[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":185},["ShallowReactive",2],{"episode-body-politics":3},{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":8,"tags":13,"thumb":16,"excerpt":22,"content":23,"transcript":24,"transcript_file":24,"audio":25,"resources":29,"segments":30},43,"body-politics","Body Politics","Disability in America",{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},1473336753,"09.08.16","Sep 8, 2016","September 8, 2016",[14,15],"disability","disability rights",{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":19},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fdisabilities.jpg","Private William Sergeant, in uniform after the amputation of both arms. Credit: Library of Congress.",{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fsquare_small\u002Fdisabilities.jpg","https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fsquare_medium\u002Fdisabilities.jpg","On this BackStory, we’re exploring the history of disability in America","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The impact of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act is visible in parking lots, bathrooms, and public buildings across the country. But for centuries before the ramps and signs were erected, disabled people had to find their own ways to navigate American society.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>On this BackStory, we’re exploring the history of disability in America, from the “ugly laws” that barred the disabled from public spaces to the grassroots activism that set the stage for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The hosts will consider how the inventor of the telephone tried to stamp out American sign language, and how enslaved people found ways to exploit white fears of physical disability. How have people with disabilities shaped 21st century America? And how have American attitudes towards disability changed?\u003C\u002Fp>\n",null,{"url":26,"duration":27,"formatted_duration":28},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fepisodes\u002Fbody-politics-2016.mp3","2265","00:37:45",[],[31,48,66,83,100,117,135,152,170],{"index":32,"title":33,"description":34,"audio":35,"tags":39,"transcript":42,"episode":43},0,"No Business Like Show Business","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Peter Onuf talks with historian Jenifer Barclay and actor Mat Fraser about one of the ways some people with disabilities made a living in 19th century America: exhibiting their bodies in sideshows—often known more crudely as “freak shows.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":36,"duration":37,"formatted_duration":38},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-01.mp3","263","00:04:23",[14,40,41],"exploitation","performance","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: For three days, students have shut down the campus, boycotted classes, and burned effigies…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: This was the scene at Gallaudet University in 1988. The nation’s only university for the deaf and hard of hearing had operated for more than a century without a president who was one of their own, so students demanded one.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: It changed not just the way hearing people saw deaf people. It changed the way deaf people feel about ourselves.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Americans with disabilities have long fought for their own voice, while others have tried to speak for them. A hundred years ago, disability reformers tried to suppress sign language. Today on \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: physical disability in America, from restrictive 19th century immigration laws to the long fight for freedom.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: There are many examples of slaves who could utilize disability—either genuine, feigned, or exaggerated—to achieve their own ends. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Coming up on \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: a history of Americans with disabilities.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Major funding for \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">… with the American Backstory hosts.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Hello, Brian.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: And Peter Onuf’s with us.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Hey, Brian. We’re going to start today’s show with a story of two sisters, Millie and Christine McKoy. They were born into slavery at a North Carolina plantation in 1851.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: And right away, their owner recognized that they were an interesting sort of spectacle.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC PLAYING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: This is Jenifer Barclay, a historian at Washington State University.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: And the twins, from a very early age, began to be exhibited in different ways throughout the southern states.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Millie and Christine were born conjoined at the hip, and, like hundreds of other 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century Americans with disabilities, the twins made their living by exhibiting their bodies in sideshows, or, more crudely, “freak shows.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: These would have been folks with unusual bodies, perhaps amputees, folks missing limbs, or folks who were considered to be giants, or folks who were considered to be midgets. So, just a whole diverse array of people.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Barclay says that, in the case of the McKoy sisters, while the twins’ extraordinary bodies got them on the stage, it was their performance as the two-headed nightingale that astounded audiences.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: Performing dance routines that were choreographed whilst they sang. They were both multi-lingual so, as part of their performance, one would carry on a conversation in, say, French, and the other would carry on a conversation in German. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: The McKoys’ act paid off. By the time they retired from the stage in their 30s, the twins had made enough money to live comfortably and buy a farm for their parents. They even founded a school for black children in their home state. But the McKoys’ use of their disability as a source of financial independence is hardly unique.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: I think the agency that maybe disabled people got in those days was the fact that they were fiscally independent, and that they had a group of equals.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: This is Mat Fraser. You might recognize him from the TV show \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">American Horror Story: Freak Show\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. He’s an actor and sideshow performer who integrates a congenital deformation in his arms into a show. Fraser’s done a lot of research into his profession and says that, like the McKoy sisters, many 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century sideshow performers leveraged their disabilities for a better life.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: And I think that was more the agency because the alternative of being—I’m going to use phrases of yesteryear here—the school cripple or whatever you get numbered as identity-wise, could often be improved by going on the road and being a fabulous freak and an exotic that people desired and wanted to know more about.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: But both Barclay and Fraser stress that this agency is easy to romanticize. In the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, sideshow performers with disabilities still regularly faced exploitation at the hands of showmen like P.T. Barnum.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: In the Millie and Christine McKoy’s case, they were forced to undergo invasive medical examinations to prove they were “real” freaks, and even the very presence of gawking onlookers complicated any financial success. Barclay says in the 1830s and ’40s, sideshow audiences weren’t exactly looking to celebrate diversity.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: Antebellum America, when these kinds of productions first emerged, was a time of tremendous change and upheaval. Industrialization, things like abolition, I think, in many ways, were anxieties that spectacles like freak shows helped to give folks a place where they could sort of test their own normalcy.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: In other words, the audiences used performers’ disabilities to feel normal. Mat Fraser says these dual strands of agency and exploitation are ever-present in sideshow history.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: Where is the line between being a self-respecting, fiscally-independent, treated-as-an-equal performer that celebrates their beautiful difference to the hideous notion of people coming to gawk at someone’s deformity because they can’t do anything else because society won’t let them work, which is the other side of the coin?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: But this tension isn’t just confined to sideshows. It runs through lots of history of disability in America. Able-bodied Americans have often projected their fears, anxieties and stereotypes onto their fellow citizens with disabilities, many of whom, in turn, have worked to find their own means of social and civic mobility.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Today on the show, a history of physical disability in America. We’ll explore how enslaved people used fear of disability to their advantage and find out why Alexander Graham Bell fought against the use of sign language within the deaf community. We’ll also hear from voices of protest in the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century fight for disability civil rights.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: But, first, let’s take a look at how views of disability have shaped who has been granted access to the U.S. in the first place. Since the founding, politicians have used the term “able-bodied” to define civic participation. By the 1880s, lawmakers begin to focus on those coming into the country.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1882, federal immigration law barred anyone who was a “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge” from entering the country. That list included children and adults with any number of physical disabilities or perceived defects.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: The list would include varicose veins, flat feet, hearing impairment, vision impairments, short stature, poor physique.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: This is University of Iowa historian Douglas Baynton. He says it’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants with disabilities were kept out of the U.S. For one thing, discrimination didn’t begin at Ellis Island.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Because the shipping companies did their own inspections, because if they brought an immigrant over who was rejected, they would have to pay a fine for that person, and they would have to bring them back at no charge. The ticket sellers, the ticket agents, who were spread all over Europe, also did their own inspections. These were non-medical people, but they would refuse to sell tickets to people who they thought would be excluded, because they would be penalized by the shipping companies.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: And what this suggests to me is that people with really debilitating disabilities might not have made it this far.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Oh, that’s right, yeah. Well, they wouldn’t have gotten through the initial screens, and also if they had a mobility impairment, they wouldn’t be able to get on the ship in the first place.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Right, right. So, can you give me an example of what this process actually looked like in practice, these officials deciding sort of on the spur of the moment that somebody was defective?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: There was an Armenian Turk in 1905 by the name of Donabet Mousekian who was diagnosed as suffering from feminism. That was the term that was used on his medical certificate, and it referred to a lack of male sexual organs or underdeveloped organs as a result of what we now know to be a hormonal deficiency.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: I mean, how would they know that? It must have been from a facial trait?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Yes.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Because I know from reading your article that, basically, people are walking by and when they see somebody who seems defective, they write an “L” on their back. Is that right?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Right, there was a whole code for different kinds of defects. So, “X” for mental defect, “L” for lame.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, the first inspection was really just a snapshot diagnosis as immigrants streamed past the inspectors, and they would pull some people out, chalk on their back, and then give them a closer inspection.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, with Mousekian, his hearing was extraordinarily brief. It was as if the board that was examining him was very uncomfortable, and, this case, one of them said, “I move to exclude as likely to become a public charge.” Second panel member said, “I second the motion,” and a third said, “He is excluded.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Oh, wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: And that was the entire hearing. But he appealed to Washington, which all immigrants had the right to do, and he wrote in his appeal that he had always supported himself. He was a photographer, a weaver and dyer of rugs, and a cook, had worked at all of these.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he wrote in his letter, “I am not ill and have no contagious disease. This is not my fault. It has come from God and my mother. What harm can I do by being deprived of male organs?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When he left, he was fleeing the violent oppression of Armenians in Turkey, and had been made to renounce his citizenship when he left. So, he explained this in his letter, and he said, “Better that you should kill me now than send me back,” and the Armenian genocide took place just a few years after he was sent back.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So much of this focused around not being able to find work.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: [Yes].\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: What kind of evidence would they have of that? Was that actually true, do you think?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: That’s the thing. There is a widespread assumption that a disability means being incapable of working. So, in the case of Mousekian, there really seems to be no reason to assume he wouldn’t be able to find work. But there was an immigration service memo that explained why they should not be admitted, which was that their abnormality becomes known to their fellow workers, who mock them and taunt them, which impedes the work—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: —at hand, and so employers know this and are unlikely to hire them.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, it’s for their own good in many ways? [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Yeah, right. So, basically, it was saying that, “We have to discriminate against them now because they’re likely to encounter discrimination later.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, you say that these restrictions grew over time. Does that mean that they grew increasingly accepted? Was there a sort of turn against people with disabilities at the beginning of the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, or was this just sort of a more bureaucratic momentum that built?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a couple of things going on. One, the eugenics movement definitely grew. And it was not just in the negative sense, of preventing defectives from giving birth, but encouraging people who considered to be superior to have more children. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, sterilization was one way of preventing the proliferation of “defective” people. The other main track that eugenicists took was to prevent defective people from coming into the country. They would argue that all of our sterilizing and institutionalizing of people is not going to do any good if we’re just being swamped with defective people from the outside.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, this just seems to be running contrary to what we think of as the currents of sensibility and progress. We think of abolitionism, and feminism, and a general sensitivity to the suffering of animals, and everything… seems to be flourishing in the 19th century. Why would people with disabilities seem to be exceptions to that general trend?