Cone, trailblazer of the disability rights movement, dies
It wasn’t long after Kitty Cone had enrolled at the Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington that she felt the grip of discrimination.
Cone walked with a cane, and the headmistress of the seminary, a private women’s school, began imposing strange rules that segregated her from the rest of the student body. For instance, she demanded that Cone bathe in a separate tub outside the suite that she shared with three other girls. But the tub was so big that she struggled to get out of it, so she just used the one in her suite. Another time, she was barred from attending a school activity, but she went anyway. Those acts got her expelled.
“For a variety of reasons, the headmistress threw me out, but all having to do with disability,” Cone said in an interview for the University of Illinois archives in 2009. “I think she was worried about liability, looking back on it, because she gave me these prohibitions.”
It wasn’t the first time Cone would experience injustice because of her disability, and it wouldn’t be the last.
This was the 1960s, a time when people with disabilities did not have basic civil rights in the United States — movie theaters could refuse to sell tickets to wheelchair users, for example, and there was little support for blind and deaf people. As evidenced by Cone’s experience, even an education was not a guarantee. People with disabilities were often institutionalized and largely isolated from society. It wasn’t until 1990 that discrimination against them was banned under the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.
Cone’s expulsion from school helped inspire her to devote the rest of her life to fighting for disability rights.
“Things that happened in my life determined the fact that I would be an activist,” she said in a 2013 oral history. “So many choices in my life had been circumscribed by the fact that I had a disability.”
Cone was the lead organizer and strategist of the 504 Sit-In, a nearly four-week-long protest in April 1977 in which nearly 150 disabled people and their allies took over the San Francisco office of the US Department
of Health, Education and Welfare. Their intent was to pressure Secretary Joseph Califano Jr. to sign regulations that would implement Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, prohibiting programs receiving federal aid from discriminating against any “otherwise qualified individuals with a disability.” The act paved the way for the ADA.
Cone was the “organizational brains” behind the sit-in, said Mary Lou Breslin, a close friend who was at the demonstration, helping to mobilize a coalition of supporters among other activist groups, including the Black Panthers, who supplied hot meals to the protesters, and machinist union workers, who rented trucks to help transport them when they took the fight to Washington.
“She believed in the depth of her soul that the broader you build something, the better chance you have of success,” said Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who met Cone at a Section 504 advocacy training in 1979 and remained her friend.
The 504 Sit-In is the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in US history.
The group ultimately succeeded in getting the regulations signed, and in a victory speech she gave on April 30, 1977, Cone said the disability community had “written a new page in American history.”