) the story of Section 504, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation for disabled people in the US. In Part One, we look at the politics leading up to the 504 sit-in and how the implementation of Section 504 very nearly didn't happen because of concerns that it would be "too expensive." In Part Two, our story continues with a look at the sit-in action itself—the longest occupation of a federal government building in US history—and the key role played by the Oakland Black Panthers and other groups in assuring the occupation's success.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)

Elaine Brown (Clipped Audio) 0:00

And remember there was a time when we -- this country would kill people who were born with certain disabilities. Here you are fighting for your very life, you're not just fighting for some little thing, you're fighting for your life.

Dennis Billups (Clipped Audio) 0:14

There were so many different blind people and disabled persons whom came from so many directions, who didn't know how they were going to eat the next day, didn't know what was next coming down the road, either police or anybody else, didn't care if anything else went good or bad, they wanted to make sure that they were part that made sure that the government heard their voices, their hearts and their minds. And they did that. They did that.

[ Intro music ]'

PART ONE

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:01:15

Welcome to the Death Panel. To support the show and get access to the entire weekly bonus episode and back catalogue of bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, pick up copies of Health Communism, and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.

So today's episode is going to be another installment in our Death Panel History Series. The three of us are going to be discussing one of the most well known early disability civil rights actions in American history.

On April 5th, 1977, disabled people led simultaneous sit-ins at 11 Housing, Education and Welfare [HEW] offices across the United States, and this is known as the 504 sit-in. And the idea was to attempt to pressure the Carter administration to implement one small section of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which was originally passed under Nixon, but had been held up and delayed over concerns about overall cost to the "taxpayer". So today, we're gonna talk about 504 itself, not just the sit-in, but why the sit-in happened, what it accomplished, and the regulatory dynamics and paranoias which led to the protest movement in the first place. Because the question really is why did a random sentence at the end of a standard reauthorization become a highly controversial national issue.

So just to sort of set us up, on the morning of April 5th, 1977, hundreds of disabled people entered the offices of the US Department of Housing, Education and Welfare in cities across the United States demanding that the agency implement one line in the law, called Section 504. Accounts vary as to the total number of protests that occurred simultaneously. But based on my own research, I would put it at 11 of them. And out of these 11 actions taking place in San Francisco, Washington, DC, Boston, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles, only one of those would last past the first week, thanks in no small part to the support of the Oakland Black Panther Party, who provided crucial support to the San Francisco sit-in allowing it to sustain for weeks. So if you look at the average account of the story, right, if you just sort of look up, like, what's the 504 sit-in --

Phil Rocco 00:04:11

Which I have to say, I didn't even -- I hadn't even heard that. Because like -- and I would have thought maybe in like thinking about the history of social movements, I would have heard about like a month long sit-in in like a federal office building where like the federal government --

Artie Vierkant 00:04:25

Like an occupation of a HEW [US Department of Housing, Education and Welfare] building?

Phil Rocco 00:04:27

Yeah, where the federal government was like doing everything possible to like, get these people out. And it's just -- it's a wild story, which I've never heard at all. But what's the sort of like, conventional account?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:04:38

So the sort of short version of the story is that in 1973, a law called the Rehabilitation Act was reauthorized. And in that act, someone had put in one sentence called Section 504, at the very end, which was a civil rights provision for people with disabilities. Now, we'll get into this a little bit later, but no one actually knows how that got in there and what the intent was. But ultimately, what happens is this law ends up sitting there for four years, and after four years, disabled people who have been organizing around this, at that point, declare that they have a deadline, and they want HEW to implement the law by April 4th, 1977. And when they don't, on April 5th, 1977, they occupy the HEW office building, with the San Francisco occupation lasting about a month. And the story goes that kind of they were successful, and then this becomes the sort of beginning of the disability civil rights movement.

And this is the kind of like genesis moment and it's kind of talked about, you know, romantically as this real origin point of the kind of model of advocacy that you see becoming dominant throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And this is really kind of laying the template for the work that would go into the ADA. And many disability rights activists at the time, you know, when they were working on passing the ADA, they said that this was explicitly a project of expanding the promise of Section 504. So it's a really important moment in disability history, but most people know of it just through this protest action, and they don't know of the bigger backstory, and the sort of more complicated and very interesting story, not just behind the sit-in, but behind the policy itself, which is actually a really important story with a lot of angles that are rarely mentioned, even in disability studies.

Artie Vierkant 00:06:34

Right. I mean, for instance, I think this has changed more recently, but I think in a lot of kind of popular accounts, like if you're gonna open, I don't know, like a high school textbook or something about this and see like a little blurb, you know, they do like a paragraph or something about some major event. I think in that kind of general sanitized history, there's no mention of like, the fact that one of the reasons that of all of the different occupations that were happening at the time, that the reason that, as you mentioned, in your sort of setup, that the San Francisco one was able to go was in large part because of the involvement of the Black Panthers, right, who did a lot of work to support -

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:07:09

To feed and -- yeah, help actually sustain it.

Artie Vierkant 00:07:13

Like that for a long time was sort of just basically ignored in the history.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:07:16

Mhm, written out -- explicitly written out of the record, in many instances.

Artie Vierkant 00:07:20

As though people just kind of like, showed up to this office building. And they were -- and it wasn't contest[ational] -- like, you know, it was an occupation of a federal building, but it wasn't -- somehow it wasn't -- like, magically miraculously, it wasn't contestational or something. It was just like they were peacefully allowed to sit there and --

Phil Rocco 00:07:36

Don't worry, it wasn't -- yeah, people weren't mean, it was nice. Everybody liked it. The classic sanitized social movement history [laughter].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:07:42

Exactly. You know, it goes law passes, government stalls, activists through direct action force the federal government to implement law, everybody lives happily ever after,

Artie Vierkant 00:07:52

Right? The arc of history got bent.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:07:54

[laughter] And, you know, this -- but of course, you know, this is Death Panel, so longtime listeners will know that I'm about to say, well, the truth is actually much more complicated than that. And this more complicated story happens to also be a particular area of research interest of mine. And because the writing I have on this is not yet published, I'm glad to be able to sort of walk you all through this other history of Section 504. But first to sort of understand why the 504 protests happened, or even what it was, it's really important to understand what Section 504 and the Rehabilitation Act itself.

Artie Vierkant 00:08:32

Right. I think what I'm really excited about getting into in the story, because there are, you know, as we mentioned, there is a lot of focus on the occupation, there is a lot of -- as we mentioned, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be revised about the histories of that occupation that is either written out of the record, but also to understand what Section 504 was and how it got implemented. It gets into this whole sort of conversation about first, what the forces were that determined this being sort of written into law in the first place, how that happened, but then also how immediately this fell into like, what at the time was sort of the costs versus benefits discussion, if you will. In this case, very literally a cost benefit discussion of is the cost of guaranteeing -- of having a law on the books saying that disabled people have civil rights, are those costs worth it to the government?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:09:31

Is it too expensive, yeah.

Artie Vierkant 00:09:32

Yeah, and these are literally the conversations that happened.

Phil Rocco 00:09:34

Should we care about their lives and how much, right?

Artie Vierkant 00:09:36

So I think getting into that, I'm very excited to hear especially your take on this story, Bea, because I think that this == yeah, again, this is this phenomenal case study, really, which is a really underdiscussed component of Section 504, as a regulation.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:09:54

Absolutely. Yeah.

Phil Rocco 00:09:55

Well I also think this is interesting is that the real thing that sparks the -- this demonstration, is like the hold up of the regulation and it's happening at a time before the sort of like formalization of cost benefit analysis. So in a way that hold up, it's so much more nakedly political why that's happening. And I sort of, as I was reading through the history, I was thinking, like, it would be so much easier to hide the very naked political interest behind holding up the regulation today, like cost benefit analysis provides this wonderful like pseudoscientific way of like justifying this. I just sort of wonder counterfactually like, what would this be like under a different regime where all of that politics is sort of hidden? And I don't know, we'll I guess get into the way that people justified holding this thing up. It's really interesting.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:10:51

Yeah. Because I think it's also this is the kind of thing where it's one of those stories that when you start to look at the picture, not just of the narrative of like how the law is passed, and then enters into public life, but just the real narrative of like, the nuts and bolts of implementing laws, once they're passed, you know, most of the time, I think, when people think of advocacy and policy victories, you think of moments of protest or the moments of drafting, being at those tables, being able to get, you know, legislation drafted in the first place. But, you know, all of those moments up until the point of something being signed, for example, by the President and then sort of sent to an agency --

Artie Vierkant 00:11:35

To then get implemented and how it gets implemented, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:11:38

Are just one tiny part of, you know, how politics are made, right. You know, the fact of the matter is, is that equally important to the political process of sort of getting the bill onto the desk, whether it's going to be vetoed or not, is if the bill is signed, what happens when agencies get it, right? What happens when agencies have to then interpret what they are given, interpret these laws and actually decide how to put those into practice? And surprise, surprise, right, when you look into the bigger history of what happened, you know, with Section 504, you immediately get into this incredibly important conversation about cost benefit analysis, about austerity, about waste, fraud, and abuse, and really about sort of the value of what the value of making the United States accessible actually was. And you know, while many are unaware of this early direct action, even fewer people know this backstory of why Section 504 took so long to implement, and how it was essentially tossed from one HEW director to the next like a fucking hot potato --

Artie Vierkant 00:12:48

Over three presidencies.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:12:49

Three presidential administrations before the protests even happened, right. And yet, stranger definitively to this day, as I mentioned, no one knows who is responsible for the language in the bill that set this whole thing in motion, no one has taken credit for it. Section 504 is a single sentence, never discussed in committee or on the floor for debate before the bill was passed. A single sentence with no legislative history to back it up. And the sort of strange truth about Section 504, which might be the sort of largest question in like disability history and American disability history, is that really, you know, if people had known what Section 504 would do, would it have actually gotten passed? Would it have made it? And I don't think that if people sort of realized as this process was happening, leading up until the point where it goes and starts hitting the agency, I think if people realized, you know, it's the kind of thing that never would have seen the light of day, which is I think an interesting angle to think about it.

So what's important to understand, basically, is that before the mid 20th century, much of the United States was highly inaccessible, disabled people often could not go to college, you basically, if you were lucky enough to get a high school education, as a disabled person, that was a tremendous achievement. There were many aspects of society that were structurally and institutionally much more inaccessible. Many disabled people lived in institutions or asylums, very few people lived in the community. And this is the beginning -- you know, the 1960s is the beginning of what's called the independent living movement, who are really sort of the first advocates for the social model of disability in the United States. And what they're doing is rejecting a sort of purely medicalized frame for understanding disability. That disability is not just a personal problem of individuals who are in need of treatment, therapy or cure, but a society level problem of exclusion, segregation and stigmatization, that exists not just at the individual level, but also at the level of systems institutions, laws, and civil rights.

Phil Rocco 00:12:57

And can we pause for a second on that? Because up until the latter part of the 20th century, the main way that governments thought about disability policy was like these people are the problem themselves. It's not like that we have a society that was, you know, built in a way that just emphasizes like economic production and just reframing and saying, no, no, the problem is that system, or that society itself. Like that is -- it's like worth thinking about how that's done, because it's precisely that kind of transformation that's like really missing even more broadly today rhetorically. Just like, I found that aspect of the history itself, even before you get to like the demonstrations or anything, like that itself is like fascinating to me.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:15:00

It's really important and interesting because it's a major shift in the way that people think about disability writ large. But it is also important to note that we shouldn't necessarily be like super stanning these early disability activists, because a lot of the ideology that underlies this early shift to the social model of disability lies on a couple of things. Like the independent living movement drew heavily on language of civil rights, but also on consumerism, self help, and demedicalization. And the sort of idea that, you know, disability doesn't exist within the physical body and that chronically ill people are sort of excluded was part of the early social model theory. It was a rejection, of saying we're not sick. So you know, it's like, in this sort of moment of reframe, right, you have these two opposing and highly, highly opposed views of disability, one that sees everything through a medicalized lens, and one that fully rejects a medicalized lens. And it's important to remember that, for example, before this moment, most bills, if they're dealing with disability, they're going to say veterans or rehabilitation in it.

Phil Rocco 00:15:45

Okay, yeah, that's right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:15:46

And in 1968, something called the Architectural Barriers Act passes. And that's really the first social model bill that passes in the United States. And that comes, you know, that's a whole other story for another day.

Artie Vierkant 00:17:11

Right, well because prior to that, most of the legislation in the United States regarding disability was mostly related to, as you mentioned, either institutionalizing disabled people or a actually conjoined purpose with the asylum system actually, which was, as you said, rehabilitation, which is the idea that you kind of separate disabled people from broader society, train them to do jobs, rehabilitate them in some way to do work. And that the end goal for a lot of especially in I think, the 19th and 20th century, right, the end goal for a lot of disability welfare policy was like work training programs --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:17:51

Right, it was normalization.

Artie Vierkant 00:17:52

Was ensuring productivity, and yeah, exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:17:54

It was a strategy of normalization to make the disabled person appear normal. So you had you know, corrective braces, things to sort of -- orthopedic interventions, right. And this is like very much like, until 1968, this is all disability policy does. Like it talks about allocating resources for surgeries and interventions and asylums, and the doctors and the nurses and the staff, you know, and it's very much all sort of contained within that medical apparatus.