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a lot of different factors. One of them is this standardization of society in the industrial age. The term “normal” comes into common use near the end of the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, and it becomes a very powerful concept. People used to talk about human nature, and then it shifted around the turn of the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century to a concern with what is normal: counting people, measuring people, seeing what the bell curve shows us about what are normal characteristics.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s tied in with a lot of changes: the growth of cities, industrialization where not only do you need standardized parts and replaceable parts, but standardized and replaceable human beings, workers. People with disabilities don’t fit as a cog in that larger machine.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, how long were these laws on the books? You say they sort of peak in the early 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century. Then what happened?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: The immigration laws do not take out the language having to do with specific disabilities or defects that are excludable until the 1990 Act, and still today we exclude people who are likely to become a public charge, and that’s still a means of keeping people out with disabilities. So, it still goes on.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Douglas Baynton is a historian at the University of Iowa and author of the forthcoming book \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Earlier, we heard from historian Jenifer Barclay at Washington State University, and actor and performer Mat Fraser.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: It’s time to take a short break. When we get back, Alexander Graham Bell thought the biggest threat to America’s deaf community was sign language.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: You’re listening to \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: We just heard about the laws in the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century that targeted disability among immigrants, but attitudes at that time affected plenty of Americans, as well. Our story starts with Alexander Graham Bell, who we all know as a hero for his invention of the telephone in 1876, but Bell was also one of the most influential figures in the field of deaf education. He had a deep personal connection to the issue. Both his mother and his wife were deaf.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: But the signing deaf community has viewed Bell as a villain.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: This is Brian Greenwald, a historian at Gallaudet University. I spoke to him through a sign language interpreter. Greenwald says that in the late 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, Bell used his fame to try to eradicate sign language, which he viewed as primitive. Bell was one of the more prominent activists who promoted a different form of communication for the deaf, known as oralism.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: Oralism is a pedagogical approach to teaching deaf children, which relies on teaching them speech training, lip reading, and eliminating the use of sign language, the idea being that deaf children would be recast as hearing, speaking people.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Why did Bell think that oralism was more advanced, or why did he think that American Sign Language was more primitive?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: This is an era when sign became viewed as atavistic, backwards thinking. That it was a bumbling use of gesture to convey information in a way that wasn’t a good fit for human nature, as it was seen. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In terms of evolutionary thinking of the day, people regarded sign, and those who used sign, as being somewhat closer to the use of gesture among, say, monkeys, and the idea being that if you could not speak, you could not think, and were not human.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, for Bell, working to eliminate sign language, I think, was really a kind of reform, as he saw it. A progressive reform.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Greenwald told me that in the late 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, there were several dozen boarding schools for the deaf where students were taught sign language. The schools, and signing, had created the beginnings of Deaf culture.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: My belief is that Bell saw oralism as a social and educational pressure that could be applied to deaf people so that they would leave that cultural community, because he thought that deaf people should not be marrying other deaf people.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Why? Bell was a eugenicist.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: Bell was very, very much so worried that if deaf people continued to marry among other deaf people then there would be, at some point, a new variety of the human race that would be deaf. But we know today that that theory doesn’t hold true.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the overarching goal for Bell was to reduce the number of deaf people in existence. Now, the way to reduce those numbers of deaf people, he thought, and his argument was through oralism as a tool for assimilation.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Was there anybody who pushed back against Bell in order to defend that culture?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, very much so, even within the schools for the deaf where sign language was forbidden or not used. Those deaf students would spontaneously sign on the sly, and if the teacher had their back turned to write on the board at any moment, the students were communicating with each other using signs and doing so in the dormitories, as well.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Other acts of resistance—and really a very important one to remember—is that when those deaf children graduated from those schools, they continued to gather in deaf communities within churches, within deaf clubs, within different organizations, and the number of deaf-related organizations on local, state, and national levels are astounding. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But oralists were like a tidal wave in that era that just swept across the United States, and part of the problem was that the oralists had never asked deaf adults—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: —about their own [laughs] experiences, and so deaf children of that day, and still today, continue to get the short end of the educational experience.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Brian Greenwald is a historian at Gallaudet University. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite efforts to suppress signing, the language thrived throughout the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, largely through those methods of resistance Greenwald mentioned. Schools today teach American Sign Language, lip reading, and speech.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: You know, guys, I noticed from those interviews with Douglas Baynton and Brian Greenwald how in the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century reformers categorized and labeled and institutionalized people with disabilities, and now, obviously, these reformers had good intentions, but it seems to me that something was lost from earlier times. So, Peter, what was gained and lost from the 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century to the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century world in which people were institutionalized?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Well, in a way your question says it all, Ed. There aren’t institutions, and everything that’s done [laughs] in terms of social welfare has to be done literally at home or in your hometown or village.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: That sounds good.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: It is good in the sense that you have a place. Whatever you’re born with, however you’re born, whatever marks you as different is accepted. One of the reasons it can be accepted is that 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century society, even in British America, is hierarchical. There is a culture of caring because without that care people can’t survive, and the survival—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: It’s kind of a culture of responsibility, right?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Yeah, exactly. You know that phrase about “it takes a village” to do this, that, and the other thing, and that begins with taking care of small children and anybody who needs help.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Peter, did it matter that so many people in the, let’s say, late 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century worked in the home?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Yeah, Brian, I think that’s a great point. We think of work as an activity that we’re slotted into once we join the labor force.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Right, you commute off to work.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: But let’s just say you can’t go out into the fields anymore. Well, there’s something for you to do in a household economy. [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: There’s plenty to do.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Right, there is plenty to do, whether it’s child care, whether it’s food preparation, whether it’s simply watching the world go by and reporting on that to your neighbors, you’re a part of an organism, of a community.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, wasn’t that better?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Yeah, that’s better, Ed, but what’s not better is the sense that your destiny is fixed with those marks at birth, whatever it is that distinguishes you, and the whole [laughs] range of things that we now call disabilities—mental, physical, whether they happened as a result of an accident and you’re “dis-abled”—all of those things lead to a fixed and permanent outcome. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That idea that you cannot pursue happiness—and we understand happiness to be the aspiration to be a full and complete human being—because you happen to be in this category, then it’s different being disabled. Then, to be disabled is not to participate.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Peter, were the categories of what today we call disabilities, were they the same back then, or are these inventions of the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, or the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Well, I think they are largely inventions of the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, and part of that is based on the idea that you can do something for somebody with what we call a disability, you can enable that person, whereas I think in the 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century you are what you seem to be. I mean, if you can’t do something, you can’t do it. There’s no probing question because there’s no hope that the diagnosis is going to lead to any kind of outcome.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: That’s what strikes me as different from my 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century purchase: the presumption shifts to being whole, enabled, fully entitled citizens with certain barriers. You might even think about those curb cuts that we have today. If you can only put cuts in the sidewalk, they can function like anybody else, and that seems very different than your period.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: And I think the neologism “ableism” suggesting prejudice against those people with disabilities that is that they can’t overcome the effects of those disabilities, and an ableist is simply going to consign those people to the fate of not being able to participate. Well, that would be to return to the 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: We’re going to leap forward now, to the late 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, in a watershed event for the deaf community.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY OFFICIAL: We picked Dr. Elizabeth Ann Zinser as establishment president of Gallaudet [protesting in the background]. It was because…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: It was March 1988. Officials at Gallaudet University had just announced the appointment of a new president. Students at Gallaudet, the nation’s only college for the deaf and hard of hearing, were outraged. They began a campaign called “Deaf President Now.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[PROTESTING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: There’s never been anything like it at Gallaudet. For three days, students have shut down the campus and burned effigies after their board of trustees…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Zinser didn’t even know sign language.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Truth be told, I was shocked.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I thought I had the job.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: This is I. King Jordan. In 1988, he was a dean at Gallaudet and one of the candidates for the presidency. Jordan lost his hearing in a motorcycle accident when he was 21. We spoke to him through a sign language interpreter.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He says that students had been telling the board that it was time for Gallaudet, founded 124 years before, to have a deaf leader.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: But the board didn’t take that message to heart, apparently. There’s a famous quote where the chairmen of the board says, “It’s not time for a deaf president. Deaf people are not ready to be president yet.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Well, do you want to tell us what was going on?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I can tell you what went on from my perspective.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Yes!\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I was at home, and it was Sunday, March 6th. And I was home in the evening, and somebody called my home. And my wife answered the phone, and whoever called—I can’t remember who it was now—said, “Turn on the news. You want to see what’s going on.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, she turned on the news, and there was live coverage of what was going on at Gallaudet, and the students were really in an uproar, and it was then that I learned that they had appointed Dr. Zinser.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I went into campus on Monday. I drove in, and I couldn’t drive on the campus, so I parked nearby, and I couldn’t walk onto campus. All of the students closed down the campus, and they wouldn’t let me on. And they had closed the gates. They had actually hotwired a couple of the school buses.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And drove the school buses in front of the gates and deflated the tires, so it wasn’t going to be very easy to get onto campus.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: So, how did you react when you saw these protests? Were you with the students? Did your administrator sensibilities kick in and say, “Oh, my goodness, this is bad for publicity?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I think both one and two are the way I reacted.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] Yeah.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I thought what the students did was understandable and correct, and, at the same time, I was a dean, so I had the tension between those two different positions.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing, if you’ve done your homework, that you probably know is on Wednesday at the National Press Club, I stood up in front of a group of reporters and cameras, and then I was asked, “Do you support what the board of trustees is saying here?” And, to my regret, I said, “Yes, I do. It’s a board decision” [laughs]. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While I was doing that, there was a crew there from a TV program called \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Deaf Mosaic\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from Gallaudet’s TV department, and the camera man and the producer who were there were both deaf. And when I looked back at the producer, who was a young woman who was a good friend of mine and someone who I liked and who I knew liked me, she was looking at me, and she was shaking her head.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And she was crying.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Oh.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: She didn’t sign anything. She just mouthed, “No. No,” and I said, “OK, I’m dean, and I’m also deaf. And I’m going to be deaf for the rest of my life, and I’m going to be dean for as long as I keep the provost happy. So, I really have to…I have to change my position somehow.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: [from the recording of a news segment] Now they’ve become even stronger…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[PROTESTING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And the next day, I went to campus.