Judy Heumann, advocate for disability rights, 75
Judy Heumann, who spent decades advocating for the inherent dignity of people with disabilities, campaigning for federal civil rights legislation while organizing sit-ins, marches and other nonviolent demonstrations, and who later wielded influence as an official at the institutions she had worked so hard to change, died March 4 at a hospital in Washington. She was 75.
Her death was confirmed by Yoli Navas, a spokeswoman working with the American Association of People with Disabilities, where Heumann was a board member. She did not cite a cause.
Heumann, who was paralyzed from a childhood bout with polio, came of age at a time when disabled people had restricted access to libraries, schools and public transportation, with limited opportunities for education or employment. She set about changing that, filing a lawsuit to become the first New York City public school teacher to use a wheelchair and later working to improve the representation of disabled people in the media.
“Disability only becomes a tragedy,” she once she told The Washington Post, “when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives — job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.”
Heumann was among the nation’s most prominent champions for disability rights, a savvy, unrelenting grass-roots agitator who also demonstrated that she could work inside the system that she had battled for so many decades.
She advocated for disabled people as an official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, expanded the scope of her work as an adviser for the World Bank, and also focused on the disability community in Washington, where in 2007 she was appointed the first director of the D.C. Department of Disability Services.
In a statement, President Biden described her as “a trailblazer for disability rights in America,” adding that “her courage and fierce advocacy” contributed to the passage of landmark legislation including the Rehabilitation Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which outlawed discrimination based on disability.
Within the disability community, Heumann was perhaps best known for her advocacy on behalf of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, an ADA precursor that banned discrimination against disabled people in programs receiving federal funds.
When President Richard M. Nixon vetoed an early version of the act, she organized a sitin on Madison Avenue, halting traffic in New York City. That effort made headlines, but even after the legislation was voted into law successive administrations delayed implementing Section 504, the key disability regulations. Soon after President Jimmy Carter was sworn into office, Heumann and other demonstrators took to the barricades, staging a nearly four-weeklong sit-in at a federal office building in San Francisco, where they called for Joseph A. Califano Jr., the secretary of health, education and welfare (HEW), to sign off on the regulations.