And starting with the independent living movement, which gets started, you know, at UC Berkeley in the early 60s, disability activists in the United States began to start to try and frame accessibility under the framework of social, civil or economic rights, not under the framework of vocational rehabilitative interventions.

So this is sort of obviously inspired by movements for racial justice and civil rights era legislation, disability activists in the independent living movement start to try and emulate those strategies in the realm of disability specific policy in the early 1970s, towards goals of essentially undoing what they're calling at the time, segregation.

If you are speaking as a contemporary person, do not use that to describe the non-inclusion of disabled people in society. That's not a current term. But as was the standard in the 50s, 60s and 70s, every few years, Congress would redraft, update and reauthorize something called a vocational rehabilitation bill.

Artie Vierkant 00:19:26

Which was designed to do exactly the stuff we're talking about.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:19:29

Exactly. It was designed to maintain funding for all of these programs that warehoused and trained and treated disabled people. And in the 1972 reauthorization, a small change was made. Again, no one knows how it got in there. And that's Section 504, which set into motion this whole debate.

The language, the actual sentence is "no otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States, as defined in section seven, paragraph six, shall solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance". And really, basically, the story goes that in the summer of 1972, when this is being drafted, this is a moment in Congress when civil rights had high visibility. Everyone had an opinion on it.

And at the time, they were fiercely debating creating an agency within the federal government to enforce all of the various nebulous civil rights statutes that had been passed over the last like decade or so.

Many disability scholars who have looked into this sort of say that the general vibe in Washington at the time, which dominated the debate over centralized versus decentralized approaches to civil rights programs is probably actually what informed this and that this was kind of like a courtesy that they -- that staffers included because they -- that was sort of in vogue at the time. It was a gesture that was something to sort of do --

Artie Vierkant 00:21:05

That in the same way as for the Civil Rights Act, if the mechanism to enforce for instance, like desegregation of public schools and other places is essentially withholding government funding.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:21:17

Yeah. And so that's essentially what 504 threatens is that if you receive federal funding, you must not discriminate against people with disabilities. And that includes -- well, it doesn't say what it includes actually, it's just that sentence that later becomes a problem, right?

Artie Vierkant 00:21:32

Right, and then who it includes becomes contestional later, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:21:34

Right, right. Exactly.

Phil Rocco 00:21:35

Right, because ostensibly it could be expansive, it could be any federal dollars, which at the time, there had just been an explosion in like federal dollars to state and local governments, all of this construction, a lot of highways, right? It's pretty expensive, like what that could have meant.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:21:54

Right. And the most definitive account of sort of who was responsible for Section 504 comes from sociologist Richard Scotch. He writes, "The idea for including an anti-discrimination prohibition in the Rehabilitation Act occurred toward the end of a meeting in late August 1972 to discuss revisions to the marked up bill. Participants in the meeting included Jon Steinberg, Michael Francis, Nik Edes, Lisa Walker, Michael Burns, Roy Millenson, and Robert Humphries. Staff members were concerned that when disabled individuals completed their training in the vocational rehabilitation system and were ready to enter the workplace, many employers appeared to be reluctant to hire them.

Staff members felt that the final goal of the vocational rehabilitation program, getting disabled people into the mainstream of society, [via work, of course] was being blocked by negative attitudes and discrimination on the part of employers and others," which if you think about this framework, right, it sounds a lot like the ADA, doesn't it? And, you know, very much the idea I think was sort of just to include it as a way to try and, you know, give people -- give disabled people possibly like leverage to argue that they're facing employment discrimination, and that, you know, texturally, oh, we can throw in there that employment discrimination against disabled people is illegal, right.

And I think if you think about that logic, and you think about it from, you know, the kind of discussions that are happening among congressional staffers at the time, they're working on Title IX, as part of the 1972 Education Act, and Title IX also features this language and it turns out that Roy Millenson, who was in that meeting, who worked for Senator Jacob Javits, who was like a leader on Title IX, he goes, well, let me just like go and grab Title IX from my office, and we'll just take the sentence. So apparently, that's sort of how it gets in there and as Scotch writes,

"At the time of its inclusion and throughout the consideration of the Rehabilitation Act by Congress and the president, neither members of Congress nor those concerned with disability issues took note of the section."

Scotch says,

"It might be thought that such a far-reaching measure would have involved substantial debate on its merits, and that Congress would carefully indicate its intentions when considering the legislation. However, there is little in the record to suggest what, if anything, members of Congress had in mind when Section 504 was enacted. When a bill is considered in Congress, both the committees that prepare it and the conference committee that reconciles the House and Senate versions issue reports. These reports provide an opportunity to comment on the statutory language and provide background information referred to as 'legislative history.' The legislative history of the Rehabilitation Act contains only passing references to Section 504, stating simply that the section prohibits discrimination without providing any rationale or predicting any impact. The committee reports may also contain projections on the costs for each of the statutory provisions. Unlike most of the other parts of the Rehabilitation Act, no public expenditures were projected for Section 504. Legislative history also consists of the discussion of a bill during its consideration on the House and Senate floors, which is published in the Congressional Record. No references were made to the potential significance [laughter] of Section 504 on the floor of either house."

Artie Vierkant 00:25:12

So they just didn't talk about it at all.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:25:13

"In short, there was nothing to indicate what Congress had intended when it had passed Section 504."

Artie Vierkant 00:25:18

So I love this especially in context with what Phil was saying earlier about how under a very different regime, you could imagine this going very differently because --

Phil Rocco 00:25:29

CBO score. [sing-song voice] CBO score.

Artie Vierkant 00:25:32

You know, I would hope -- like in some ways this gives me hope that potentially something like this could still happen today. I feel like I doubt it. But it seems like just the power of having, you know, a couple of staffers in a room say like, let's see if we can get this in there. And then just no one noticing or commenting on it. And it, you know, really like, shaped -- like shaping so much of the -- really shaping so much of policy that came afterward.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:26:01

Absolutely. I mean, it turns out that the Rehabilitation Act of '73 was already controversial.

Artie Vierkant 00:26:06

Should we pass Medicare For All like this?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:26:07

I know, right? By a little secret line in there somewhere.

Phil Rocco 00:26:10

[sneaky mumbling noises] [laughter]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:26:13

So the act itself had already been controversial, right? Nixon vetoed it in '72, because it had added additional funding to existing vocational rehab programs and created new programs that were specifically targeted at certain disability groups. But mostly what really worried conservative politicians at the time was the change in the act that would allow disabled people with "severe disabilities" to participate in rehabilitation and education programs that they were previously barred from for being categorically "too disabled."

Artie Vierkant 00:26:48

Too disabled to be rehabilitated?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:26:50

Too disabled to be rehabilitated or educated, called formally human waste by the rehabilitation movement in the 1800s. So the reauthorization bill, right, it was controversial, but nobody knew about Section 504. And Section 504 was not why it was initially controversial and first vetoed by Nixon. But after being basically reintroduced for the third time in Congress in May of 1973, the Rehabilitation Act makes it to Nixon's desk again, President Nixon signs it on September 26th, 1973, with Section 504 in it. And you know, of course, most members of Congress appear to have been unaware that this was in there, or even thought about it at all. At best, it was maybe thought of as a sort of platitude, as we were saying, you know, that people -- staffers were like, oh, well, this relates to employment. This bill relates to employment of disabled people, we should include a provision against employment discrimination, right.

So you know, it's not to say that Section 504 is like a fluke or an accident, right, but there's no intent there on the record. And so after the Rehabilitation Act is signed in late September 1973, it gets passed on through the executive branch so that they can decide sort of where it goes. And it ends up where the prior rehabilitation acts ended up, which is in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, who was responsible for doing basically what Congress failed to do, which was include their preference, defining what Section 504 meant, was meant to do and how it was meant to be done. So I mean, Phil, maybe you could please feel free to jump in on this. But once something like the Rehabilitation Act is signed by a president, it goes through the sort of normal process, right, where it gets assigned to a department. And most bills have language in them that says, this is the law, and this is how the law should work. Correct?

Phil Rocco 00:28:49

It varies, right? I mean, one of the ways that you get a coalition together is you make the law vague. And then you say the agency has to fill in the details, right? All of that is like the politics of bureaucratic structure that, you know, is often required in like getting a bill passed. One example is like the -- as a sop to like opponents of the OSHA Act, they required all of this -- all these sort of studies to be done beforehand, to sort of delay things, right. So like you can -- like all of the details that won't appear immediately interesting to you, when you like look at a piece of legislation, they're really the sort of -- the politics that like produces the -- yeah, so like when something is super vague, it either means that maybe people didn't know that it was in there, or that it's the product of some implicit or explicit political compromise.

But in any case, it's the agency that has to interpret it. And it's interpreting it in the light of the rulemaking process, which gives a period of time for the agency to publish like a proposed rule. And then people can comment on the rule. Often those comments come from pretty well organized business interests. There's sort of a bias -- tends to be a bias in those comments towards those interests. And then agencies essentially are required to take those comments into consideration and then issue a final rule that takes them into consideration. And then the most important thing is that -- that you can take the agency to court if it didn't make the rule correctly, if it didn't follow the process, or if it like blatantly violated the law in most cases.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:30:37

Right. And I mean, the agencies as I understand it, have a lot of discretion. But they're supposed to, I guess, be making their decisions within the sort of intent and spirit of the law, right?

Phil Rocco 00:30:49

Yeah. And again, if the law is really vague, then there's a lot of variation. And this is why I think the thing that you said earlier, Bea is very important, which is the idea that like the political process ends after a piece of legislation passes, is is very wrong, especially when laws are vague.

Because the fight really becomes defining what it's going to mean for people to implement it. And the thing about that process is, it can be very technical, it can be very exclusive, right, to a relatively small number of regulated parties.

And I think when you look at what happens after this particular piece of regulation is then sort of drafted, you know, it's like colleges and universities are completely up in arms, they're like, we're not going to be able to do our jobs anymore. Like, God forbid, like we allow people with disabilities to like, go to college -- like go to college.

Artie Vierkant 00:31:50

Yeah. And you're not exaggerating, that's basically what they say in their statements about this.

Phil Rocco 00:31:54

Oh, they're freaked out. They are out of control.

Artie Vierkant 00:31:58

I mean, before we get ahead of ourselves though, I want to say something actually -- part of this, I think, very illustrative actually, of exactly what the two of you are saying, but more specific to -- you know, back to the specifics about 504, is that immediately after 504 is passed -- or sorry, I mean, immediately after this is signed with 504, in it rather, there is a question -- because it is vague, as we've been talking about, there's a question of even what agency is responsible for dealing with this and implementing this. And it ultimately --

Phil Rocco 00:32:32

Yeah, it's that vague.

Artie Vierkant 00:32:33

Right, it's that vague.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:32:33

It's that level of vague.

Artie Vierkant 00:32:34

But even it's unclear whether it's like -- there's this discussion, like is it part of the Rehabilitative Service Administration, hich was the thing at the time. Is it part of -- is it more broadly part of HEW, is it more broadly part of where it -- well, where it ultimately ends up for at least the beginning, is in the Office of Civil Rights. And what's very interesting there in itself is that -- so it becomes up to the Office of Civil Rights to draft the regulations for what Section 504 would entail when implemented. And they immediately run into this interesting hitch, which is that every agency at the time, I actually don't know if it might still be very similar today, but every agency at the time has its own or multiple definitions of disabled, multiple definitions of what it means to be a disabled person. And in the Act, the one thing that wasn't vague was that ultimately, the office that was going to manage this, the Office of Civil Rights, they should use the definition under the Rehabilitation Act itself, which is -- I'm going to read the exact language, which is, again, not language that should be used anymore. "The term handicapped individual means any individual who A) has a physical or mental disability for which such individual constitutes or results in a substantial handicap to (emphasized) employment, and B) can reasonably be expected to benefit in terms of employability, from vocational rehabilitation services, etc., etc.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:34:10

Yeah. And so this basically, as you can see, presented a bit of a problem because the Rehabilitation Act, right, as I had said, this is mostly used to sort disabled people -- these programs are used to sort disabled people into those who can be rehabilitated, and those who can not. People who can be rehabilitated, got access to certain services, and people who could not get access to carceral options only pretty much. It was carceral across the board, actually, frankly, but got access to much less. So obviously, the Office of Civil Rights sees an immediate problem here, which is if we -- the bill says use -- you know, literally the one thing that Section 504 is clear about, right, because there's no legislative history, there's no elaboration in the text itself, but it does say, according to this definition that's in this Act, right, that Artie just read, those people deserve civil rights, essentially, right. Here's the problem, right. So the Office of Civil Rights is like we can't do a civil rights provision that is this restrictive. You know, we can't basically say that we're only doing civil rights for some disabled people and not for others. This isn't an appropriate definition to use. We need to include more people and we need to include --

Artie Vierkant 00:35:29

People who can't work, for instance, because that's a whole big category of disabled people, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:35:33

A huge category, right. Like we can't just give civil rights to only disabled people who can work, like that would be a big fuck up, right. You know, at the time, obviously, I think when the -- when 504 was included, right, obviously, no one was really thinking about it, but they said, oh, we've got that definition of disability in Section 7, so we'll just reference that, and the problem is that, essentially, by this point, it's now 1974. And they've been trying to work out the definition.