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [from the recording of a news segment] Yesterday, because I had been a candidate and wanted to be both reasonable and fair, I gave a statement recognizing the legal authority of the board to name the president of Gallaudet University. In fact, my personal reaction to the board’s decision was and is anger. Anger at the continued lack of…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[CHEERING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I said, “I fully support the action that the students have taken, the notion that the next president should be a deaf person, and I stand with you.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [from the recording of a news segment] I must now publicly affirm my support for the point of view held by the Gallaudet community.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And while I was signing that, I knew that I was shooting myself in the foot. I thought, “Ain’t no way I will ever become president now. I mean, not now, not later. They’re going to have to appoint somebody because Zinser can’t weather this storm. I know that. But given the way I stood up and did this, they’re never going to appoint me.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Right.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: That was Thursday. On Friday, Zinser resigned, and the short of it is that I got a telephone call on Sunday telling me that the board had appointed me president. So, we went to the Mayflower Hotel where the board had been staying. And the Mayflower, when they announced a press conference, word got out, and so all the students came there.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[CHEERING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students came. And I remember a short written statement that I had. I wanted to be very careful of what I said.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [from the recording of a news segment] And I must give the highest praise to the students of Gallaudet for showing us exactly, even now, how one can seize an idea with such force that it becomes a reality.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[CHEERING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And I pronounced “reality” [laughs] like real estate, “an idea becomes realty,” and my wife gave me an elbow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] King, what impact do you think this event had on the deaf community?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Oh, wow, it’s almost impossible to measure. I think about halfway—well, no, not halfway through the week. Actually, it was probably toward the end of the week, I realized that it was not really a protest anymore, that it was really a revolution. That the deaf community would never be the same. That the view of and understanding of and perception of deaf people would never be the same.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It began as a student protest, but it really became a revolution about the rights and abilities of people who were deaf, and a cry for the recognition of people who can hear of those abilities and rights. And there was a buzz phrase that I had when I was president, and that was, “Deaf people can do everything except hear,” and I believe that with all my heart.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: King, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been to talk to you today. Thank you so much for joining us on \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Thank you. It’s really been a pleasure for me.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: I. King Jordan is president emeritus of Gallaudet University.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: In the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, epilepsy was considered a serious disability, and it was thought to be especially prevalent among enslaved people, but if we dig a little bit deeper, the historical record shows a more complicated story.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: I have read accounts of slaves who admitted having feigned seizures in a variety of ways—choking, frothing at the mouth, convulsing—and some who claimed that they had witnessed such fits in other people, and they knew how to mimic them.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: This is historian Dea Boster. She says that white slave owners were terrified of epilepsy, which helps explain why slaves found ways to use those fears to their own advantage. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slavery, of course, was itself a violent, disabling system with backbreaking work, beatings and medical neglect, but the hidden history Boster uncovers shows that even able-bodied slaves exploited white anxieties about disability. Boster tells a story of a child whose seizures saved her from a terrible fate.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: In 1843, a 15-year-old female slave in Richmond, Virginia, named Virginia, was found guilty for the crime of arson, which for slaves was a capital offense, and she was sentenced to hang. But her master, a man named Archibald Govan, appealed to the governor for clemency, and he was able to convince the governor to have her sentence commuted. So, instead of being executed, Virginia was supposed to be sold.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, on the day that Govan picked her up at the city jail to transport her to slave trader Bacon Tait’s jail, she experienced what Govan described as an epileptic fit. There’s nothing to indicate she had a history of it, but she had such fits, or episodes, regularly for almost two months before both the slave trader and a physician he had hired threw up their hands and said, “We can’t sell her. She has no value. You have to take her home.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, a slave, a young girl, who had been found guilty in a Richmond court of a capital crime—was sentenced to die—was saved. Her life was saved. She wasn’t sold. She was returned to her family.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: How would they know that she had epilepsy?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Well, that’s a very good question. It was a not a very well understood disease category at the time, and they never exactly explained in any of the correspondence I read what the fits actually looked like. They just used the word “epileptic.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Yeah, we can’t know what really happened, but we can’t help but be struck by this seemed very advantageous to her for those fits to strike her when they did. So, where there other times that you know of that people were able to use disability or feigned disability to their advantage?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Oh, absolutely, in a variety of instances. I mean, when you think about the day-to-day negotiations of slavery, slaves who could use agency not so much for out-right rebellion but to negotiate the terms of their labor and how they interacted with their masters, there are examples of slaves who sabotaged their own body at market to prevent a sale to an undesired master.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My favorite example, though—and it’s a very unique one—of a slave who utilized a masquerade of disability to her advantage was Ellen Craft, who, in 1848, escaped with her husband, William, from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: And that’s a long way to escape [laughs] as enslaved people, right?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: It is. What’s really remarkable about the Craft story is that they traveled on public transportation the entire way.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Yeah.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, I’m guessing disability played a role in this? Can you explain?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Absolutely. So, the Crafts devised a plan where Ellen, who was fairly light-skinned—presumably, she was the daughter of her master, her white master—she disguised herself as a white slave-holding man, and gave herself the persona Mr. Johnson, and her husband, William, who was slightly older than she, disguised himself as Mr. Johnson’s servant.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the cover story was that they were going to Philadelphia to seek medical treatment and, in order to cover up—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: For Mr. Johnson?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: For Mr. Johnson, yes. In order to cover up Ellen’s femininity, her voice, the fact that she could not read or write, because as a slave she had never been trained how to read and write, they utilized a variety of disabling characteristics. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, they put shaded green glasses over her eyes to feign a problem with her eyesight. They wrapped her head in poultices. When an acquaintance who knew her as a slave tried to strike up a conversation with her, she feigned deafness so that she wouldn’t have to respond. And, most importantly, they bound her right arm in a sling so that she would have an excuse not to register her name for hotels and such along the way because she didn’t know how.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, it’s interesting that they used disability to make themselves invisible and, in some ways, in inaudible [laughs] on their escape from the South.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: And they could exploit the reactions to disabling injuries, whether it was revulsion, whether it was repression, horror, disgust, pity, sympathy.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: It’s fascinating how enslaved people, such as Virginia or the Crafts, were able to use disability as a way to actually buy a little bit of space in a society that otherwise left them so little.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: And, certainly, that tells us an awful lot about expectations of disability and ideas about disability in antebellum society more generally. The more visible or apparent a disability is, the greater the impulse to render that individual invisible. So, I think that actually helps lend complexity to this issue, to understand exactly how disability can work on so many levels in American society and in American history.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Dea Boster is a historian at Columbus State Community College and author of \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">African-American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800 to 1860. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Earlier in the show, we spoke with actor Mat Fraser. He’s best known for his part in \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">American Horror Story,\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> where he played Paul, the Illustrated Seal Boy. The role was a fitting one; 15 years ago, Fraser constructed an entire act based on a historic sideshow performer named Stanislaus Berent, whose stage name was Sealo the Seal Boy.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We asked Fraser how he started in the profession, and to tell us about its history.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: It all started when I was an actor, and I went for an audition at \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bill\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which is our long-standing police drama. And I had a great audition with the guy, but then I didn’t get the call, and I just knew it was my disability. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And we called them, and they said, “Oh,”—we caught them on the hop—and they were all, “Um, um, um, he needs to drive, so there’s a problem. The character needs to drive,” and I have “full driving license” at the front of my resume, so they just picked the wrong excuse.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I thought, “OK, I get it. People don’t want me. Right. Where can I go where not only will I be wanted, but no one can take the job from me?” and, at the time, I was interested in looking at freak shows as the cultural heritage of disabled performers today.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: For myself, I come out in usually to some sort of sexy, pretend sexy, music with a jacket with pretend long arms. I then let them drop from the sleeves. Then I throw away the jacket, and I’m like, “Yes, it’s me,” and then I explain my physical condition, this condition called phocomelia, is seal-like limbs. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I talk about being the seal boy and being scared when Canadians come to the show because they’re famous for clubbing seals and, you know, real bad-taste humor like that. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I end up by doing my clever rock drumming and, say, do a roll in a paradiddle and do a bit of explanation, and then I get the hell out of dodge.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: When I explain my medical condition in terms of what my bones are like, I can see that the audience are genuinely interested, and do I detect a sort of relief to understand? I think I do. I don’t want to put words into their expressions, but I’m really convinced there’s a sort of appreciation of understanding. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, you’re not allowed to ask the disabled person, “So, how are your bones work then? Those funny little arms you’ve got, how do they work?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the fear of the unknown, I think, that is a lot of difficulty around the language of disability and, of course, political correctness—and, of course, self-respect to disabled people—meant that it’s just not cool to go around going, “So, why can’t you walk?” It’s just not cool to do that, but people still want to know and, in the sideshow, you get to tell them, and they get to find out.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: This is part of America’s entertainment heritage, and so I very much feel that in doing the Sealo the Seal Boy’s act, you get a guilt-free slice of history to see what it was like for a disabled performer. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He was very proud of the fact that throughout his 35-year career, he looked after all five members of his family. He kept them clothed, housed and fed, and it was something that he was tremendously proud of. And back in those days, he wouldn’t have been able to do much, so it was a way of validating him. Because in—not to get too political—but in our capitalist society, you are what you do. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have to say, I think this is actually a growth movement at the moment, not a subsiding one, which it was when I came into the business about 15 years ago. And I think what’s wonderful is that disability is just considered normal now within it. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s simultaneously a normalizing of the congenital difference with a glamorizing and an exoticizing of that difference for performance purposes.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Phew. Mat Fraser is an actor and performer. We’ll link to videos of his performance at BackStoryRadio.org.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: In July of 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. This landmark law prohibits any employer from discriminating on the basis of disability. At the signing ceremony, President Bush hailed the legislation as an unambiguous civil rights achievement.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GEORGE H.W. BUSH: [applause] Three weeks ago, we celebrated our nation’s independence day, and, today, we’re here to rejoice in and celebrate another independence day, one that is long overdue, and with today’s signing of the landmark…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Long overdue because the ADA was the result of a decades-long civil rights battle. We’re going to end today with a look back at a key moment in that struggle.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act. It mostly applied to veterans, but it included a clause, Section 504, that prohibited any federally-funded institution from discriminating against anyone based on disability. But there was a hitch. In order for Section 504 to be enforced, regulations had to be drafted, and—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: They needed a signature from the head of Health, Education, and Welfare.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: This is Emily Smith-Beitiks, associate director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability. She says President Nixon’s Health, Education and Welfare secretary never signed the 504 regulations. When Jimmy Carter took office, his secretary, a man named Joseph Califano, didn’t sign, either.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Without those regulations, people with disabilities continued to face rampant discrimination and unemployment. By 1977, they weren’t going to take it any longer. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: Protests in 10 cities across the U.S. were helped at Health, Education, and Welfare offices to demand the signing of 504 regulations on April 5, 1977.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: In San Francisco, disability rights activists occupied a federal building for nearly a month. Although protesters didn’t know it when they showed up in the morning, leaders in the movement planned to stay until they got that signature. Emily Smith-Beitiks collected oral histories from those involved in that protest.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: It all started this morning here at the old federal building on 50 Fulton…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: Somebody said to me, “There’s a demonstration at the federal building tomorrow.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: “It’s going to be outside from blah to blah time. We’re inviting deaf people to come, so we need an interpreter. Can you interpret?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: So, we were just going around in a big circle with signs and chanting different slogans and singing songs, and it was hot, and the third hour into it, I was thinking, “I need to go home,” and that was when the organizers said—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: [whispers] “Tell the deaf people we’re going inside.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was like, “What?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“We’re going into the building. We’re going to take over the building.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: [crowd singing in the background] Immediately after their demonstration this morning, the handicapped started invading the building.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JUDY HEUMANN: We were let into the building. Nobody charged into the building unwelcomed, but we just didn’t leave.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DENNIS BILLUPS: I was surrounded by 200 people or more. I had my cane in hand, and I was saying [clapping], “504, 504,” and then it [crowd chanting in the background] started it. “504, 504.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: There was a chant, “Sign 504, sign 504, sign 504,” [laughs] and I remember, like, this sea of deaf people signing that.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DENNIS BILLUPS: And then I says, “We won’t move. We won’t move. We won’t move.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: I’ve just gotten word, too, these people are now locked into the building…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: And we stayed that night, and we continued to stay, but we had no idea how long we were going to be there.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: And, if we starved in there, that’s what was going to happen. If we got sick in there, we’d get sick in there. Whatever was going to happen, we were just going to be in there until this thing got resolved.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: And the protesters stayed in the building for 26 days. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: I mean, I remember the first night, trying to decide what to do when they came to arrest us, because we were sure that they were going to come to arrest us. And we were surprised that they hadn’t taken us out already.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: I don’t think they’d seen so many disabled people acting up, I suppose, is the term. I mean, what could they do? They were afraid if they picked someone up, they might hurt them. They were just completely lost and confused.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BONNIE REGINA: You know, the image of disabled people up until that time had been that we were all little, pathetic children with individual tragedies and, well, none of that was true.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: We were sleeping wherever there was free space, so we had the large conference room, we had the hallway, and some were around the elevator, and I slept under one of the large desks.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: I think probably everybody was in pain. A lot of us had physical disabilities, and sleeping on the floor is just… First of all, you’ve got to get down there, and then you’ve got to get up, so a lot of blind people came and helped us get on the floor and get up in the morning.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: There were certainly [laughs] romances that bloomed in the building, and I actually had created a tent out of a big chenille bedspread that I had, so it was one of the few fairly private spaces, and people would come to me and say, “Um, could I… could I use your tent?” [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was like, “Sure, yeah,” just being a friend. Just being a friend.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JUDY HEUMANN: It was pretty amazing that we had three meals a day.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: They couldn’t stop food coming in. They couldn’t starve ’em. That would look even worse. [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BONNIE REGINA: The Black Panther party was there every day bringing us really good food.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: And the people with the guns at the doors said, “You can’t come in,” and they said, “Either you let us in, or we’re going to come back with our guys, with our guns.” And they let them in.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: The media was our main weapon.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: The scene at San Francisco’s HEW headquarters now is in its third day, and 125 disabled and…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: At one point, the building, trying to figure out how to get these people out of their [laughs] federal building, said, “Well, let’s turn off the phones. If they can’t reach the press, their power will be weakened.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: There were huge windows in the federal building, and there were people signing the press releases—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: To people on the outside, and then interpreters would interpret what was being said on each end.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So much so that, within a day, the building said, “Ugh, give them the phones back. It’s not making a difference anyways.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: And 125 disabled and handicapped are pledging they’ll continue the sit-in through tomorrow night, if not longer.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: But the problem on this, the fourth day, is still the same as it was on Tuesday: trying to get the attention of Washington.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So, after the protesters had been in the building for a couple weeks, they started to get antsy that Washington, D.C. was not adequately aware of what was happening.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: We had an election to choose who went to Washington, D.C.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JUDY HEUMANN: We looked at the amount of money we had [laughs] and the kind of support that we would need, so we had personal assistants and sign language interpreters, and we wanted a diversified group of people that was racially diverse, that was disability diverse.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: In D.C., conditions were very similar to what they had been back in San Francisco. They stayed in a church basement. They were, again, sleeping on the floor. But what infuriated the protesters is that Califano, head of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Jimmy Carter, would not meet with them.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: I think the first night, we went and had a vigil outside of Califano’s house, and he left by the back door, and we went to Carter’s church, and left by the back door. So, this was part of our tactic, was to say, “This is not an open door administration.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: And, in the meantime, the group of handicapped people are sticking to their guns here in San Francisco. Today starts the third week of their sit-in at the old federal building…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So, the protests continued in this way with a group in San Francisco still in the federal building, and a group in D.C., and, on the 24\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> day of the occupation, word reached them that the 504 regulations had finally—finally—been signed.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: And I remember when we heard, there was just this really joyous explosion.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: We’d won.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: We just—I mean, I think the overwhelming feeling that everybody had was just pride.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BONNIE REGINA: Pride, and power.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: And the whole group starts singing “We Shall Overcome,” and [crowd singing in the background] because there were so many deaf people involved and interpreters there, a lot of people had learned the sign for this particular song, and the whole room was signing, [sings] “We shall overcome,” and it was just this beautiful, beautiful moment.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC: “We Shall Overcome”]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, it bore the imprint of the 504 protests. The ADA itself echoed and expanded the 504 regulations, extending the guarantee of civil rights to the private sector. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: But it was the history of civil protest that was most on the display when the first President Bush spoke at the law’s signing ceremony.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: It’s been the work of a true coalition of people who have shared both a dream and a passionate determination to make that dream come true.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Emily Smith-Beitiks is the associate director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. She collected these oral histories as part of a project celebrating the 25\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> anniversary of the ADA. It’s called \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You can find a link to the exhibit on our website.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We heard from protesters Kitty Cone, Barry Ryan, Bonnie Regina, Joe Quinn, Judy Heumann, Dennis Billups, and Swami Suddhananda.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We had help from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC: “Body Language” by the Jackson 5]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can join us online to continue the discussion. Tell us what you think of this week’s show and help shape our upcoming shows, like the history of American-born religions.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ll find us a BackStoryRadio.org, or shoot us an email at \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"mailto:backstory@virginia.edu\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">backstory@virginia.edu\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC: “Body Language” by the Jackson 5]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">is produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek. Jamal Millner is our engineer. Juliana Daugherty is our digital editor, and Melissa Gismondi helps with research. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Special thanks this week to interpreters Adam Bartley and Eileen Schein from the Gallaudet Interpreting Service.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks also to Catherine Kudlick and everyone at the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Additional thanks to Brenda Brueggemann and Susan Burch.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And by History Channel: History made every day.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ANNOUNCER: Brian Balogh is professor history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC: “Body Language” by the Jackson 5]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ANNOUNCER: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":44,"tags":45,"thumb":46},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":47},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":49,"title":50,"description":51,"audio":52,"tags":56,"transcript":60,"episode":61},1,"Foreign Bodies","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Historian Douglas Baynton tells Ed Ayers why immigrants with disabilities were denied access to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":53,"duration":54,"formatted_duration":55},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-02.mp3","547","00:09:07",[57,14,58,59],"ableism","eugenics","immigration","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">… with the American Backstory hosts.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Hello, Brian.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: And Peter Onuf’s with us.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Hey, Brian. We’re going to start today’s show with a story of two sisters, Millie and Christine McKoy. They were born into slavery at a North Carolina plantation in 1851.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: And right away, their owner recognized that they were an interesting sort of spectacle.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC PLAYING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: This is Jenifer Barclay, a historian at Washington State University.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: And the twins, from a very early age, began to be exhibited in different ways throughout the southern states.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Millie and Christine were born conjoined at the hip, and, like hundreds of other 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century Americans with disabilities, the twins made their living by exhibiting their bodies in sideshows, or, more crudely, “freak shows.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: These would have been folks with unusual bodies, perhaps amputees, folks missing limbs, or folks who were considered to be giants, or folks who were considered to be midgets. So, just a whole diverse array of people.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Barclay says that, in the case of the McKoy sisters, while the twins’ extraordinary bodies got them on the stage, it was their performance as the two-headed nightingale that astounded audiences.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: Performing dance routines that were choreographed whilst they sang. They were both multi-lingual so, as part of their performance, one would carry on a conversation in, say, French, and the other would carry on a conversation in German. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: The McKoys’ act paid off. By the time they retired from the stage in their 30s, the twins had made enough money to live comfortably and buy a farm for their parents. They even founded a school for black children in their home state. But the McKoys’ use of their disability as a source of financial independence is hardly unique.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: I think the agency that maybe disabled people got in those days was the fact that they were fiscally independent, and that they had a group of equals.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: This is Mat Fraser. You might recognize him from the TV show \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">American Horror Story: Freak Show\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. He’s an actor and sideshow performer who integrates a congenital deformation in his arms into a show. Fraser’s done a lot of research into his profession and says that, like the McKoy sisters, many 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century sideshow performers leveraged their disabilities for a better life.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: And I think that was more the agency because the alternative of being—I’m going to use phrases of yesteryear here—the school cripple or whatever you get numbered as identity-wise, could often be improved by going on the road and being a fabulous freak and an exotic that people desired and wanted to know more about.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: But both Barclay and Fraser stress that this agency is easy to romanticize. In the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, sideshow performers with disabilities still regularly faced exploitation at the hands of showmen like P.T. Barnum.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: In the Millie and Christine McKoy’s case, they were forced to undergo invasive medical examinations to prove they were “real” freaks, and even the very presence of gawking onlookers complicated any financial success. Barclay says in the 1830s and ’40s, sideshow audiences weren’t exactly looking to celebrate diversity.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JENIFER BARCLAY: Antebellum America, when these kinds of productions first emerged, was a time of tremendous change and upheaval. Industrialization, things like abolition, I think, in many ways, were anxieties that spectacles like freak shows helped to give folks a place where they could sort of test their own normalcy.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: In other words, the audiences used performers’ disabilities to feel normal. Mat Fraser says these dual strands of agency and exploitation are ever-present in sideshow history.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: Where is the line between being a self-respecting, fiscally-independent, treated-as-an-equal performer that celebrates their beautiful difference to the hideous notion of people coming to gawk at someone’s deformity because they can’t do anything else because society won’t let them work, which is the other side of the coin?