And the Office of Civil Rights wants to expand it to include all disabled people as it should. The problem is that that would mean including people who use drugs or who are "dependent on alcohol," people who are "severely disabled," all these kind of like undesirable constituencies that are, you know, politically devalued. And part of the problem is that because of the sort of lack of legislative history, right, there are plenty of people to be like, oh, no, it's -- you know, just use any old definition of disability. But the Office of Civil Rights is really adamant that no, we have to, like, make a new definition that includes these subaltern groups, because otherwise, it's really fucked up. And so what happens is, they start to sort of send portions of the bill, they send them back to the Senate and the House. And they asked for sort of technical clarification, and it goes through all these rounds of discussion.

And, of course, you know, this more expansive framework of disability needing to happen is a sort of immediate issue. And essentially what happens is that after about a year, by late November 1974, the Act ends up back at HEW with these new amendments sort of tacked on to it, that are technical and clarifying amendments to sort of expand on 504. And so essentially, between 1973 and 1974, still, activists are not at all aware that Section 504 exists, they are not organizing on it, they are not involved in the process, they are not being asked for their opinions, they are not being necessarily thought of as stakeholders in this.

They're still very much a kind of passive object by a lot of the people that are working on this, but that's going to change. And ultimately, the sort of real task begins when, in 1975, HEW starts to try and concretize this broader definition of disability that would include, you know, this different working of disabled people that was much more expansive. And the other thing that's not addressed in Section 504, and not addressed in any of the amendments that they've just spent a year working on, is cost.

Artie Vierkant 00:38:14

Here we go.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:38:15

There's no discussion of cost or how it's going to be "paid for." And this was sort of the style at the time, they decided, you know what, fuck it, we need to intentionally leave that out though, because if we put that in, that's a sort of catch. And it's a "cynical obstruction" to focus on costs, and that any benefits would quantifiably, above and beyond, so obviously outweigh any potential costs, that it wouldn't even merit comparing them. And this is taken into account in the drafting process and sort of reflected in the language. And after several rounds back and forth, this first full draft is finally settled upon in early 1975.

Artie Vierkant 00:38:56

I'm sorry, can you imagine?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:38:58

I know, right?

Artie Vierkant 00:38:59

[laughing] Can you imagine literally anybody in the process of drafting a reg like this, like staking out that particular --I know it's not like -- this is far from the end of the story, and basically it gets disrupted on a cost basis after this. But can you imagine this happening today, like this?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:39:17

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't.

Phil Rocco 00:39:18

Oh yeah. I mean, it's -- I'm imagining that really what the process would have been like, okay, well, like how can we find some logical way within the text of the statute to provide waivers to any and all [laughter] institutions that might for some reason not be able to do this, right? Because like the cost thing is interesting. Is it like, okay, you're gonna impose this regulation on like, say, local governments. And remember, this is the middle of the 1970s. You've got fiscal crisis, you've got governments like going into default. You've got New York about to be run by like a debt junta.

Artie Vierkant 00:40:00

Yeah.

Phil Rocco 00:40:01

So like, there are real issues about like, you know, that the federal government can avoid by simply making a regulation rather than providing financing to ensure that the thing that they want to do, the people who they're asking to do it actually have the money to make it happen. But at the same time, it is like -- it's profoundly -- I mean, it's profoundly interesting to see what happens when you don't have this - you know, what ultimately became the Reagan executive order in the early 1980s, saying -- directing agencies that it doesn't matter what Congress tells you the law is, right? Congress may have commanded you to do this, but you are only allowed to, you know, fulfill Congress's command, its democratically legitimate command, if you determine that the benefits of the way that you're doing it outweigh whatever attendant incalculable and far more calculable costs.

I mean, so like, that's the thing that's interesting is, okay, this is going to be a very flawed rollout for a variety of reasons, but at the very least, the idea is Congress has sent me -- like the elected Congress has sent me, an unelected bureaucrat, a command. My job is not to necessarily preemptively at the very least consider, oh, gee, I hope that the benefits outweigh the costs. Now that emerges through the political process anyway, but it's a very -- you can imagine that like, even just in the mind of somebody who's doing this, that's going to read very, very differently today, when there is this other thing that's just like, oh, yeah, by the way, this -- here's a constraint on democracy. You got to take that into consideration too.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:41:48

Well, and the -- you know, here's the really interesting thing, right? Because this is 1975. And what happens in 1975, but a lot of regime change at HEW. And in early summer of 1975, the HEW Secretary changes. And it's a guy named F. David Matthews who's brought in, who surprise, surprise -

Artie Vierkant 00:42:09

Dave Matthews.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:42:10

[laughing] Yeah, surprise, surprise, guess what Dave Matthews' job was right prior to becoming HEW Secretary?

Artie Vierkant 00:42:16

Oh, I didn't know this, what was it?

Phil Rocco 00:42:17

Being under the table and dreaming, I don't know.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:42:19

President of the University of Alabama.

Artie Vierkant 00:42:21

Oh, a university president.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:42:23

From 1969.

Artie Vierkant 00:42:24

The very same people who had been up in arms about the very idea that -- I want to be clear, actually, as I'm about to say this, we've talked about how the regulation as written, for instance, the idea was not -- was to like either not be really explicit about the cost benefit stuff, because that is kind of vile, or to at least try to sort of undermine the degree to which people could point to this and say, this is an inordinate cost. And so when people like university presidents, etc., or people like representatives of universities got up in arms about the regulations being shaped for 504, one of the things that the people drafting the regulation preemptively basically did was say, like, look -- it seemed like there was an internal conversation that was like, we're gonna get a lot of pushback or it might be like -- it might seem too costly or something from a lot of people if we tell them basically that all spaces have to be made accessible. And this, I think, is frankly a very shitty compromise, like self-own compromise that they did in shaping these regulations in the first place. They said, basically, you don't have to make everything accessible, you just -- if you're a university, for example, there have to be like -- I think they use the phrase like reasonable accommodations, essentially, which is just like oh boy --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:43:48

Mhm. Reasonability, that's a huge framework, yeah.

Artie Vierkant 00:43:51

They essentially --

Phil Rocco 00:43:52

We're all reasonable people here.

Artie Vierkant 00:43:52

They essentially inscribe, like, you know, you have to make sure that you have sort of enough accessible spaces to have like some amount of accommodation, but like not everything has to be accessible. Not all spaces have to be accessible. And so yeah, of course, this -- yeah, it's interesting then that the person who comes in as the HEW secretary, as the Health, Education and Welfare secretary is a university person, because they were so adamant about this. Ironically, you know, adamant about not wanting to --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:44:21

Well, actually, this is how the university people find out about Section 504 and oppose it in the first place, is because Matthews comes in, and Matthews is a major snag, F. Dave Matthews. So yeah, I mean, it was not -- it was not until this point in 1975 when you have the sort of regime change in HEW that people outside of the federal government start to sort of get wind of Section 504. And so it's at that point that you start to see some notification of the parties that are going to have to be making these alterations, right, which is the colleges and universities who begin to quickly organize in opposition to Section 504. And because of that, you have this sort of Office of Civil Rights staff, who's already sort of started making inroads with disability activists, and this is a movement that's been growing in parallel with this drama, right, which starts in the early 70s. So this is by 1975. There's a little bit more infrastructure. And so you have some of the people within Office of Civil Rights passing information and organizing with disabled people and sort of starting to get their input on this policy, on the Rehabilitation Act in general, not just 504 because the Rehabilitation Act, remember it was controversial, and it had all these additional programs. So disabled people were already organizing around it, they just didn't know about Section 504 until much later, and this guy Matthews -- Dave Matthews, had a reputation as a "philosophical pragmatist." To give an example from Scotch, "Secretary Matthews had a profound concern about the whole process of government. Faced with difficult and complex regulatory issues, Matthews might ask whether regulations should be issued at all."

Artie Vierkant 00:46:01

Right. My favorite part of this, of this same account, the Richard Scotch account that you're talking about, my favorite part of this whole drama around David Matthews, the HEW secretary is, so first of all, you know, basically as soon as the secretary changes, the regulations start getting deliberately kind of stonewalled and slow walked by him. And one of the people under Matthews, a person named Martin Geary describes the reasoning that Matthews has towards this as such, I just want to read this quote, because I find it just amazing. "David Matthews' basic inclination was to just let the whole thing go away. He didn't want to put out regulations. He certainly had a more or less charity mentality towards disabled people, not in the malevolent sense, but in a paternalistic sense. He really just didn't get the idea that these were rights and that you weren't really talking about nice things to do for Easter Seal children." Easter Seal being a charity organization. "Then when we got to alcoholics and drug addicts, he really flipped out. These were obviously derelicts and they were so far from Easter Seal children, things had truly run amok. His main concern was that by giving in to junkies and addicts and all those other people and doing too much, we were going to screw up the basic charity system. I think he sincerely believed the net effect of all this might be to really injure handicapped people and take away from them some of the benefits that they had already won over the years."

Phil Rocco 00:47:39

Yeah, it's not necessarily surprising to me, Matthews -- Dave Matthews -- I love being able to say that [laughter].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:47:47

F. Dave Matthews.

Phil Rocco 00:47:48

Dave Matthews, [laughter] F. David Matthews' benighted position on rights, he was involved in -- or he was the named party in a lawsuit in which someone had been denied Social Security benefits without a hearing and of course, he thought that was, you know, absolutely essential. And this went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Court ruled that no, you could actually be denied Social Security disability benefits without a standard -- what was then called a Goldberg type hearing, which was a prior case decided by the court. So yeah, he was not exactly what you would call on the bleeding edge of disability rights [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:48:34

And, you know, rather than overtly oppose the regulation, what does F. Dave Matthews do instead, but instead to stall and demands further study into the draft regulation, claiming that Executive Order 11821 required any proposal by a federal agency that involved expenditures over $100M to include an assessment of its impact on inflation. [laughter] So he sends a memo --

Artie Vierkant 00:49:05

Now this is familiar, now we're in - now we're in a reality I understand.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:49:11

[laughing] So he sends a memo and the draft regulation to receive a inflation impact statement prepared by the end of 1975. So that delays the regulation from the summer of '75, all the way through the rest of the year. And what happens is that, you know, this analysis happens, and ironically, the report comes back, and it says, well, there are costs, but the benefits greatly outweigh the costs, and there is little that it would do in the long run to drive inflation. This seems like a good thing. And by March 1976, it goes back to Matthews' desk. And essentially what starts to happen is that Matthews is obviously not satisfied. So he does a very strange thing. As Phil was saying, normally, you know, you sort of publish the rule. And then there's the comment period.

Artie Vierkant 00:50:04

Public comment and stuff, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:50:05

And then you sort of resolve those comments, and then you like publish the next draft. He did something else instead. And he instead gave it a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which basically gave people a kind of like, pre-heads up to the comment period. So it was kind of like, slowly debuted. Matthew said it needed to happen that way because the rights of disabled people were very like difficult and tricky, and it was really controversial. So he was trying to soften the blow by doing a sort of soft release before the major release that would lead to the comment period.

Phil Rocco 00:50:40

I think maybe just to make more it succinct, like he is doing whatever he can possibly do within his power, maybe even things that are not in his power to stop this thing from -- to stop the train from going down the tracks.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:51:44

Basically.

Phil Rocco 00:50:53

And I love -- I love that he failed -- like he fails all the time. So like [laughing] he gets the -- under the executive order, he gets the inflation impact statement. And then it's like, oh, actually, okay, not that bad. And then then he gets -- like sends it to a private organization and says, like, I need another analysis, and then the private organization comes back, and they're like, oh, yeah, by the way, actually, like the benefit -- this is in the conclusion,

"The benefits forthcoming (psychic as well as pecuniary) provide a substantial offset to the costs that will be incurred. The costs involved will not be as great as widely thought and the compelling situation of some of the handicapped persons involved tips the balance in favor of proceeding with immediate implementation of the regulation."

So he just keeps like lobbing out these like last ditch like Hail Mary passes [laughing], and they just go like nope, denied.

Artie Vierkant 00:51:47

Right. Like that language is from the private consulting firm, the Public Interest Institute, that he hired to get this torpedoed as this last ditch effort. And he couldn't even do that.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:51:47

And he couldn't even do that.

Artie Vierkant 00:52:00

I mean, he did successfully slow roll it for his entire tenure.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:52:04

He sat on it for the whole, you know, Ford administration. And up until the last -- literally the last day that he was in the job. The sort of problem is, is that the guy that replaced him in 1977 --

Artie Vierkant 00:52:19

Oh boy.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:52:19

Joseph Califano, who was President Carter's HEW secretary, Carter had promised to enact Section 504 on the campaign trail. He made a speech actually just about that, at one point in 1976. So disability activists kind of had this promise on the ledger from Carter that when Carter got into office, Carter would stop the bullshit at HEW and his HEW director would make Section 504 finally happen. But it turns out that his HEW director, Califano gets into office, he takes over the job, and he wasn't convinced -- Califano felt that the regulation reflected the demands of disabled people, but that it did not reflect a political and financial reality that existed in the United States. So essentially, you know, the sort of liberal version of F. Dave Matthews comes in to the job right behind him, and essentially has the exact same perspective, but from a liberal standpoint.