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":62,"tags":63,"thumb":64},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":65},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":67,"title":68,"description":69,"audio":70,"tags":74,"transcript":77,"episode":78},2,"Signs of the Times","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Historian Brian Greenwald details one of the darker and lesser-known chapters in the life story of Alexander Graham Bell: his crusade to take sign language out of deaf education.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":71,"duration":72,"formatted_duration":73},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-03.mp3","322","00:05:22",[75,57,76,14],"Alexander Graham Bell","deafness","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: But this tension isn’t just confined to sideshows. It runs through lots of history of disability in America. Able-bodied Americans have often projected their fears, anxieties and stereotypes onto their fellow citizens with disabilities, many of whom, in turn, have worked to find their own means of social and civic mobility.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Today on the show, a history of physical disability in America. We’ll explore how enslaved people used fear of disability to their advantage and find out why Alexander Graham Bell fought against the use of sign language within the deaf community. We’ll also hear from voices of protest in the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century fight for disability civil rights.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: But, first, let’s take a look at how views of disability have shaped who has been granted access to the U.S. in the first place. Since the founding, politicians have used the term “able-bodied” to define civic participation. By the 1880s, lawmakers begin to focus on those coming into the country.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1882, federal immigration law barred anyone who was a “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge” from entering the country. That list included children and adults with any number of physical disabilities or perceived defects.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: The list would include varicose veins, flat feet, hearing impairment, vision impairments, short stature, poor physique.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: This is University of Iowa historian Douglas Baynton. He says it’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants with disabilities were kept out of the U.S. For one thing, discrimination didn’t begin at Ellis Island.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Because the shipping companies did their own inspections, because if they brought an immigrant over who was rejected, they would have to pay a fine for that person, and they would have to bring them back at no charge. The ticket sellers, the ticket agents, who were spread all over Europe, also did their own inspections. These were non-medical people, but they would refuse to sell tickets to people who they thought would be excluded, because they would be penalized by the shipping companies.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: And what this suggests to me is that people with really debilitating disabilities might not have made it this far.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Oh, that’s right, yeah. Well, they wouldn’t have gotten through the initial screens, and also if they had a mobility impairment, they wouldn’t be able to get on the ship in the first place.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Right, right. So, can you give me an example of what this process actually looked like in practice, these officials deciding sort of on the spur of the moment that somebody was defective?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: There was an Armenian Turk in 1905 by the name of Donabet Mousekian who was diagnosed as suffering from feminism. That was the term that was used on his medical certificate, and it referred to a lack of male sexual organs or underdeveloped organs as a result of what we now know to be a hormonal deficiency.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: I mean, how would they know that? It must have been from a facial trait?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Yes.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Because I know from reading your article that, basically, people are walking by and when they see somebody who seems defective, they write an “L” on their back. Is that right?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Right, there was a whole code for different kinds of defects. So, “X” for mental defect, “L” for lame.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, the first inspection was really just a snapshot diagnosis as immigrants streamed past the inspectors, and they would pull some people out, chalk on their back, and then give them a closer inspection.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, with Mousekian, his hearing was extraordinarily brief. It was as if the board that was examining him was very uncomfortable, and, this case, one of them said, “I move to exclude as likely to become a public charge.” Second panel member said, “I second the motion,” and a third said, “He is excluded.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Oh, wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: And that was the entire hearing. But he appealed to Washington, which all immigrants had the right to do, and he wrote in his appeal that he had always supported himself. He was a photographer, a weaver and dyer of rugs, and a cook, had worked at all of these.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he wrote in his letter, “I am not ill and have no contagious disease. This is not my fault. It has come from God and my mother. What harm can I do by being deprived of male organs?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When he left, he was fleeing the violent oppression of Armenians in Turkey, and had been made to renounce his citizenship when he left. So, he explained this in his letter, and he said, “Better that you should kill me now than send me back,” and the Armenian genocide took place just a few years after he was sent back.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So much of this focused around not being able to find work.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: [Yes].\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: What kind of evidence would they have of that? Was that actually true, do you think?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: That’s the thing. There is a widespread assumption that a disability means being incapable of working. So, in the case of Mousekian, there really seems to be no reason to assume he wouldn’t be able to find work. But there was an immigration service memo that explained why they should not be admitted, which was that their abnormality becomes known to their fellow workers, who mock them and taunt them, which impedes the work—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: —at hand, and so employers know this and are unlikely to hire them.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, it’s for their own good in many ways? [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Yeah, right. So, basically, it was saying that, “We have to discriminate against them now because they’re likely to encounter discrimination later.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, you say that these restrictions grew over time. Does that mean that they grew increasingly accepted? Was there a sort of turn against people with disabilities at the beginning of the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, or was this just sort of a more bureaucratic momentum that built?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a couple of things going on. One, the eugenics movement definitely grew. And it was not just in the negative sense, of preventing defectives from giving birth, but encouraging people who considered to be superior to have more children. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, sterilization was one way of preventing the proliferation of “defective” people. The other main track that eugenicists took was to prevent defective people from coming into the country. They would argue that all of our sterilizing and institutionalizing of people is not going to do any good if we’re just being swamped with defective people from the outside.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, this just seems to be running contrary to what we think of as the currents of sensibility and progress. We think of abolitionism, and feminism, and a general sensitivity to the suffering of animals, and everything… seems to be flourishing in the 19th century. Why would people with disabilities seem to be exceptions to that general trend?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a lot of different factors. One of them is this standardization of society in the industrial age. The term “normal” comes into common use near the end of the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, and it becomes a very powerful concept. People used to talk about human nature, and then it shifted around the turn of the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century to a concern with what is normal: counting people, measuring people, seeing what the bell curve shows us about what are normal characteristics.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s tied in with a lot of changes: the growth of cities, industrialization where not only do you need standardized parts and replaceable parts, but standardized and replaceable human beings, workers. People with disabilities don’t fit as a cog in that larger machine.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, how long were these laws on the books? You say they sort of peak in the early 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century. Then what happened?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DOUG BAYNTON: The immigration laws do not take out the language having to do with specific disabilities or defects that are excludable until the 1990 Act, and still today we exclude people who are likely to become a public charge, and that’s still a means of keeping people out with disabilities. So, it still goes on.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Douglas Baynton is a historian at the University of Iowa and author of the forthcoming book \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Earlier, we heard from historian Jenifer Barclay at Washington State University, and actor and performer Mat Fraser.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":79,"tags":80,"thumb":81},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":82},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":84,"title":85,"description":86,"audio":87,"tags":91,"transcript":94,"episode":95},3,"Disability Across the Centuries","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The hosts discuss how Americans’ views of disability evolved from one century to the next.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":88,"duration":89,"formatted_duration":90},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-04.mp3","262","00:04:22",[57,14,92,93],"institutionalization","social hierarchies","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: We just heard about the laws in the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century that targeted disability among immigrants, but attitudes at that time affected plenty of Americans, as well. Our story starts with Alexander Graham Bell, who we all know as a hero for his invention of the telephone in 1876, but Bell was also one of the most influential figures in the field of deaf education. He had a deep personal connection to the issue. Both his mother and his wife were deaf.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: But the signing deaf community has viewed Bell as a villain.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: This is Brian Greenwald, a historian at Gallaudet University. I spoke to him through a sign language interpreter. Greenwald says that in the late 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, Bell used his fame to try to eradicate sign language, which he viewed as primitive. Bell was one of the more prominent activists who promoted a different form of communication for the deaf, known as oralism.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: Oralism is a pedagogical approach to teaching deaf children, which relies on teaching them speech training, lip reading, and eliminating the use of sign language, the idea being that deaf children would be recast as hearing, speaking people.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Why did Bell think that oralism was more advanced, or why did he think that American Sign Language was more primitive?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: This is an era when sign became viewed as atavistic, backwards thinking. That it was a bumbling use of gesture to convey information in a way that wasn’t a good fit for human nature, as it was seen. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In terms of evolutionary thinking of the day, people regarded sign, and those who used sign, as being somewhat closer to the use of gesture among, say, monkeys, and the idea being that if you could not speak, you could not think, and were not human.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, for Bell, working to eliminate sign language, I think, was really a kind of reform, as he saw it. A progressive reform.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Greenwald told me that in the late 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, there were several dozen boarding schools for the deaf where students were taught sign language. The schools, and signing, had created the beginnings of Deaf culture.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: My belief is that Bell saw oralism as a social and educational pressure that could be applied to deaf people so that they would leave that cultural community, because he thought that deaf people should not be marrying other deaf people.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Why? Bell was a eugenicist.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: Bell was very, very much so worried that if deaf people continued to marry among other deaf people then there would be, at some point, a new variety of the human race that would be deaf. But we know today that that theory doesn’t hold true.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the overarching goal for Bell was to reduce the number of deaf people in existence. Now, the way to reduce those numbers of deaf people, he thought, and his argument was through oralism as a tool for assimilation.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Was there anybody who pushed back against Bell in order to defend that culture?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, very much so, even within the schools for the deaf where sign language was forbidden or not used. Those deaf students would spontaneously sign on the sly, and if the teacher had their back turned to write on the board at any moment, the students were communicating with each other using signs and doing so in the dormitories, as well.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Other acts of resistance—and really a very important one to remember—is that when those deaf children graduated from those schools, they continued to gather in deaf communities within churches, within deaf clubs, within different organizations, and the number of deaf-related organizations on local, state, and national levels are astounding. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But oralists were like a tidal wave in that era that just swept across the United States, and part of the problem was that the oralists had never asked deaf adults—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN GREENWALD: —about their own [laughs] experiences, and so deaf children of that day, and still today, continue to get the short end of the educational experience.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Brian Greenwald is a historian at Gallaudet University. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite efforts to suppress signing, the language thrived throughout the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, largely through those methods of resistance Greenwald mentioned. Schools today teach American Sign Language, lip reading, and speech.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":96,"tags":97,"thumb":98},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":99},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":101,"title":102,"description":103,"audio":104,"tags":108,"transcript":111,"episode":112},4,"Deaf President Now ","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gallaudet University President Emeritus I. King Jordan tells the story of the “Deaf President Now” protest, in which students at Gallaudet—the world’s only liberal arts college for the deaf and hard of hearing—organized a campaign to replace the school’s hearing president with a deaf one.