Artie Vierkant 00:53:22

Yeah, I'd like to -- I think I have some interesting context for who Joseph Califano was as an individual. He's actually someone who came up in -- I believe he came up to some degree in our previous conversations about the history of Medicare and things like that. And while I could point to stories from that period, what I would say is, I think the one thing really that you need to know about Califano in this period is that much like the statement like, oh, we need to look at the impact on inflation, Joseph Califano was also one of these people who was -- during his tenure at HEW, at Health, Education and Welfare, he was -- like a lot of the initiatives that he took part in were all about trying to do cost control. He more or less failed in a lot of those initiatives, and when -- and after he did -- so after all the events that we're about to talk about, right, after this -- I just, I think, contextually, it's important to note, basically, the next thing that Joseph Califano did after leaving HEW, is he went to work for Chrysler to basically oversee their shift to managed care insurance plans, as the --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:54:40

Oh. Fucking --

Artie Vierkant 00:54:40

As one of the first big corporations to do that. Because as he said, basically, there are things you can see in for instance, like contemporaneous coverage in the New York Times where they're saying that like, literally he is looking at this as his mission, he couldn't do it -- he couldn't control health care costs in the Carter administration, so he's going to do it for Chrysler.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:55:03

In the private sector.

Artie Vierkant 00:55:04

And I have a quote from this.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:55:08

Oh, yes.

Artie Vierkant 00:55:08

This is from a source that we looked at for the Medicare episode, this is from Jill Quadagno's One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance. It is talking about Joseph Califano starting up the process of initiating this sort of like managed care and cost control. And part of it is basically -- basically what they do is working sort of against insurance and hospital companies that Chrysler is paying. They try to basically root out worker disability fraud, quote, unquote, you know, And it says here, they have this audit made, I'm going to quote from this Quadagno piece,

"According to California, the audit revealed an 'appalling degree of unnecessary care, inefficient practices and outright fraud.' Some podiatrists [seeing people on the Chrysler insurance plan] were working on feet one toe at a visit and prolonging time off for employees on disability. Califano recalled the case of one employee certified as disabled because of foot surgery, who was apprehended after a lengthy foot chase while attempting to steal parts from a Chrysler plant."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:56:18

Oh my god.

Phil Rocco 00:56:19

Awesome. Well, but can I also say --

Artie Vierkant 00:56:21

So [laughing] good on that worker. But also, that's the kind of guy Califano is.

Phil Rocco 00:56:25

But also like, let's -- I want to just broaden out for a second, which is that like so Califano is also operating in a political environment in which even he is like too generous, for like, his political principles. So like, he famously gets dismissed by Carter in '79, because essentially the things he's promoting within the administration, for Carter's taste, are too costly, spending -- doing too much social spending.

Artie Vierkant 00:56:55

Wow.

Phil Rocco 00:56:55

And Carter has -- and again, just consider this for a second, Carter, one of his key campaign pledges in 1980 -- and maybe the first evidence that we see of this for a Democrat is he is -- and I just feel like we're all living in like the fever dream of this. [laughter] One of his 1980 campaign pledges is ending deficit spending.

Artie Vierkant 00:57:20

Oh no.

Phil Rocco 00:57:21

Like, amazing. So anyway, like that's the sort of broader context is like, there's all of this -- you know, all of this pledging to like -- political pledging to reduce the cost of government, which then just sets things up beautifully for Reagan by 1980. And again, and there's the history of cost benefit analysis and the regulatory state. That's the pre-history.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:57:48

Yeah, I mean, all these sort of contingent logics, right? Right now, in this moment, that Section 504 is really sort of being debated within HEW and within the Office of Civil Rights, these are like moments with the themes that we talk about all the time are like so present in the dominant sort of cultural ideology, right? The political reality, when you say, like, oh, disability policy is like not realistic. It's too expensive. Like, if you don't contextualize that by saying that, yeah, and Califano believed that we needed to bring the national deficit to zero, which, you know, is a dangerous thing to do to the economy, right, and believed in these kinds of ideas of like the federal government being a household and not being able to sort of deficit spend or whatever, which at the time, was becoming like, quite -- quite dominant, right. And this is just -- that is a worldview in which disability policy is unrealistic. And that is a worldview that doesn't reflect a sort of America that can afford disability policy. It's not that that worldview is actually what America is like, or what society should be like, or is reality. It's just the reality that Joseph Califano was working towards, personally as his own political project as an agent of the US government.

Artie Vierkant 00:59:04

And importantly, unfortunately, is the worldview under which, of so much disability, both civil rights and welfare policy that survives to the contemporary moment is -- was made and is treated today.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 00:59:18

Absolutely. And throughout 1976, you have disability organizers really sort of coalescing, coming together, centralizing around this issue and the ACCD is like really trying to push for -- in the beginning when they start working on it, they're really trying to push regulators to make Section 504 more expansive, but by 1977, ater a year of dealing with F. Dave Matthews stalling and getting in the way however he could with a bunch of just absolutely arbitrary cost benefit bullshit, right, activists are now focused on getting them -- getting this reg implemented as is, right? Just getting it -- just getting it actually out there, getting the HEW director to sign it, finally, fucking finally, right? Because Matthews, after all of his pushing and all of his trying, and disability activists bugging the shit out of him, he's like, fine, fine, I'll sign it and then never does, right. You know, basically getting in the way and being a barrier to this until the last day in the job. And then Califano again is refusing to sign it. So at this point, like all of the organizing is now oriented around, the demand is getting the director of HEW to sign this fucking Rehabilitation Act and get it out there so it can start to be implemented because again, like --

Artie Vierkant 01:00:39

And without watering down the regs further, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:00:41

Right, exactly. Without any more watering down. And so what you have in early January 1977 is obviously this sort of transition. this last ditch effort by Matthews. And the disability movement starts to become really fed up and the protests escalate. And Califano actually walks into a sort of landscape in this job with a disability movement that is way more organized than the previous two HEW directors have had to deal with at this point. They're pretty ready for him. By March, they have issued a demand and they said, by April 4th, you need to sign the Rehabilitation Act, you need to implement it, Section 504 unchanged needs to move forward. And if you do not do this, by April 4th, expect us in all of the HEW offices across the United States on the morning of April 5th. And Califano, as you can tell from the quote that Artie read, you know, he's a pretty paternalistic guy when it comes to how he thinks about disabled people. He didn't even notify his staff that this protest might happen. So when a lot of these disabled people actually start showing up on the morning of April 5th, not only do many of the staffers in these regional offices have no idea about the drama of 504, they have no idea that protesters are going to start to show up because no one's been alerted because Califano didn't really believe that they would like -- that they were for real.

Artie Vierkant 01:02:09

Also Califano is pissed by this. There's a statement from his deputy, a person by the name La Bosse, saying of this, essentially -- it sounds like basically, Joseph Califano's response to this occupation was mostly like, kind of the knee jerk response that we're used to, I think, from today's contemporary Democratic Party, which is the like, oh, any contestation against like - of, you know, people who want to push us left on something is bad for optics.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:02:44

And how dare they.

Artie Vierkant 01:02:45

La Bosse says -- this is talking about the Washington sit in, the one at the HEW headquarters in Washington, one of the many that happened across the country - "they stayed in the HEW building, the Hubert Humphrey Building overnight. And Joe [Joseph Califano] was really upset about that, because he did not want to sort of say this was a reawakening of the 60s, his attitude was, we're not going through this crap anymore. It's bad politics, it's bad for the country, it's bad for the causes to think that sit in demonstrations were the way the government was going to make basic public policy."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:02:45

It's just -- and if you read any of his commentary, or if you read his biography, his autobiography, and he talks about these protests, he was like, more concerned that his dog would bite one of the protesters and there'd be a headline --

Artie Vierkant 01:03:33

It's optics stuff, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:03:34

“Califano's dog bites handicapped person,” that to him was like a bigger issue than what would eventually actually like happen. And they would actually occupy the office in San Francisco for a month, as we were saying, aided by

Black Panthers, who were bringing food in and out. And so I think it's just really telling to sort of -- when you actually look at, so why did this legendary early disability civil rights action even take place, right? There's this incredible story about waste, fraud, abuse, and like government spending that lays the stage for this disability action. And yet, the movement's goals at the time are actually quite compatible with the goals of the regulators, which is to employ disabled people, get them off welfare and supporting themselves, living independently as part of the independent living movement. Again, I was saying there's a lot of libertarian ideology about free market and freedom and autonomy, all sort of being things that only occur together, right, that you're un-free --

Artie Vierkant 01:03:35

Among the protestors, you mean?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:03:40

Right. So this is an ideology among the protesters and among the early disability rights movement, that you're only free if you're off of, you know, government care and supporting yourself and working and this is obviously in reaction to basically full exclusion and elimination from the job market, prior to this, but at the same time --

Artie Vierkant 01:03:40

Well and it makes sense as a reaction to state paternalism. But it's also a limited view -- I think, a limited vision of not only what the role of the state is or could be, but also, I think, a frankly, exclusionary vision of what constitutes disability.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:05:17

Right. And ultimately -- and these are critiques that like the disability movement has had to sort out post ADA because remember, as I was saying, 504 was just for buildings or facilities or organizations that received federal funding. And so when people were -- and these are the obviously a lot of the same people involved in the 504 fight, are involved in the early ADA stuff and you have some of the same people who worked on flushing out 504 called back into work on the ADA, because they have that expertise that other policymakers don't, rght. And so you have the sort of frameworks and the issues on the regulatory side, reproduced in the ACA, and supported by the activists that were advocating for it, because they are a shared goal still at that point. And so a lot of people -- what I think a lot of people don't understand, from our contemporary perspective, is, you know, just how influential this sort of fiscal ideology was in disability policy, and in the sort of construction of disability identity in the United States in general. So ultimately, this brings us to the morning of April 5th, 1977, to the Section 504 sit in itself, which as I said, lasts 30 days.

Artie Vierkant 01:06:37

Or sit ins, rather.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:06:37

Sit ins, right. So, you know, this is just part one of the story, part two will be coming out on Monday in the patron feed, and we will get into, you know, after all of this sort of policy machination, right, leading up to the moment of occupying the HEW regional offices, this is sort of the groundwork that you need to understand what issues were actually at play in the sit in. And this is the stuff that like when that sit in is discussed in terms of disability history, the stuff that we just talked about in the last hour is never mentioned.

Artie Vierkant 01:07:10

What was at stake, actually, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:07:11

Exactly.

Phil Rocco 01:07:12

Yeah, no, I think that this sort of episode in policymaking is illustrative of so many things. Like one, just the idea that there -- like, on the one hand, like this is sort of what policymaking was like before mandated cost benefit analysis. And I think what's interesting, like you can see the same sort of like political motivations, the pushing back against the expansion of rights, they're still there, right? And they're trying, as the Matthews' sort of very like slap-sticky kind of Matthews digging in his heels reveals, like they're trying anything, and they're looking to cost benefit analysis, you know, or something like it, to try to stop this from going forward. So it's not as if like, before cost benefit analysis, everyone was like, yeah, let's expand rights. But at the same time, I think what's interesting to me is, it does seem as if, once the stakes are revealed, once this thing goes from being like buried in the text of a piece of legislation to something that's a little bit clearer, the stakes seem more obvious, politics seem more obvious, like it makes sense to me as I guess we'll get into on Monday, like why this resulted in a demonstration. And I think what's kind of interesting is the way that like contemporary regulatory politics have a way of like killing off a lot of that political energy.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:08:48

Absolutely.

Phil Rocco 01:08:48

And like, once you're in the realm of like, oh, we're just weighing things, like some experts are gonna, like, make some decisions. And you're outside of like, this is -- and like, you know, universities at the time like articulated, like yeah, no, we don't want to do this, like this is like -- we don't want to do this. They can't go to these sort of -- the more genteel, like scientific-y arguments that I think that it allows for maybe -- maybe a more robust kind of politics. And I frankly, long for that, I yearn for that.

Artie Vierkant 01:09:23

I also think that this part of the story in particular is really interesting to look at for all those reasons, but as the arc of what changes over this policy discussion that is so protracted, because I mean, if you look not only at some of the major shifts that happened, that we discussed in terms of cost benefit analysis, in this particular instance, with 504 over that period, over these three presidential administrations, you know, not only within the context of 504, but also like, this is around the time that the discussions begin happening that end up in the formation of the Congressional Budget Office, right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:09:23

Mhm, absolutely.

Artie Vierkant 01:09:23

Which is not to say that, you know, this itself is, you know, a motivating factor. But this is like -- literally, this is a time of, I think -- I think there's like significant change that happens during this time, basically, that you do see the formation of, you know, again, over this protracted period, because it was dragged out for so long, this whole incident like occurs over a really dramatic moment of political inflection, basically.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:10:33

Absolutely. These are such important themes to keep in mind. When I think of this story, one obviously, it's one of the reasons why I started getting really interested in the Congressional Budget Office and why the CBO was even created. Because when you read a story like this, and it's happening at the same time, you're like, oh, yeah, I definitely could see why people would get the idea that it's a good idea to have, within Congress, this body that's sort of made to catch stuff like Section 504, made to see those things before they sort of get slipped past someone's nose in order to sort of replicate the same position that activists were able to leverage to essentially force this to be implemented.

And the thing that I always think about as a kind of counterfactual is what would have happened if in 1972, the disability activists were tipped off to 504 earlier. What would have happened if for those debates about costs that were happening during the Nixon administration, before F. David Matthews comes in? What if disability activists were already involved in having to advocate against these cost issues? Would that have changed the rhetoric at all? Because it's not to say -- and as we'll get into in the sort of second half of this, it's not to say that the people who were participating in this movement were not radical, right? It's just that they have a different radical ideology than we all do. They're radical democratic liberals, they're sort of radical and informed by different -- very different ideas. And some of them are these kind of libertarian, free market, you know, independence through sort of like self ownership --

Artie Vierkant 01:12:12

Market valorization.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:12:13

And sort of seizing your production value and asserting that you have labor value, right, which is an argument that friend of the show, Karen Tani, wrote like a great piece sort of against that logic, as part of the Cost Benefit Analysis Symposium for the Law and Political Economy Project actually -- shout out to Karen. But, you know, these are the kinds of ideas that like, you know, what would have happened, right, if things had played out a little differently, and maybe this whole discussion around the value, the literal monetary value of accessibility as a social phenomenon was a sort of debated issue in those terms earlier, we might have seen a very different version of the ADA, we might have seen a very different disability rights movement emerge from that period of time.

Artie Vierkant 01:12:57

We may even have a very different -- we may have even ultimately ended up with a very different built environment today.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:13:02

Exactly. And these are the kinds of things where if we think about oh, accessibility, oh, it's always going to be so expensive. It's gonna be so impossible. It's an impossible political project. Well, you know, shut the fuck up. And don't talk to me until you understand what made it impossible first, motherfucker. I'm sorry.

Part two will be coming, we'll be talking about the month long occupation, how it would not be possible without the Black Panther Party and the support that they gave to the occupiers in San Francisco. And what happened to that story and why it didn't become a part of the dominant narrative of the disability rights movement and sort of was whitewashed away.

Computer Generated Voice Over (Daniel, Beatrice’s Screen Reader) 1:13:17

Stay tuned for Part Two, beginning momentarily.

[ Interlude music ]

PART TWO

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:14:57

So this is Part Two of our Death Panel history of the Section 504 sit-ins, which is an early moment of protest in the disability civil rights movement that started on April 5th, 1977, and lasted about a month. And this month, April 2022 is the 45th anniversary of this historic occupation. In part one, we talked about the four years of bureaucratic debate that went on through three presidential administrations over what was really the value, or if there was value in providing civil rights to disabled people. And we talked at length about how the agency heads responsible for writing and implementing the Section 504 regulation and the US Department of Housing, Education and Welfare, HEW, used proto-cost benefit reasoning to delay and nearly kill this landmark piece of disability civil rights legislation.

Artie Vierkant 01:16:15

[ Referring to the original release schedule of this episode ] Yeah, so if you're a patron and you haven't heard that episode, which is the public episode from last week, from last Thursday, do go ahead and do that. I mean, I think a lot of what we're going to talk about is a standalone story, really, but I think you'll get a lot more out of this episode, specifically because we go through so much of both what was at stake, but also sort of what people were so frustrated with, which was this framework used to -- yeah, to hold up the enshrining of civil rights law for disabled people through three presidential administrations on the basis of, yeah, basically, like it would cost too much to do it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:16:53

Mhm. And it might give benefits to the sort of undesirable.

Artie Vierkant 01:16:57

Yeah, which we'll talk about today.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:16:58

Yeah. So part one brought us through those first four years, from when the 1973 Rehabilitation Act starts being debated until April 4th, 1977, which is the night before these demonstrations really start to kick off. And here in part two, we're going to talk about the sit-in itself, picking back up the story at April 5th, 1977, to talk about the actual sit-in itself, what happened, and how the action played out. And the 504 sit-in is sometimes called the Stonewall Inn riots of the disability rights movement. But there is nowhere near the kind of awareness of this popular account in like pop culture as there is the sort of events that it's often compared to, so would you say like --

Artie Vierkant 01:17:46

Really for any of the events that it's compared to.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:17:48

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like people act like, oh, you should know what this is like, you should know what the 504 sit-in is. Everybody knows what this is. This is the Stonewall Riots of the disability rights movement.

Artie Vierkant 01:17:59

Which itself, it's like why would you make that --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:18:01

It's a meaningless comparison. Yeah.

Phil Rocco 01:18:04

At that popular bar, Health, Education and Welfare, one of the most important bars in the disability scene.

Artie Vierkant 01:18:12

I mean, actually, you know, what's interesting is that -- I wouldn't be surprised if this is in part why -- I mean, as we'll get into -- I don't want to have our preamble go on for too long, because we need to get into the story, but basically, like, the occupation of this building, and also the subsequent -- like the delegation that they send to Washington two weeks in to sort of like harass the President and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. But then like, you know, if you think about it, they're occupying a federal agency building, right? And I mean, they're staging protests across multiple federal agency buildings. A lot of the corollary protests, right, or a lot of the like other historical examples that are brought to bear as being similar in some way to 504 are not necessarily occupying federal offices --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:19:01

Yeah, they're like private businesses. Yeah.

Artie Vierkant 01:19:03

Right. Which it makes sense that this might be like a little bit less, this might be a little bit downplayed, let's say, in some histories, because it's potentially more of a threat to the state.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:19:13

Absolutely. And ultimately, it still is, I believe, the longest occupation of a federal building in US history. And it absolutely would not have been possible without the tremendous coalition of organizers from all sorts of causes, who came together to sort of make up the structural components of what this community needed in order to occupy the building for the entire month of April basically. They were there until April 30th. So this sit-in itself had been called by a group called the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities, known as the ACCD, which was led at the time by a Deaf activist named Frank Bowe. And basically, they had gotten this tip off that Jimmy Carter's HEW Secretary, Joseph Califano, was pushing to have some of these provisions watered down. We talked a lot in the first part about how Califano was very skeptical of these regulations and how much they would cost.

Califano later called Section 504, a

"unqualified ticket to equality and opportunity,"

saying that,

"The issue was not whether to enforce Section 504, but how. Those most interested, the handicapped, were like all special interest groups, rather one dimensional in their views. It's hard enough to deal with interest groups in black, even gray hats, but it's nothing like dealing with those in white hats with an unqualified ticket to equality and opportunity issued by the Congress."

Phil Rocco 01:20:44

Yeah, this is a really - so I get resonances of the present in the past here, in the sense that like they come in, and they're delaying, like the prior administration. And then but like, you know, like, we're Democrats, we do things differently. We're setting up a task force, you know, just I mean [laughing]. It's like, of course you are setting up a task force. And, you know, like, slow walking this, but like, but in a nicer way. Right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:21:17

Yeah. And I mean, this like heinous statement from Califano is from his own autobiography. So this was written with like, many years of hindsight, and the opportunity to reflect on his actions, and maybe what he could have done better.

Phil Rocco 01:21:31

Could recant. No, I'm not going to recant.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:21:32

No, and --

Artie Vierkant 01:21:33

I could make myself look good and take credit for this, but I won't, because I don't want to be, even at the end of my life, taking credit for making the government spend a cent on anything.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:21:45

So yeah, I mean, as Califano himself notes, the official plan was more delay. And in response to this very clear message that Califano and the Carter Administration plan on delaying 504 as well, even though Carter had made this campaign promise that they were going to try and hold him to, national disability rights groups started to hold protests and demonstrations in DC. And this is around -- you know, this is basically February, March of 1977.

And they organize their local chapters in other cities to hold simultaneous events in the few weeks sort of leading up to the sit-in. And on the day of the sit-in, at HEW offices across the country, disabled people showed up to protest. The demonstration in Washington, DC, at the HEW headquarters, where Califano's office was located, was supposed to be the largest and so 300 disabled people show up at Califano's office on the morning of the 5th and they ended up remaining until the next day. They also make it overnight. And as Joseph Shapiro writes in his account of the DC sit-in, in his book, No Pity, Califano was, "infuriated and retaliated by refusing to let in food and cutting off telephone communication at the DC office."

And Shapiro notes that the demonstration in the DC building basically only lasted 28 hours because Califano was so pissed that they were inside, that the sort of security officers at the DC building got harsh, really quick. But there were all these simultaneous protests in all the other regional offices that had taken place the same day. Most of them were not able to stay overnight even at all and they were kicked out by the end of the day by the security forces.

Artie Vierkant 01:23:32

Well, that sounds like by most accounts, they kind of had a similar situation as the Washington, DC protesters actually where I think in some accounts it says that basically the other occupations were "starved out" --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:23:46

Starved out, yeah.

Artie Vierkant 01:23:47

Is something that was used. And I think that was part of -- it would make sense that essentially as their general tactic, they tried to keep the occupiers from being able to get food brought in.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:23:57

Yeah, and it was pretty heinous what has been -- what was done in some of the regional offices. I was trying to find the quote on this, it was someone talking in an oral history about their experience at the Philadelphia protests, and they said that they like closed the bathrooms off to protesters, so there was nowhere for them to even go to the bathroom. And really, you know, even if you don't have a like complex medical issue, right, like being denied access to food, water, and the bathroom is going make it very difficult for you to occupy the building.

Phil Rocco 01:24:31

I think maybe that's why this is so -- it's astounding maybe because it's like the longest occupation of a federal building, but like the occupation of the federal building itself, you know, it brings with it a kind of, you know, more militarized response. And the tactics, I mean, like you're just in a place that's a lot harder -- this is not like, some external area where it's easy to like get the things you need to endure. Like this is a closed environment, where like, actually maintaining the spaces is really difficult -- like just tactically speaking, it seems kind of improbable that it happened. That's the thing. That's the thing that I keep coming back to in my mind is like, this is pretty astounding that this occurred sort of how it did, you know, and especially in San Francisco.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:25:17

Oh, and like best believe, the activists getting starved out in the beginning was exactly what the media needed to get interested in this. So like, the HEW offices looked bad immediately, basically, because they had all of these disabled people who showed up to protest. And in the vast majority of instances, they were starved out and treated horribly, immediately. Ironically, the San Francisco sit-in, for some reason, the people in that HEW office met the protesters with cookies and lemonade, and they were incredibly pissed off, because it was like really paternalizing. They were like, here we are to fucking take over your federal building and you are bringing us like lemonade?

Artie Vierkant 01:25:59

Like kids food or something, basically.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:26:01

Like we're children. Yeah. Like what the fuck?

Artie Vierkant 01:26:04

Well that really speaks to the whole thing, doesn't it? I mean --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:26:07

I know, right? And so the the DC sit-in, which lasted 28 hours was the third longest. The second longest was the Los Angeles sit-in, I'm not even sure where that one was. And that one's often not mentioned. But it was the second longest, it lasted almost a week. But the San Francisco sit-in, however, lasted for about 25 or 26 days, sustaining from April 5th, as I said, all the way to the end of the month, with a group of about 100. Like it varied obviously by day, but it was about between 100 and 150 people occupying the fourth floor of the HEW offices in the federal building that's in UN Plaza in San Francisco.

And this obviously grabbed national news coverage. And this San Francisco sit-in outlasted all of the other demonstrations by weeks and weeks. And activists were legitimately living in the building. They were living in offices, they were living in hallways, they were sleeping in stairwells. And I think it's important to note that for many, this was actually -- who were participating in the protests in San Francisco, this was the first time they had in some cases slept somewhere that wasn't their home or the residential group home that they lived in.

Many were risking their lives being at these protests, because here you had over 100 people with many different and intersecting disabilities. Some people with conflicting access needs, you have a bunch of different impairments, a bunch of different embodied identities, several different types of communication style, whether it's ASL, speaking, non speaking communication, all of these groups sort of coming together. Also with activists who are from without the "disability community" who have been sort of basically brought on to help as collaborators, but who are not necessarily disability literate yet.

This is kind of the first exposure that a lot of Bay Area activists have to disability thought and disability activism. So you have to remember that this is kind of a massive moment of political education for people. And that's something that's not often talked about. The fact that not only was this an important movement for the disability civil rights movement, but this is like why the Black Panthers started to -- they put up ramps outside of all of their buildings because they had this insight to like disability culture through one of their members, Brad Lomax, who was involved in the Oakland Independent Living Center, who was involved in working with the white activists who are sort of known for putting this action together, and who is the reason why the Black Panthers were there with security and portable showers and support, making sure that this protest was able to make it.

And basically, all of these different people all came together, and they took up residence of the federal building. And while many dominant accounts of the story chalk the success up to basically just like a general vibe, or like activist spirit in the Bay Area, that the success of the sit-in actually was very dependent on the organizing resources and the paramilitary infrastructure of the Black Panthers, the actual way the organization operated, the fact that their members were paid to be there. You know, you had people who could take a whole month to support an occupation, right?