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":105,"duration":106,"formatted_duration":107},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-05.mp3","565","00:09:25",[109,57,76,14,110],"Gallaudet University","protest","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: You know, guys, I noticed from those interviews with Douglas Baynton and Brian Greenwald how in the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century reformers categorized and labeled and institutionalized people with disabilities, and now, obviously, these reformers had good intentions, but it seems to me that something was lost from earlier times. So, Peter, what was gained and lost from the 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century to the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century world in which people were institutionalized?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Well, in a way your question says it all, Ed. There aren’t institutions, and everything that’s done [laughs] in terms of social welfare has to be done literally at home or in your hometown or village.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: That sounds good.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: It is good in the sense that you have a place. Whatever you’re born with, however you’re born, whatever marks you as different is accepted. One of the reasons it can be accepted is that 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century society, even in British America, is hierarchical. There is a culture of caring because without that care people can’t survive, and the survival—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: It’s kind of a culture of responsibility, right?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Yeah, exactly. You know that phrase about “it takes a village” to do this, that, and the other thing, and that begins with taking care of small children and anybody who needs help.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Peter, did it matter that so many people in the, let’s say, late 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century worked in the home?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Yeah, Brian, I think that’s a great point. We think of work as an activity that we’re slotted into once we join the labor force.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Right, you commute off to work.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: But let’s just say you can’t go out into the fields anymore. Well, there’s something for you to do in a household economy. [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: There’s plenty to do.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Right, there is plenty to do, whether it’s child care, whether it’s food preparation, whether it’s simply watching the world go by and reporting on that to your neighbors, you’re a part of an organism, of a community.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, wasn’t that better?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Yeah, that’s better, Ed, but what’s not better is the sense that your destiny is fixed with those marks at birth, whatever it is that distinguishes you, and the whole [laughs] range of things that we now call disabilities—mental, physical, whether they happened as a result of an accident and you’re “dis-abled”—all of those things lead to a fixed and permanent outcome. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That idea that you cannot pursue happiness—and we understand happiness to be the aspiration to be a full and complete human being—because you happen to be in this category, then it’s different being disabled. Then, to be disabled is not to participate.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Peter, were the categories of what today we call disabilities, were they the same back then, or are these inventions of the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, or the 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: Well, I think they are largely inventions of the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, and part of that is based on the idea that you can do something for somebody with what we call a disability, you can enable that person, whereas I think in the 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century you are what you seem to be. I mean, if you can’t do something, you can’t do it. There’s no probing question because there’s no hope that the diagnosis is going to lead to any kind of outcome.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: That’s what strikes me as different from my 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century purchase: the presumption shifts to being whole, enabled, fully entitled citizens with certain barriers. You might even think about those curb cuts that we have today. If you can only put cuts in the sidewalk, they can function like anybody else, and that seems very different than your period.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: And I think the neologism “ableism” suggesting prejudice against those people with disabilities that is that they can’t overcome the effects of those disabilities, and an ableist is simply going to consign those people to the fate of not being able to participate. Well, that would be to return to the 18\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":113,"tags":114,"thumb":115},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":116},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":118,"title":119,"description":120,"audio":121,"tags":125,"transcript":129,"episode":130},5,"Hiding In Plain Sight","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Historian Dea H. Boster describes how some slaves in the American South used disability—genuine, feigned, and exaggerated—as a way to gain the upper hand over their white oppressors.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":122,"duration":123,"formatted_duration":124},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-06.mp3","361","00:06:01",[14,126,127,128],"epilepsy","fear","slavery","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: We’re going to leap forward now to the late 20\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century in a watershed event for the deaf community.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCER: We picked Dr. Elizabeth Ann Zinser as establishment president of Gallaudet. [protesting in the background] It was because…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: It was March 1988. Officials at Gallaudet University had just announced the appointment of a new president. Students at Gallaudet, the nation’s only college for the deaf and hard of hearing, were outraged. They began a campaign called “Deaf President Now.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[PROTESTING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: There’s never been anything like it at Gallaudet. For three days, students have shut down the campus, boycotted classes and burned effigies after their board of trustees…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Zinser didn’t even know sign language.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Truth be told, I was shocked.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I thought I had the job.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: This is I. King Jordan. In 1988, he was a dean at Gallaudet and one of the candidates for the presidency. Jordan lost his hearing in a motorcycle accident when he was 21. We spoke to him through a sign language interpreter.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He says that students had been telling the board that it was time for Gallaudet, founded 124 years before, to have a deaf leader.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: But the board didn’t take that message to heart, apparently. There’s a famous quote where the chairmen of the board says, “It’s not time for a deaf president. Deaf people are not ready to be president yet.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Well, do you want to tell us what was going on?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I can tell you what went on from my perspective.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Yes!\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I was at home, and it was Sunday, March 6. And I was home in the evening, and somebody called my home. And my wife answered the phone, and whoever called—I can’t remember who it was now—said, “Turn on the news. You want to see what’s going on.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, she turned on the news, and there was live coverage of what was going on at Gallaudet, and the students were really in an uproar, and it was then that I learned that they had appointed Dr. Zinser.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I went into campus on Monday. I drove in, and I couldn’t drive on the campus, so I parked nearby, and I couldn’t walk onto campus. All of the students closed down the campus, and they wouldn’t let me on. And they had closed the gates. They had actually hotwired a couple of the school buses.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And drove the school buses in front of the gates and deflated the tires, so it wasn’t going to be very easy to get onto campus.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: So, how did you react when you saw these protests? Were you with the students? Did your administrator sensibilities kick in and say, “Oh, my goodness, this is bad for publicity”?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I think both one and two are the way I reacted.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] Yeah.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I thought what the students did was understandable and correct, and, at the same time, I was a dean, so I had the tension between those two different positions.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing, if you’ve done your homework, that you probably know is on Wednesday at the National Press Club, I stood up in front of a group of reporters and cameras, and said that it was the board’s decision and that, as dean, I should support that decision.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, as I stood up there saying it—well, there’s a backstory.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: We love backstories on \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [laughs] Right, I would guess you do. [laughs] I would guess you do.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On Wednesday, I got an email, and the email was from the provost who, obviously, was hearing, and the provost was my immediate supervisor. So, she said she wanted to meet me and where could we meet? Where would be a good place off-campus where it would just be the two of us and that there wouldn’t be anybody else there, blah, blah, blah?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People were afraid. People who were administrators and people who were on the board were afraid of the protesters. So, we agreed to meet at a restaurant, and we agreed to meet at the Tune Inn—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And, if you know anything about Washington, D.C., that’s [laughs] really a cool place, the Tune Inn.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: It is deeply cool… I know the Tune Inn.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [laughs] It is. Oh, good, I’m glad. I’m glad you do. So, I selected the place where we would meet.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I learned later that they sent a team of security people to scrub the place, to look around and make sure that it was going to just be me who went there.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Yeah, it was really unreal. I didn’t know this at the time, but it was really unreal. So, I went. I met with her, and she said, “Dr. Zinser is in town. She just arrived. She’s here, and she wants to meet with the student leaders of the protest. She thinks she can convince the student leaders of the protest that she would be a good president, and she will tell them that she’s only going to be a president for a couple years.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then the provost told me that I needed to meet with Dr. Zinser and that I could help put them together. So, I said, “OK. I can do that,” and then I went back to campus. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meanwhile, the… I said on Monday morning there was some confusion about who was in charge and what was going on. By this time during the week, they had what they called the DPN Council of representatives from all the different constituencies on campus, and they met on a very regular basis—all day, into the night, and they had headquarters on campus.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They had telephones and teams of interpreters, and I met with them, and they were not very friendly to me when I met with them to bring that request. They were very unfriendly with me, and they wanted to make sure that… “Whose side are you on, anyway?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I said, “Honestly, all I’m doing is trying to arrange for an opportunity for Dr. Zinser to meet with the four student leaders.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, the four student leaders were there, and they were all for it. They said, “Great. Let’s meet with Dr. Zinser, but she can’t meet here. She can never set foot on campus. Never.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: “We will not allow her on campus.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, we arranged to meet in a motel, and I have a really great memory of that meeting.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Tell us about it.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Because it was a motel that’s right at the corner of Bladensburg Road and New York Avenue.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I forget the name of the motel now, but I went and—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: These were not—as I recall Washington, D.C., these were not luxury motels?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Oh, no. It was like Motel 6 kind of motel. It was really—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] Well, actually, more like Motel 2½.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Maybe Motel 1.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: It was not a good motel, not at all. It was really not a good motel, and we just had a regular room, and the room had one double bed and one—count ‘em—one chair.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And, in that room, were the four student leaders, a sign language interpreter, me, and Elizabeth Zinser. So, there were seven of us in that room.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Who got to sit in the chair?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [laughs] I can’t remember. I can’t remember. That’s a very good question: Who got to sit in the chair? I can’t remember. I stood. I can remember that I stood the entire time, and I watched Elizabeth Zinser try to persuade the students that she could do the job, that she would be their friend, their ally, their supporter, that there would be no recriminations or punishment for the protest or anything like that.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, one by one, the four students spoke, and each one of them with increasing conviction and strength said, basically, “Ain’t no way.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are a lot of “with all due respect…” statements, and they all said, “We respect you. We understand that you’re a very successful administrator at the University of North Carolina. You can never be president of Gallaudet, no. Sorry. Can’t happen.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And she tried and tried and tried, and, ultimately, the four students said, “OK, we’re done here,” and they stood up one by one, shook her hand and left, and it was just me and Elizabeth Zinser standing in this motel room.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: She was talking on a cell phone. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I wasn’t even sure who she was talking to, and she basically said, “Come with me,” and I’m, “Where are we going? Why am I going with you? Where are we going?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And she said, “We’re going to the National Press Club. There’s a press conference happening right now.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I didn’t know the purpose of the press conference or exactly what was happening or anything, but the purpose of the press conference was to emphasize to the public that while the students were there protesting, and while all that was happening, the board was firm in their conviction that they had made the right decision, and that they were reaffirming their support for president-elect Zinser.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And when I got to the National Press Club, then there was an interpreter, and, all of a sudden, the… I can’t remember if it was the chairman of the board or the provost—I really can’t remember who did it—but somebody, literally, grabbed my arm and walked me up to the stage, and then I was asked by whoever that was, “Do you support what the board of trustees is saying here?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, to my regret, I said, “Yes, I do. It’s a board decision. They made a lawful and legal, and what they thought was reasoned decision, and they had every right to do that.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[laughs] While I was doing that, there was a crew there from a TV program called \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Deaf Mosaic\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from Gallaudet’s TV department, and the camera man and the producer who were there were both deaf. And when I looked back at the producer, who was a young woman who was a good friend of mine and someone who I liked and who I knew liked me, she was looking at me, and she was shaking her head.