If you're protesting, and you're not being sort of paid to be there as a medic, that means you're taking like 19 days off of work, if you're participating in this sit-in. And so actually, people being paid to be there was really crucial, and the sustained occupation was so much more involved. It wasn't just disability movements, as I'm saying. It's like this entire matrix of radical groups and different ideologies were all coming together, you know, which includes major support from the Oakland Black Panthers.

Artie Vierkant 01:30:05

Right. And I think this is -- kind of I think the really important -- one of the really important takeaways, I think, that we wanted to focus on in this sort of account of it is, you know, I think there's a reason why so many of the other occupations did not continue. It's not like, oh, this just independent Bay Area spirit or whatever. No, it's organization. It's coalition building between these groups. They're very -- I mean, when you listen to oral histories -- we have -- I'll play some clips of these, for example, like, when you listen to oral histories, it's very clear that this would not have happened, that like the occupation would not have been able to continue, certainly without the Oakland Black Panthers, but also without -- what are the other groups who were involved? There's like organized labor plays a part in this too even.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:30:53

Mhm, organized labor. There's a lot of LGBTQ organizing, called the Butterfly Brigade. And this is a group of guys who actually even smuggled walkie talkies into the occupied building to help them communicate.

Artie Vierkant 01:31:05

Cool.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:31:05

Local churches, local and national labor organizations. They had support from the members of the Delancey Street, which is like a really famous grassroots rehab program in San Francisco, and stuff like the Women's Health Coalition. And so you have all of these sort of --

Artie Vierkant 01:31:21

And a group called the Mission Rebels.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:31:22

And the Mission Rebels, yes, which is a sort of -- they're more of like a group in the vein of the kind of like organizing -- the radical organizing that you're seeing going on in the Bronx, in Latinx communities in the 70s, too. So you sort of have like --

Artie Vierkant 01:31:36

You mean like a Young Lords corollary, or something or --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:31:40

They're not like part of the Young Lords, but it's like inspired by the same ideology and it's like along the same sort of organizing principles, that's also you know, has affinity with the Black Panthers, right. And while many people talk about it almost as if it's like a fluke, or some sort of like magic, wonderful happenstance that the Black Panthers showed up with food, it's actually not. You know, the Black Panthers had been having Bradley Lomax organize with the Independent Living Movement since 1975. So this was a ongoing collaboration. Ed Roberts, from the --

Artie Vierkant 01:32:13

Right, they already had some tacit coalition going on.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:32:16

Yeah. Exactly. I mean, they had different ideologies, but they were together,

Artie Vierkant 01:32:20

I think -- I have a really good way of illustrating this. There's a fantastic oral history interview conducted of Elaine Brown, who was the chairman of the party at the time, who talks about in this oral history, sort of the reason why the Black Panther Party decided to throw their weight behind this action.

Elaine Brown (Clipped Audio) 01:32:38

We had free clinics, we had free food programs in general. We did all of these things, because we saw these as building and organizing people around their basic needs and their right to have them, right to have food, right to have, you know, freedom of movement, and so forth. All of these rights were connected to us. And we recognize that when we joined with others, and joined others with us, that our freedom was tied to the freedom of everyone else. And that is a very important thing. So we were not speaking just of rights under the law, civil rights, that is. We talked about the freedom of everyone. And eventually we met with and learned about the Center for Independent Living and met with Ed Roberts, but I think probably our consciousness was raised around this issue of the independence and the rights and freedoms of people who were oppressed because of disabilities because we had a brother in the party named Brad Lomax, who showed us that he was black and he was poor, but we didn't think about how he was going to get around and be in the Black Panther Party if he didn't have the physical ability to be in the party.

And so we had to transform our own thinking, which we did, which wasn't difficult because we were already recognizing the various aspects of oppression. Like we have people who took care of their children, we had people who ran the school, we had people ran the club that we had, we had people who edited the newspaper, so everybody had jobs to do. People sold the newspaper, people ran the clinics and so forth. And Brad's role was to keep us informed, and work with the Center for Independent Living, just like we had people working with the Trust for Public Land. And so Brad probably told us that there was going to be this big thing.

And so the question was, what did they need? And he was the one that told us food was the biggest thing, because they planned on staying, you know, until hell froze over. And of course, for us, this was just absolutely fabulous in the sense of how ridiculous was it for the federal government to allow people in wheelchairs to sit there and wait. We actually thought it would end sooner. We just could not imagine the embarrassment of it, the shame of it, to see people who had not the ability to, because of physical disability, couldn't do this or that. And you really don't want to give them access, you really don't want to recognize their rights as human beings under the law. Really? So we didn't had no idea it would last that long.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:35:08

Yeah. And so in the whitewashed version, that framework is rarely mentioned. The fact that there was any sort of affinity or common cause between these two movements is like completely dropped out of it. And it really is sort of just like, oh, well, the Black Panthers, they like brought in some meals, but so did McDonald's and Safeway. So you know, and that's kind of like how that whitewashing of disability history has happened. And unfortunately, this is a kind of known issue within the movement.

And the late Disability Studies scholar, Chris Bell, he called this a problem of disability studies actually being something called White disability studies. And as Bell wrote, "White disability studies, while not wholeheartedly excluding people of color from its critique, by and large, focuses on the work of white individuals, and is largely produced by a core of white scholars and activists."

And that's exactly sort of what's happened in this story is that the white people who were part of this protest, and part of this movement went on to become the kind of face and image of the movement in the popular retellings of the story. And the connection to the sort of more ideologically radical groups like the Black Panthers, or the Butterfly Brigade, who are supporting them, was sort of toned down, you know, as they transitioned, after this movement into a much more sort of professionalized liberal, nonprofit advocacy core, let's call it, so.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Why were they sitting in the building in the first place, right? We know how it was able to logistically sort of happen, and we're going to discuss that, you know, as we keep going, but it's important to know why they were actually there. And it wasn't just because Califano was delaying, it was also because Califano basically was signaling that Carter was really not okay with the regulation including people with substance use issues or with "alcohol dependency."

They were really not okay with these less desirable disabled people getting access to it. And that was sort of opening the door to allow further changes and further study. And Califano was really indicating to the staff at the Office of Civil Rights, who were also involved in this, that they were going to sincerely water down the provision in a very specific way. Califano was saying that what he thought might be better would be to maybe instead of doing structural change, do some more slow and targeted interventions and sort of water down 504 --

Artie Vierkant 01:37:46

By structural change, do you mean things like making businesses and colleges and universities and like elementary schools accessible?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:37:54

Right, yeah. So while these sort of provisions are talked about as like broad civil rights legislation, functionally what they did is they were anti-discrimination mandates for public schools, colleges and universities, many health care providers, many state and local agencies like libraries, transit operations. And what Section 504 did is it said if you get federal money, you have to make your facility accessible. And what Califano said is well, maybe instead of making the whole public school building accessible, we could have one accessible classroom and we could put all the disabled students in there, right? What if we do that? What if we make things a little bit easier on these --

Artie Vierkant 01:38:38

I think they literally said, "separate but equal" as the way to do it.

Phil Rocco 01:38:44

Yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:38:44

Yes, exactly.

Phil Rocco 01:38:45

There was some -- it's funny because we were talking about, in the last episode I had mentioned that were this regulation promulgated under current sort of regulatory approaches and ideologies, I was like, oh, yeah, they'd probably have like voluntary carve outs for any number of organizations. And like, indeed, when you go back and look at it, it's like, it's not as if that's not what Califano was thinking about. Like they were going to create this like university consortium, that would like allow colleges and universities to avoid the regulations and sort of shunt disabled people into a small pool of university. So it's like that ideology, which is now very dominant in the regulatory state, sort of economistic. And also the idea that like, you know, it's whatever the most powerful plaintiff before the -- or you know, commenter before the agency, it's what their preferences are that really dictates things. Like that ideology is already sort of nascent here. But I think the thing that's, like, fascinating about the protests is like, not only does it make that -- those consequences visible. There's also like a delegation of people from the San Francisco protests that like go to Washington, and actually start articulating these demands, not in front of Califano, but like in front of members of Congress.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:40:16

Right. And you also have pressure from state legislators, like people like Jerry Brown in California who's like, according to Califano's autobiography, at this point, picking up the phone and calling Carter and being like, listen, all the disabled people in Los Angeles are drug addicts and homeless people. If you pass this, we're going to have to pay to make all of our libraries accessible to drug addicts and homeless people. And that is unacceptable. I mean, it's like --and so then Carter is going into meetings with Califano and being like well, Jerry Brown's calling me and saying --

Artie Vierkant 01:40:50

Being like furious we can't have this. Yeah. By Scotch's account, basically, allegedly, it's like this part of it is all that Carter cared about.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:41:00

All that Carter gave a shit about.

Artie Vierkant 01:41:01

Yeah, he like didn't give a shit about any of the -- about, you know, the idea of even, you know, writing down civil rights for disabled people into the law, you know, despite the fact that obviously that alone doesn't do it. He didn't care about any of that shit. He just cared about, like, how it was going to look if he signed something enshrining rights for like these groups of people that he --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:41:21

‘Degenerates.’

Artie Vierkant 01:41:21

Thought were -- yeah, ‘degenerates.’

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:41:22

Yeah. I mean, and this is not just in Richard Scotch's -- the sociologist Richard Scotch's account, who we referenced a lot in part one. This is also confirmed in stuff like Califano's own biography,

"The definition of disability was the only part of the regulations in which President Carter expressed any interest. At the Cabinet meeting on March 21st, 1977, Carter said he did not want drug addicts or alcoholics classified as handicapped."

So this leaks to disability activists, there's already contact -- disability activists, prior to this point, had been consulted by Califano's predecessor on some of the final language in the regulation. So there is like knowledge and sort of information passing between federal workers and activists.

And that sort of tips them off that they're going to face some serious sort of retraction of even the limited framework in 504 which, you know, as we said, in the first part, you know, this was a huge shift in disability policy, as ineffectual as it sort of is in fulfilling what it's often sold as, which is like a civil rights revolution for disabled people.

It is incredibly important in the change of how we create disability policy and how we think about accessibility and the built environment. And it's not just about public funding.

As friend of the show, Karen Tani writes,

"Although these provisions asked nothing of private actors, i.e. individuals and institutions that did not receive federal funds, they had the potential to shift the terrain for everyone by changing common sense understandings of what was possible and what was just."

So there are a lot of -- there was a lot of heavy interest in watering 504 down basically. People were really concerned about what the potential cost was going to be. And so their demands were that they were going -- they wanted the regulations to be signed, they wanted this to be signed unchanged. And essentially, they said that they were going to remain in the San Francisco HEW offices until Califano signed them unchanged and they were refusing to leave. And while this is the longest occupation ever of a federal building in US history, most people have never heard of it.

And the fact of the matter is, I think, it's because this kind of coalition that came together in order to support the occupation, which had many more logistical needs than the normal -- I don't know if there's a type of normal building up occupation, but like, if you're talking about a group of people who are going to have the most logistical needs in some situation like this, that's basically what you have going on here.

But they all sort of excluded this intersectional component of these other organizers that were working on things like racial justice, and who were anti-capitalist, in favor of sort of pursuing this like very professionalized like free market advocacy, through the 80s and 90s. So but the protest, it's not just that the Black Panthers helped.

The protests would not have been possible without them. As Hale Zukas writes, in his account, An Army Marches on its Stomach,

"One of the reasons the 504 demonstrators were able to pull off the longest sit-in in US history is that we were well fed. Not for nothing do they say an army marches on its stomach. Yes, I must concede that some of the credit goes to McDonald's and Safeway which donated some of their products. It was the Black Panther Party, however, that played the biggest role in sustaining us nutritionally. Among the group occupying the HEW building were two Panthers, Brad Lomax, and his non-disabled colleague, Chuck Jackson, who later became my attendant when a group of us went to Washington. I don't know who got the first bright idea. But it was not many days after we marched into the building that the Black Panthers started delivering meals every day for all of the demonstrators in the building. This is just one example of how a group of poor helpless cripples were able to carry out such a protracted action."

Artie Vierkant 01:41:25

It's interesting that, you know, also etc., you know, Safeway and McDonald donated stuff becomes part of the conversation -- part of the way that this is remembered, because to go back to that oral history, the Elaine Brown oral history, talking about the BPP involvement, there's this -- the mention of Safeway here actually is kind of interesting, because I want to play this really quick. At one point, the person conducting the interview asks Elaine, where did the food come from? Because, you know, they're feeding a bunch of people, they're feeding over 100 people every day. And I think it's particularly interesting when you see -- when you hear her response to who was paying for the food and how and where it came from.

Interviewer (Clipped Audio) 01:45:26

Now the food, to get back to money, the food costs money, obviously. And what was the figure, it was like, $200 a day to feed the protesters in the federal building.

Elaine Brown (Clipped Audio) 01:46:19

Who knows where'd that come from.

Interviewer (Clipped Audio) 01:46:20

Yeah. Okay.

Elaine Brown (Clipped Audio) 01:46:21

I mean, food doesn't cost $200. You know, you can [laughing] -- I mean, you know, people really -- we provided the food, but we provided free breakfast too, so I mean, it's like nobody's sitting here calculating the price. You don't know how we might have gotten that food, either, because we might have gone to Safeway and set up against a wall like we usually did. So I don't think we counted money. We never did that. We fed -- at one point, we were feeding in our 48 chapters, we were feeding probably around 250,000 breakfasts to children a week. And what was the calculation of that? I have no idea. How did we get the food? Sometimes we beg for it, sometimes we demanded it. Sometimes we paid for it, very rarely. [laughing]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:47:05

[laughing] Yeah. And it really sort of shows you like, immediately, right, we heard that first clip of Elaine Brown saying no, Brad was there for a reason. He was sent by the Black Panthers to work with the Independent Living Movement and to report back to us about what they were doing and how we could help basically, right. But even people who have accounts that differ from this dominant account of like, oh, this is just sort of this magical Bay Area energy, you know, like Zukas' account that I just read, like even Zukas doesn't totally grasp actually like how important the Black Panther paramilitary infrastructure was, and their free breakfast program was, to actually feeding those protesters who were in the federal building.

And as Disability Studies scholar Susan Schweik recounts, and the paper that she wrote called Bradley Lomax's Matrix, which is about this kind of erasure of the Black Panthers from the story, is a really, really important corrective history. And it's actually had some influence on the way that Disability Studies talks about this event, but it's still not the dominant account of 504. So Schweik is here sort of describing what the dominant accounts are like, "Accounts of the action usually present that coalition as a remarkable momentary cluster of support built out of the awareness and keen organizing skills of the demonstration's leaders."

So Schweik basically writes about how in addition to providing food, the BPP made like all of these, you know, financial donations, logistical support. They also made substantial contributions to the historical record of the 504 action in their newspapers. They covered this much more than the mainstream press in April and May of 1977. And that coverage too has also largely been written out of the dominant records of the story. So obviously, this is like really, you know, something that's kind of written out. But it's absolutely structurally integral.

And I think it's important to talk about what the conditions were like inside to understand really how important the Black Panther support was, because what was going on was that they had -- as I said, they have no water, they have no food, initially, guards are trying to block people from being able to get in and out of the building. After the first night, it becomes clear that they're going to need to get some supplies in and the HEW officials let some people into the lobby to drop stuff off. And those people start sneaking up the elevator into the protests. And so they quickly basically shut the whole building down.

And so it's not just like food, it's also the sort of security, it's the pressure that BPP applied politically on people, like the Mayor of San Francisco, on HEW officials themselves, on other politicians, which actually like forced the HEW officials to allow things in and out. And also because they made the conditions inside basically so unlivable that -- and they were able to get that out to the media, that they were pressured to essentially give people some of what they needed to survive towards the middle of the protests. But in the beginning, there was nothing. And here's an account from quadriplegic activist Bill Blanchard, who wasn't there on night one, but arrived on the morning of day two, and was one of those people who snuck in through the elevator. And he says,

"So there I was, among what seemed to be a couple hundred non-disabled and disabled demonstrators, most of whom I did not know. I realized I had no idea how long I was going to be there, or how I was going to get food, or where I was going to sleep, or who would help me with my bowel and bladder routine, or help me bathe or dress or whatever. I wasn't prepared, because I wasn't sure what to prepare for. All of a sudden excitement turned to concern. What the hell was I thinking, what was I doing here? I was a spinal cord injured quadriplegic, after all, and a quad who likes comfort at that. My idea of roughing it is having to watch black and white television and that's while in the comfort of my own warm bed. Now I have the option to sleep in my not meant to be slept in wheelchair, or to sleep on the floor. Great. What wonderful choices. I prayed this was going to be a very brief occupation. Surely Califano would sign it in a day or two. So much for prayers, or at least my prayers. We were in for a long stay."

So this gives you a little bit of a picture of what the class position was of some of the disability organizers. The Center for Independent Living, obviously, was a kind of like hub of people in San Francisco who are coming together and really trying to work on like living outside of institutions. And a lot of the people that were involved in that were of a very different class position than a lot of the other organizers that were helping in this event. And so you also sort of had these like cultural clashes, where what was going on is that, you know, you had like all of these people coming together to basically support this action.

But you had a lot of different ideologies and interests sort of at play that conflicted with one another. And it's not to say that there were not like poor disabled people participating as well. But it is to say that you had just this kind of lack of like cohesion actually that ever occurred, these communities didn't like come back together again. They didn't largely continue to work together. And part of that is that, you know, a lot of the people who were in -- like involved in those protests, like were not previously organizing with each other, they didn't know each other going in. And the Independent Living Center didn't really create an opportunity to welcome in particularly a lot of the disabled people of color who were a part of that action, but then sort of not involved in any of the trainings or any of the implementation money that went forward. You literally have this kind of essential support, that then immediately is discarded in favor of sort of taking over the center stage on this action.

Phil Rocco 01:52:58

Yeah. And it's also I think worth noting that like by the late 1970s -- so like you think about what disorganizes people, or what makes it difficult to like be in coalition with one another. Well, there's like the sort of objective class position aspect of it. But there's also like ways that the government can use policy as a way of hiving people off from one another, or hiving interests off from one another. And by the late 1970s, the context of like welfare reform, particularly the Nixon administration's Family Assistance Program, which was a like "anti-dependency" initiative, like eliminating welfare, replacing it with like a minimum cash benefit, which then the Carter administration sort of took up again. It too was essentially instrumental in, you know, keeping disability activists separate from activists in the black community, who are sort of arguing about like, what actually does, you know, a federal social policy look like that's just. The way that the Carter administration sort of handled that policy, and the Nixon administration before it, had a way of like dividing those two groups. So it's not just like, these, you know, objective class positions that are keeping people separate. Like the policies that are on the agenda at the federal level are also like having an instrumental role in dividing them as well.

Artie Vierkant 01:54:23

I think it's also really important to note that this is kind of a moment of the ascendancy of sort of what we now would call the charity industrial complex. And I think that this aspect and also what Bea was saying about the exclusion of particularly a lot of the black disabled people there and other disabled people of color who participated in the action, is really well illustrated in another oral history, if I can just play a clip really quick, from Dennis Billups, who's a blind man who participated in the action, but felt that he was deliberately excluded from certain aspects of it.

Interviewer (Clipped Audio) 01:55:04

Did you ever personally feel discriminated while you were at the protest, while you were protesting, or in the building?

Dennis Billups (Clipped Audio) 01:55:11

In some meetings I was privileged to go to and some meetings I was not privileged to go to. And some meetings I knew about and some meetings I didn't know about. Those with the organizational ties with Easter Seals, and every other organizations, had meetings and things like that. And those who were just there, just the protests didn't have really that much of a voice. If you weren't in the loop, you weren't, you weren't there. And I didn't really notice that too much, because I was doing the demonstration. But you could see who was sitting outside and who was really in the room talking about, you know, this part of the regs needs to be changed, or, you know, we need to call the governor or, you know, things like that. So I felt, you know, in some instances, I was involved. But a lot of instances, I was kind of left out, even though I was there all the time, giving ideas and doing, you know, what I'm -- what I could. The difficult thing was you're going to have people who are in control, you're going to have people who have connections to money and other things that people who come off the street or from other organizations don't have. And I think the willingness not to share a lot of the stuff that they did behind closed doors or in the other rooms or meetings, was a disingenuous thing. I understood that being in the demonstration, being active, was a good thing. But please, since I was here from the beginning, since I went to Washington, DC with you, since I was the first one to make sure that we got on the floor in the Califano's house at the beginning, since I was the first one who started the candlelight vigil, since I was the first one who said all right, we're not going to move out in front of Califano's house until we get an answer. And we had FBI, we had police and everything come there. I should have been included.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 01:57:21

Yeah, and I mean, it sort of -- this is a problem that basically was pretty consistent throughout the occupation, right, that you had sort of this really important contingency of the Black Panthers. They're organizing the sort of people that people like Dennis Billups were able to bring into the protests, largely because of the coverage that the Black Panthers were doing in their own newspapers, which are circulating throughout the country, right, also. Dennis Billups is like, becomes this kind of spokesperson, calling people who are like fighting for causes of like racial justice and economic justice to like join them and come together and like support the action.

And so really early on, you have like the Black Panther Party putting out this like press release to the media, saying we're standing in solidarity, and you know, Carter and Califano need to, you know, enact the regulation right away, they need to sign it unchanged. You know, this is like a no nonsense policy. And you also have like their sort of media and propaganda arm working really hard to like, communicate how the Section 504 protests like could become this kind of like moment of intersectional collaboration between like economic justice movements, racial justice movements and disability civil rights, but then like that -- all of that momentum and all that organizing and infrastructure, right, that is not only making the protests possible, but is also helping to like draw attention to it and sustain it, you know, this gets basically discarded in favor of being able to like capitalize and become these sort of professional lobbying organizations and really lay the groundwork for the kind of organizing that would later result in things like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was later passed in 1990.

You have all of these trainings that happen after the law itself has passed, where you have the kind of ideology of the Independent Living Movement, which is really oriented around -- it didn't necessarily start as being a kind of libertarian free market ideology, but it quickly became part of that kind of like culture that was like advocating for changes to social welfare policies that might -- you know, that were being framed as maybe a way to help disabled people, but were also attractive to conservative Democrats and Republicans who were interested in kicking people off of the welfare rolls. So you sort of have like this early moment where you have the movement sustained by radical collaboration of one kind.

And then after the 504 protests, like it's kind of -- it never really happens again, because the radical collaborators after that are radical centrists and centrist Democrats and radical conservative Republicans who end up like, you know, working within the Bush administration to help pass the ADA. So I think it's a really sort of important moment to remember that, you know, all of the other protests, they fizzled out, there was no food, there was no medicine.

As the protest continues in San Francisco, there are, you know, people who are being paid by local organizations to come in and supervise all of the medicine and be medical officers there to provide care. You have attendants who are providing their services in people's offices before they come to work in the morning. Here is an attendant's perspective of what it was like. She said,

"Assisting with personal care was quite a challenge. We were all away from our familiar surroundings. At 5:00pm, when the office staff left for the day, we used their offices. We woke up early in the mornings, got our routines done, and made sure the offices were clean before the workers came in. And thank you to those office workers who gave us their support by leaving their office doors unlocked. You know who you are."

Artie Vierkant 02:01:06

Cool.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:01:07

Yeah. And so you even have -- you know, as they progress through their first week of the occupation, we're talking about maybe around day six, day seven, it's unclear what day this happens. The HEW officials start to, you know, pull some really like weird hijinks to try and force them out of the building. And so one thing that they do is they like basically stage a fake bomb scare, and they wake the activists up in the middle of the night.

Phil Rocco 02:01:34

Classic.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:01:35

And they try and scare them into evacuating the building. They're basically trying to trick them out of the building. Here is a recollection --

Phil Rocco 02:01:44

We committed a felony just to have -- you know, just to make this end.

Artie Vierkant 02:01:48

Just to make it convenient for us. Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:01:50

Here's an account of this from someone's oral history,

"Around midnight, a security guard summoned me. I was told there was a bomb in the building and to wait for a call from Jim Hayes to advise me how everyone should be evacuated. 20 minutes later, Hayes' call informed me that a bomb squad would be arriving shortly. He suggested I wake everyone up, but not move them until I was given further instructions. I told Jim Hayes not to wake us again until the bomb went off."

So you've had this kind of situation where, you know, they were bringing trash cans through in the middle of the night, making people who are sleeping in the hallways get up and get back in their wheelchairs and get out of the hallway, so they could move the trash at like 3:00, 4:00 in the morning.

They were basically trying to do everything they could, including like they cut off the phone lines, they reduced the phones in the building to only accept incoming calls. They only left them with two available pay phones to use. When those pay phones filled with quarters, they didn't empty them at all, so that they couldn't be used because you couldn't put a quarter in them anymore. And so then you had like Deaf activists signing like out the window to interpreters and other Deaf protesters who were on the street to pass information out, you had at least some of the staff able to get it out.

So you've had this pretty confrontational, sustained occupation where federal workers just worked around them pretty much all day long. Like the disabled people took over the fourth floor of the building, but they didn't send workers home. So there were also like workers there for a large part of the protests.

And you know, there were all these sort of strange interactions that started happening between the protesters and between the office workers and the security guards and you start to have collaboration starting and the HEW officials find out and so they like transfer people off the floor and they like switch out the security guards. If the security guards like refused to wake up the protesters in the middle of the night and they actually like let them have some privacy and some sleep or something like that, they were transferred off of the protests and sent basically to go work on another floor.

And ultimately what was going on this whole time during the protests, they basically early on start to form these committees. And they together create systems in order to make sure that people who are there are getting sort of their basic care needs met. Obviously, everyone is sort of working at, you know, basically zero sleep at this point. They've not been able to have their normal levels of care for about, you know, maybe two weeks of occupying this building before the Black Panthers are allowed to bring in like portable showers. They're just using sinks for about, you know, 10-12 days before that.

And what you have is that, like, there are local congressional representatives who represent Northern California who start to support the protests publicly. There's enough news going on that you have these two congressmen who say, listen, we're going to do an informal hearing here, we're going to set up a hearing, we're going to hear you out. And we're going to let you sort of tell us about like your side of the story and give us like your input on Section 504.

And they end up holding a hearing that is kind of talked about as if it's this moment when the story changes, and this is really what got people to change. And Judy Heumann's testimony is usually the one that is like shown if you're like in a Disability Studies class and you learn about Section 504, you watch like Judy Heumann is like crying and testifying about the indignation of like the delays and how insulting it is that the federal government refuses to implement this law. And it's sort of talked about as like, and here's the magical moment that everybody stopped and Washington paid attention.

But what actually happened is that they have this hearing, right, and they -- you know, this event happened, but like the next week, they sent a delegation of 25 people to go harass Califano at his home in Washington, who protested outside of like the Capitol building when they were basically like ghosted from the meetings that these congresspeople, these California Congressmen had promised that they would set up in Washington. So it's really not until there's this additional sustained pressure and direct action that Califano even signs it.

So the story is kind of sanitized to tell it as if, you know, it's this hearing and it's this testimony that's emotional that really is the kind of like last straw that breaks the camel's back, when in actuality, it actually took place like much later. And that whole trip to Washington too was really kind of a contentious PR stunt.

Phil Rocco 02:06:33

Yeah. I think that like, this is the -- and maybe just a broader point about how this happened, and what the history is, because I think that the -- like history ends up getting told in retrospect with the set of narrative devices and tools that make sense for the present political -- like in the present political economy, which is dominated by, you know, nonprofits whose entire existence in the way that they engage in politics is like, yeah, we go testify, or we have a nice conversation with people, and then everybody like seems to listen, and we get some sort of half measure, and we go home and publish our annual reports and say that we've succeeded.

And I think that like the thing that it appears that both that complex of nonprofits, as well as the federal government has learned from episodes like this, is that the one thing that in addition to having like strong movement organizing, this collaborative and cross cutting, that you need to succeed in things like this, is you are more likely to be able to sustain a movement if it is very clear that what the federal government is saying is like, no, go fuck yourself.

When they start appearing as if they're moving on your demands, however, you know, marginally, however for show, they make it harder to organize. Like, see, we're being responsive, right. And now that they -- now that like some of the primary movers in politics are nonprofits, like that sets up kind of a perfect balance there where it's like, okay, well, you know, the major claimants on the state are now like willing to take a smaller amount, and the state has realized that they can give smaller amounts of rights or you know, social support, or whatever it is, and use that and like stave off broader social movements or demands for the expansion of rights.

So like, and this is an instance where it's not entirely clear that like somebody like Califano's like learned that yet. It's still just like, here we are however many weeks into this, and the administration is just saying, still, no. And they're not even -- you know, so it's hard for me to conclude that like there hasn't been some learning from this, and learning in a way that is demobilizing.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:09:10

Right. Well, and I'm saying, and like Califano doesn't realize this and because he's like so pissy about the occupation, he's kind of like refusing to work with these larger nonprofits that are involved in a lot of the advocacy, like the Easter Seals Foundation, right where you have -- he's just so mad, right, that he's like, fuck all you. Like, I don't want to deal with this, like fuck you. For like a large portion of the occupation, he's blowing them off over and over and over again, he's blowing off like Congresspeople.

And like all of those people are realizing what you're bringing up, Phil, which is like, wow, it's like much easier if you just sort of collaborate with these nonprofits, right? If you like give the advocacy like a little bit of what it wants, like it'll be gentler on you, it'll be nicer to you. And Califano really doesn't get this and I think this is part of like why he like becomes a kind of like laughingstock after this, is part of it. Like this, among many other like pretty embarrassing leadership decisions that he made, the Section 504 sit-in was a huge embarrassment for him, and it was a huge embarrassment, you know, internally within Washington, people like looked at it as just something that was so horrifically mishandled, not necessarily by the two prior presidential administrations, but by the Carter administration specifically, because they had an opportunity.

They made a promise, right? They made those activists a promise. They had an opportunity to fulfill that promise, they didn't. And then they sort of had egg on their face as a result. And I think, you know, it's one of those things where you really sort of see after that, like after the sort of movement professionalizes, right, the sort of Independent Living Movement professionalizes in the two decades after this, they write out sort of what the point of this whole trip to Washington was, that sort of splits half of the movement from the occupation and sends 25 people from the sit-in to Washington, which is essentially funded by a local machinist's union in San Francisco and the Black Panthers. The machinist's union are like renting the truck and the Black Panthers are like paying for the plane tickets, and they're getting them out there. And of course, Ed Roberts, who's not been in this protest at all, who was sort of the most famous disability rights activist from the Independent Living Movement, he's like flying to Washington to meet them for the press appearances. And you have this really become a kind of media circus for those liberal disability nonprofits, right, that are getting sort of started in this moment. And it's all on the dime of Black activists in San Francisco who are busting their ass to keep the protests that's, you know, sustained, right, while this basically becomes a lobbying trip that cements a lot of the relationships that these leaders like Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann would use for the next two decades of their disability advocacy.

Phil Rocco 02:12:05

Yeah, so in a way, it kind of shows how moments like this -- however, profoundly meaningful and actually like illustrative of what it takes to win under conditions of, you know, incredible odds stacked against you, there's a -- I would say a dark lining to the situation, which is that it's also easy to hijack things like this, to help purport a series of memories of how politics works that actually don't comport with history at all, but instead comport with like the -- a new political economy that people are trying to build, in which everything is far more highly managed and controlled.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:12:52

Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you ultimately see too is in this sort of process of forgetting, it creates this kind of like magical picture of these movements as sort of inherently successful because they were able to appropriate the civil rights message and apply it to disability civil rights. And there's this kind of attitude that develops, that many people have been critical of, that's just sort of like well, everybody else has gotten their rights and it's time for disability to get their rights too, as if like the problems of other like civil rights inequities are somehow like magically already solved. And you even have this kind of sickening thing that develops in these movements in the next 10 years when they're doing transit protests to try and force 504 to basically -- you know, 504, like once this protest ends and 504 is signed, there's like a whole other long process of that law actually being implemented and that money getting disbursed and how that money is used. But what ends up happening is a series of bus and transit strikes that happen. And in those protests, disability activists literally had signs that said, at least Rosa Parks could get in the back of the bus.

Artie Vierkant 02:14:11

Oh god. [sighs]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:14:12

And it's -- this is the part of the story that makes me so mad and sad and angry, right, because this would not have been possible without the Black Panthers. And to like then base a series of protests in San Francisco only a couple years later around that message and framing, and really, disability activists leaned into this kind of like competitive -- like it's each minority against the other framework. And it's disgusting, and it's really fucking tragic, because it's the kind of thing that like people who are working now have spent decades trying to work against. And that really became the kind of dominant imaginary of what disability policy was supposed to be during, like things like the Clinton era, when you have people like Judy Heumann who are really, you know, instrumental in how the Clinton administration approached disability policy and how things like the ADA itself was implemented. But what ends up happening is because of the sort of sustained pressure that was going on in the offices in San Francisco, because of the activists that are hassling Califano for basically three days everywhere he goes in Washington, DC, and he's still refusing to meet them and blowing them off, Califano was like, I said I was maybe going to sign this in May, but I'm going to just sign it today to get these people fucking off of my back. And because if I delay any longer --

Artie Vierkant 02:15:46

So the pressure worked.

Phil Rocco 02:15:46

Yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:15:47

The pressure worked, and he signed the regs on Thursday, April 28th, before the occupation actually ended. So he signed the regs, he didn't tell anyone. It was like a really unceremonious affair. And he was -- ultimately, all of this pressure, right, all of this pressure that was building after this, essentially, you know, maybe like two and a half, three year campaign, obviously, there's the four years of the regs being negotiated.

But you have three years of pressure, but only a couple months of pressure on Califano himself, right, because he's only coming into the job in 1977 in the first place. But the protest movement by that point had gotten so robust that it actually was effective, and they did have 504 signed, and that money ended up being disbursed to all the organizations that had been on hold while things were getting negotiated. And the Center for Independent Living was able to be funded.

And it turned into this sort of platform for a lot of the people who were involved to come together and form organizations that would really, ultimately expand this vision that the Independent Living Movement had for a kind of new class of like disability worker that they were trying to forward. So ultimately, you know, you had success from this protest, the occupation worked, and the pressure worked, and it wouldn't have happened without all of the, you know, incredible hard work and organizing by the Black Panthers, you know, literally, logistically, as an organization, they were one of the most like robust -- they had like the most robust back end organizing in order to be able to immediately sort of accommodate feeding, you know, an extra 150 people a day, that was no big deal for them. And unless you sort of have these other organizations, right, that wouldn't have happened.

The protests would have lasted one day, and there would have been no way I think that the regulation would have been signed as is without those changes that Califano really wanted, that would have severely limited the definition of disability, to specifically exclude people, as per Carter's wishes, who were people who use drugs or people who use alcohol. And I think it's really, you know, it is obviously like really a kind of tragic story, right?

Because people like Dennis Billups, who you heard from in his oral history in a clip earlier, you know, they don't have the kind of fond memories that you hear a lot of white disability activists have when they talk about this protest because it really is also this sort of tragic moment where there was a possibility for a more inclusive and multiracial disability rights movement that just didn't happen and didn't really flourish after this. And you had this kind of separation of these two groups that had come together in order to try and achieve the same goal, right. But then at the end of the day like their ideological missions were quite different, right?

And so you don't actually have that develop. And I think a lot of people, as many people sort of look to this as a really important inspiring moment about like what direct action can do, it's also a really important lesson on, you know, what -- sort of our interdependence and what we need to be able to have in order to sustain these kinds of direct actions that can apply that kind of pressure. And there aren't organizations like the Black Panthers around anymore, right? There isn't that kind of infrastructure of anyone who's doing a kind of free breakfast program that can immediately accommodate feeding 150 protesters taking over a federal building somewhere.

Artie Vierkant 02:19:26

Well, I think also, though 504 was then implemented, it's not as though everything was like, or is now, like sunshine and rainbows or whatever. I mean, I don't want anyone to get the impression that -- while yes, it was successful, and I think there are a lot of itinerant issues with how, you know, obviously, it was very immediately whitewashed -- i mean whitewashed kind of in the process of it happening, but then also whitewashed like very immediately afterwards, including by a lot of the white disabled people at the action, basically people like Judy Heumann or whatever. You know, while those are issues, I think beyond it, it's like, you know, it's not as though 504 itself brought about some sort of end to the marginalization and oppression of disabled people, right, which is also I think sometimes how it and the ADA are remembered in the US.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:20:15

Oh, absolutely. That's 100% part of the whitewashed story. And then forever after, education was accessible in America.

Phil Rocco 02:20:22

Right. Well, I mean, this is the problem when you deliver sort of the job of political narratives over to liberals, which is that for liberals, a political story has to have a beginning, middle and an end. And the end is usually like, okay, we signed the big piece of legislation. Struggle, by contrast, is a narrative that never ends. And that is the thing that is like written out of that imagination. And I think it's partly why stories like this can be mistold.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 02:20:53

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I always like to sort of think about when I think about this story is really what could have happened to legislation like the ADA if these groups had stayed in collaboration after something like 504. If you had sort of done 504 with a different coalition of disability activists, with a different ideology, what are the sort of contingent movements that could have come out of something like that? Because I mean, it is depressing, but it's kind of the nice way to see the silver lining on the story is like, you know, these things are not just like doomed to fail by fate, right? They they fail for specific reasons and because of specific political economic dynamics that underlie all of our organizing at the end of the day. And I think that's probably a good place to leave it for today.

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Elaine Brown (Clipped Audio) 02:25:07

We just figured out how to do stuff. I mean, that was a really wonderful part about the Black Panther Party. When people talk about medical care now, in clinics right now, you still don't have local clinics, you don't have free clinics. We're talking about the Affordable Care Act as though that's some kind of a serious medical treatment plan. And it's just an insurance plan. If I were Kaiser, I'd be jumping up and down, which they did, soon as they heard about the Affordable Care Act, because that means more people are going to come in there. And they're going to make a lot more money. So our goal was, for example, in the free clinics, people could come and it was free. I mean, you came in, you saw a doctor. How did we get the doctors? We went to medical schools and asked them to donate time. Because that's how we were. I mean, we -- and remember these, this was an ideological question for us. And this was a question of fundamental change in the government, not a question of just continuing the same process, but you having your rights, but everybody else's rights can be trampled. We were looking for systemic change, not for accommodations for people in wheelchairs, that was not our issue. Our issue was systemic change, and that would sweep we presumed all the people who had been oppressed and left out and marginalized and so forth. But it has to be clear that we always took an ideological position. Same thing with our free breakfast and food giveaways. We didn't see this as a food program. We saw this as a stepping stone to educating people that you have a human right to eat and that no one -- anyone making you pay for food is putting a price on your life, putting a price on your head for life. Same thing with being disabled. If you cannot have all the things that you need, which includes your human dignity, obviously, but if you do not have the things that you need, then you are an oppressed person.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)