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And she was crying.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Oh.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: She didn’t sign anything. She just mouthed, “No. No,” and then I was whisked away from there, and whisked back to Gallaudet campus.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I got back to Gallaudet campus, there was a faculty meeting going on, and, at the faculty meeting, they were debating whether or not the faculty was going to go on record supporting the students or go on record supporting the board, and it was a very hot faculty meeting.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I watched as one of the influential and highly-respected deaf faculty members made an impassioned plea for the faculty to go on record supporting the students. And then he was stunned. He came off the stage, and he saw me, and he signed to me something like, “King, we saw what you said at the National Press Club, and you have to know that I really strongly disagree with what you said, but I still love you,” and he gave me this huge hug.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, when he did that, I said, “OK, I’m dean, and I’m also deaf. And I’m going to be deaf for the rest of my life, and I’m going to be dean for as long as I keep the provost happy. So, I really have to… I have to change my position somehow.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: [from the recording of a news segment] And now they’ve become even stronger…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[PROTESTING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And the next day, I went to campus.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [from the recording of a news segment] So, yesterday, because I had been a candidate and wanted to be both reasonable and fair, I gave a statement recognizing the legal authority of the board to name the president of Gallaudet University. In fact, my personal reaction to the board’s decision was and is anger. Anger at the continued lack of…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[CHEERING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I said, “I fully support the action that the students have taken, the notion that the next president should be a deaf person, and I stand with you.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [from the recording of a news segment]… focused the world on the larger issues. I must now publicly affirm my support for the point of view held by the Gallaudet community.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And while I was signing that, I knew that I was shooting myself in the foot. I thought, “Ain’t no way I will ever become president now. I mean, not now, not later. They’re going to have to appoint somebody because Zinser can’t weather this storm. I know that. But given the way I stood up and did this, they’re never going to appoint me.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Right.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: That was Thursday. On Friday, Zinser resigned, and the short of it is that I got a telephone call on Sunday telling me that the board had appointed me president. So, we went to the Mayflower Hotel where the board had been staying, and the Mayflower, when they announced a press conference, word got out, and so all the students came there.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[CHEERING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students came. And I remember a short written statement that I had. I wanted to really be careful of what I said.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: [from the recording of a news segment] And I must give the highest praise to the students of Gallaudet for showing us exactly, even now, how one can seize an idea with such force that it becomes a reality.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[CHEERING]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: And I pronounced “reality” [laughs] like real estate, “an idea becomes realty,” and my wife gave me an elbow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs] King, what impact do you think this event had on the deaf community?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Oh, wow, it’s almost impossible to measure. I think about halfway—well, no, not halfway through the week. Actually, it was probably toward the end of the week, I realized that it was not really a protest anymore, that it was really a revolution. That the deaf community would never be the same. That the view of and understanding of and perception of deaf people would never be the same.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It began as a student protest, but it really became a revolution about the rights and abilities of people who were deaf, and a cry for the recognition of people who can hear, of those abilities and rights. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, it really changed not just the way you guys saw us, you know, not just the way hearing people saw deaf people, but it changed the way we saw ourselves. I changed the way deaf people feel about ourselves. People are proud to be deaf. People are proud to be part of the deaf community, and, as I’m saying this, I’m thinking back to when I was in graduate school. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was in graduate school at the University of Tennessee, and I was a psychology student. And, one day, I gave a presentation, and I called the presentation “Deaf Pride,” and the faculty member, professor, really, really criticized me in front of the class.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He said, “Talking about deaf pride assumes that someone would be proud to be deaf, and deafness is a very serious handicap. Deafness is a very serious disability. Nobody would ever be proud to be deaf.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow! \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s see, I graduated in ’73, so this would probably be 1971 that this professor, who was an expert in deaf education—I mean, that was his area—told me, “Never, ever talk about deaf pride.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: How old were you when that professor made that statement?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: So, let’s see. In 1971, that would make me 28. I was 28 years old. He was probably 60.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just said, “OK,” and then I left. I knew he was wrong, but I didn’t argue with him. I—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: He was wrong, but would you say he represented the prevailing knowledge and expertise of the time?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Absolutely. That’s exactly what he represented: the prevailing knowledge and expertise of the time, that’s exactly it, yep, and now there’s a whole new world for deaf people where people in deaf education—hearing people—respect the opinions and the knowledge of people who are deaf, respect the life experiences that people who are deaf have that they can never have.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: What would you identify as the most important turning point in the emergence of your own identity and your pride as a person who is deaf?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: It would have to be Gallaudet. It would have to be my experience as a student at Gallaudet. I woke up in the hospital deaf. I was in the navy at the time, and I was working at the Pentagon and living in a barracks. I had a job, at night, in downtown D.C. I would ride my motorcycle from the barracks to this job.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I would do the job and, then, about 11:00 at night, I would ride my motorcycle back. A woman—I was riding my motorcycle south on 14\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Street. A woman was driving north on 14\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Street, never saw me, turned right in front of me. I didn’t even have a second to put on the brakes. I ran into her, and I had a very, very severely fractured skull.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I thought that my life was over when I became deaf. I really… I said, “What am I going to do? How can I possibly get an education?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I had a friend who had a deaf aunt. He told me about Gallaudet. I became deaf in Washington, D.C. for heaven’s sake right hard by Gallaudet on 6\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Street [laughs]. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t know, but this friend told me about Gallaudet, so I went to Gallaudet, and it changed my life.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was a hearing person who couldn’t hear, and, during my time there, I learned to become a deaf person. And there was a little buzz phrase that I had when I was president, and that was, “Deaf people can do everything except hear,” and I believe that with all my heart.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: King, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been to talk to you today. Thank you so much for joining us on \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BackStory.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5\">I. KING JORDAN: Thank you. It’s really been a pleasure for me.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: I. King Jordan is president emeritus of Gallaudet University.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp> \u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":131,"tags":132,"thumb":133},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":134},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":136,"title":137,"description":138,"audio":139,"tags":143,"transcript":146,"episode":147},6,"Acting the Part","\u003Cp>Actor Mat Fraser talks about the cultural heritage of the disabled performer, and tells the story of how he got his start in show business.\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":140,"duration":141,"formatted_duration":142},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-07.mp3","247","00:04:07",[14,127,144,145],"freakshow","performace","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: In the 19\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century, epilepsy was considered a serious disability, and it was thought to be especially prevalent among enslaved people, but if we dig a little bit deeper, the historical record shows a more complicated story.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: I have read accounts of slaves who admitted having feigned seizures in a variety of ways—choking, frothing at the mouth, convulsing—and some who claimed that they had witnessed such fits in other people, and they knew how to mimic them.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: This is historian Dea Boster. She says that white slave owners were terrified of epilepsy, which helps explain why slaves found ways to use those fears to their own advantage. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slavery, of course, was itself a violent, disabling system with backbreaking work, beatings and medical neglect, but the hidden history Boster uncovers shows that even able-bodied slaves exploited white anxieties about disability. Boster tells a story of a child whose seizures saved her from a terrible fate.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: In 1843, a 15-year-old female slave in Richmond, Virginia, named Virginia, was found guilty for the crime of arson, which for slaves was a capital offense, and she was sentenced to hang. But her master, a man named Archibald Govan, appealed to the governor for clemency, and he was able to convince the governor to have her sentence commuted. So, instead of being executed, Virginia was supposed to be sold.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, on the day that Govan picked her up at the city jail to transport her to slave trader Bacon Tait’s jail, she experienced what Govan described as an epileptic fit. There’s nothing to indicate she had a history of it, but she had such fits, or episodes, regularly for almost two months before both the slave trader and a physician he had hired threw up their hands and said, “We can’t sell her. She has no value. You have to take her home.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, a slave, a young girl, who had been found guilty in a Richmond court of a capital crime—was sentenced to die—was saved. Her life was saved. She wasn’t sold. She was returned to her family.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: How would they know that she had epilepsy?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Well, that’s a very good question. It was a not a very well understood disease category at the time, and they never exactly explained in any of the correspondence I read what the fits actually looked like. They just used the word “epileptic.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Yeah, we can’t know what really happened, but we can’t help but be struck by this seemed very advantageous to her for those fits to strike her when they did. So, where there other times that you know of that people were able to use disability or feigned disability to their advantage?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Oh, absolutely, in a variety of instances. I mean, when you think about the day-to-day negotiations of slavery, slaves who could use agency not so much for out-right rebellion but to negotiate the terms of their labor and how they interacted with their masters, there are examples of slaves who sabotaged their own body at market to prevent a sale to an undesired master.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My favorite example, though—and it’s a very unique one—of a slave who utilized a masquerade of disability to her advantage was Ellen Craft, who, in 1848, escaped with her husband, William, from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: And that’s a long way to escape [laughs] as enslaved people, right?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: It is. What’s really remarkable about the Craft story is that they traveled on public transportation the entire way.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Wow.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Yeah.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, I’m guessing disability played a role in this? Can you explain?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: Absolutely. So, the Crafts devised a plan where Ellen, who was fairly light-skinned—presumably, she was the daughter of her master, her white master—she disguised herself as a white slave-holding man, and gave herself the persona Mr. Johnson, and her husband, William, who was slightly older than she, disguised himself as Mr. Johnson’s servant.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the cover story was that they were going to Philadelphia to seek medical treatment and, in order to cover up—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: For Mr. Johnson?\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: For Mr. Johnson, yes. In order to cover up Ellen’s femininity, her voice, the fact that she could not read or write, because as a slave she had never been trained how to read and write, they utilized a variety of disabling characteristics. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, they put shaded green glasses over her eyes to feign a problem with her eyesight. They wrapped her head in poultices. When an acquaintance who knew her as a slave tried to strike up a conversation with her, she feigned deafness so that she wouldn’t have to respond. And, most importantly, they bound her right arm in a sling so that she would have an excuse not to register her name for hotels and such along the way because she didn’t know how.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: So, it’s interesting that they used disability to make themselves invisible and, in some ways, in inaudible [laughs] on their escape from the South.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: And they could exploit the reactions to disabling injuries, whether it was revulsion, whether it was repression, horror, disgust, pity, sympathy.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: It’s fascinating how enslaved people, such as Virginia or the Crafts, were able to use disability as a way to actually buy a little bit of space in a society that otherwise left them so little.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DEA BOSTER: And, certainly, that tells us an awful lot about expectations of disability and ideas about disability in antebellum society more generally. The more visible or apparent a disability is, the greater the impulse to render that individual invisible. So, I think that actually helps lend complexity to this issue, to understand exactly how disability can work on so many levels in American society and in American history.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Dea Boster is a historian at Columbus State Community College and author of \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">African-American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800 to 1860. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":148,"tags":149,"thumb":150},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":151},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":153,"title":154,"description":155,"audio":156,"tags":160,"transcript":164,"episode":165},7,"San Fran Sit-In","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Disability rights advocates share their memories of the “504 sit-in,” in which a group of activists—many of them disabled—occupied the San Francisco Federal Building to demand civil rights protections for people with disabilities.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":157,"duration":158,"formatted_duration":159},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-08.mp3","669","00:11:09",[161,162,163,14,15],"Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)","activism","civil rights","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Earlier in the show, we spoke with actor Mat Fraser. He’s best known for his part in \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">American Horror Story,\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> where he played Paul, the Illustrated Seal Boy. The role was a fitting one; 15 years ago, Fraser constructed an entire act based on a historic sideshow performer named Stanislaus Berent, whose stage name was Sealo the Seal Boy.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We asked Fraser how he started in the profession, and to tell us about its history.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: It all started when I was an actor, and I went for an audition at \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bill\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which is our long-standing police drama. And I had a great audition with the guy, but then I didn’t get the call, and I just knew it was my disability. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And we called them, and they said, “Oh,”—we caught them on the hop—and they were all, “Um, um, um, he needs to drive, so there’s a problem. The character needs to drive,” and I have “full driving license” at the front of my resume, so they just picked the wrong excuse.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I thought, “OK, I get it. People don’t want me. Right. Where can I go where not only will I be wanted, but no one can take the job from me?” and, at the time, I was interested in looking at freak shows as the cultural heritage of disabled performers today.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: For myself, I come out in usually to some sort of sexy, pretend sexy, music with a jacket with pretend long arms. I then let them drop from the sleeves. Then I throw away the jacket, and I’m like, “Yes, it’s me,” and then I explain my physical condition, this condition called phocomelia, is seal-like limbs. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, I talk about being the seal boy and being scared when Canadians come to the show because they’re famous for clubbing seals and, you know, real bad-taste humor like that. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I end up by doing my clever rock drumming and, say, do a roll in a paradiddle and do a bit of explanation, and then I get the hell out of dodge.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: When I explain my medical condition in terms of what my bones are like, I can see that the audience are genuinely interested, and do I detect a sort of relief to understand? I think I do. I don’t want to put words into their expressions, but I’m really convinced there’s a sort of appreciation of understanding. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, you’re not allowed to ask the disabled person, “So, how are your bones work then? Those funny little arms you’ve got, how do they work?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the fear of the unknown, I think, that is a lot of difficulty around the language of disability and, of course, political correctness—and, of course, self-respect to disabled people—meant that it’s just not cool to go around going, “So, why can’t you walk?” It’s just not cool to do that, but people still want to know and, in the sideshow, you get to tell them, and they get to find out.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MAT FRASER: This is part of America’s entertainment heritage, and so I very much feel that in doing the Sealo the Seal Boy’s act, you get a guilt-free slice of history to see what it was like for a disabled performer. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He was very proud of the fact that throughout his 35-year career, he looked after all five members of his family. He kept them clothed, housed and fed, and it was something that he was tremendously proud of. And back in those days, he wouldn’t have been able to do much, so it was a way of validating him. Because in—not to get too political—but in our capitalist society, you are what you do. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have to say, I think this is actually a growth movement at the moment, not a subsiding one, which it was when I came into the business about 15 years ago. And I think what’s wonderful is that disability is just considered normal now within it. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s simultaneously a normalizing of the congenital difference with a glamorizing and an exoticizing of that difference for performance purposes.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Phew. Mat Fraser is an actor and performer. We’ll link to videos of his performance at BackStoryRadio.org.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":166,"tags":167,"thumb":168},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":169},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},{"index":171,"title":172,"description":173,"audio":174,"tags":178,"transcript":179,"episode":180},8,"I. King Jordan - Web Only","\u003Cp>An extended conversation with Gallaudet University President Emeritus I. King Jordan.\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":175,"duration":176,"formatted_duration":177},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fbody-politics-2016\u002Fbody-politics-2016-09.mp3","1332","00:22:12",[109,57,76,14,110],"\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: In July of 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. This landmark law prohibits any employer from discriminating on the basis of disability. At the signing ceremony, President Bush hailed the legislation as an unambiguous civil rights achievement.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GEORGE H.W. BUSH: [applause] Three weeks ago, we celebrated our nation’s independence day, and, today, we’re here to rejoice in and celebrate another independence day, one that is long overdue, and with today’s signing of the landmark…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ED AYERS: Long overdue because the ADA was the result of a decades-long civil rights battle. We’re going to end today with a look back at a key moment in that struggle.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act. It mostly applied to veterans, but it included a clause, Section 504, that prohibited any federally-funded institution from discriminating against anyone based on disability. But there was a hitch. In order for Section 504 to be enforced, regulations had to be drafted, and—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: They needed a signature from the head of Health, Education, and Welfare.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: This is Emily Smith-Beitiks, associate director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability. She says President Nixon’s Health, Education and Welfare secretary never signed the 504 regulations. When Jimmy Carter took office, his secretary, a man named Joseph Califano, didn’t sign, either.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Without those regulations, people with disabilities continued to face rampant discrimination and unemployment. By 1977, they weren’t going to take it any longer. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: Protests in 10 cities across the U.S. were helped at Health, Education, and Welfare offices to demand the signing of 504 regulations on April 5, 1977.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: In San Francisco, disability rights activists occupied a federal building for nearly a month. Although protesters didn’t know it when they showed up in the morning, leaders in the movement planned to stay until they got that signature. Emily Smith-Beitiks collected oral histories from those involved in that protest.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: It all started this morning here at the old federal building on 50 Fulton…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: Somebody said to me, “There’s a demonstration at the federal building tomorrow.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: “It’s going to be outside from blah to blah time. We’re inviting deaf people to come, so we need an interpreter. Can you interpret?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: So, we were just going around in a big circle with signs and chanting different slogans and singing songs, and it was hot, and the third hour into it, I was thinking, “I need to go home,” and that was when the organizers said—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: [whispers] “Tell the deaf people we’re going inside.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was like, “What?”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“We’re going into the building. We’re going to take over the building.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: [crowd singing in the background] Immediately after their demonstration this morning, the handicapped started invading the building.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JUDY HEUMANN: We were let into the building. Nobody charged into the building unwelcomed, but we just didn’t leave.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DENNIS BILLUPS: I was surrounded by 200 people or more. I had my cane in hand, and I was saying [clapping], “504, 504,” and then it [crowd chanting in the background] started it. “504, 504.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: There was a chant, “Sign 504, sign 504, sign 504,” [laughs] and I remember, like, this sea of deaf people signing that.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">DENNIS BILLUPS: And then I says, “We won’t move. We won’t move. We won’t move.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: I’ve just gotten word, too, these people are now locked into the building…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: And we stayed that night, and we continued to stay, but we had no idea how long we were going to be there.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: And, if we starved in there, that’s what was going to happen. If we got sick in there, we’d get sick in there. Whatever was going to happen, we were just going to be in there until this thing got resolved.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: And the protesters stayed in the building for 26 days. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: I mean, I remember the first night, trying to decide what to do when they came to arrest us, because we were sure that they were going to come to arrest us. And we were surprised that they hadn’t taken us out already.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: I don’t think they’d seen so many disabled people acting up, I suppose, is the term. I mean, what could they do? They were afraid if they picked someone up, they might hurt them. They were just completely lost and confused.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BONNIE REGINA: You know, the image of disabled people up until that time had been that we were all little, pathetic children with individual tragedies and, well, none of that was true.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: We were sleeping wherever there was free space, so we had the large conference room, we had the hallway, and some were around the elevator, and I slept under one of the large desks.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: I think probably everybody was in pain. A lot of us had physical disabilities, and sleeping on the floor is just… First of all, you’ve got to get down there, and then you’ve got to get up, so a lot of blind people came and helped us get on the floor and get up in the morning.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: There were certainly [laughs] romances that bloomed in the building, and I actually had created a tent out of a big chenille bedspread that I had, so it was one of the few fairly private spaces, and people would come to me and say, “Um, could I… could I use your tent?” [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was like, “Sure, yeah,” just being a friend. Just being a friend.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JUDY HEUMANN: It was pretty amazing that we had three meals a day.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: They couldn’t stop food coming in. They couldn’t starve ’em. That would look even worse. [laughs] \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BONNIE REGINA: The Black Panther party was there every day bringing us really good food.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: And the people with the guns at the doors said, “You can’t come in,” and they said, “Either you let us in, or we’re going to come back with our guys, with our guns.” And they let them in.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: The media was our main weapon.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: The scene at San Francisco’s HEW headquarters now is in its third day, and 125 disabled and…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: At one point, the building, trying to figure out how to get these people out of their [laughs] federal building, said, “Well, let’s turn off the phones. If they can’t reach the press, their power will be weakened.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: There were huge windows in the federal building, and there were people signing the press releases—\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: To people on the outside, and then interpreters would interpret what was being said on each end.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So much so that, within a day, the building said, “Ugh, give them the phones back. It’s not making a difference anyways.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: And 125 disabled and handicapped are pledging they’ll continue the sit-in through tomorrow night, if not longer.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: But the problem on this, the fourth day, is still the same as it was on Tuesday: trying to get the attention of Washington.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So, after the protesters had been in the building for a couple weeks, they started to get antsy that Washington, D.C. was not adequately aware of what was happening.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: We had an election to choose who went to Washington, D.C.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JUDY HEUMANN: We looked at the amount of money we had [laughs] and the kind of support that we would need, so we had personal assistants and sign language interpreters, and we wanted a diversified group of people that was racially diverse, that was disability diverse.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: In D.C., conditions were very similar to what they had been back in San Francisco. They stayed in a church basement. They were, again, sleeping on the floor. But what infuriated the protesters is that Califano, head of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Jimmy Carter, would not meet with them.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: I think the first night, we went and had a vigil outside of Califano’s house, and he left by the back door, and we went to Carter’s church, and left by the back door. So, this was part of our tactic, was to say, “This is not an open door administration.”\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NEWS ANNOUNCER: And, in the meantime, the group of handicapped people are sticking to their guns here in San Francisco. Today starts the third week of their sit-in at the old federal building…\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So, the protests continued in this way with a group in San Francisco still in the federal building, and a group in D.C., and, on the 24\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> day of the occupation, word reached them that the 504 regulations had finally—finally—been signed.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: And I remember when we heard, there was just this really joyous explosion.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BARRY RYAN: We’d won.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KITTY CONE: We just—I mean, I think the overwhelming feeling that everybody had was just pride.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BONNIE REGINA: Pride, and power.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">JOE QUINN: And the whole group starts singing “We Shall Overcome,” and [crowd singing in the background] because there were so many deaf people involved and interpreters there, a lot of people had learned the sign for this particular song, and the whole room was signing, [sings] “We shall overcome,” and it was just this beautiful, beautiful moment.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC: “We Shall Overcome”]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, it bore the imprint of the 504 protests. The ADA itself echoed and expanded the 504 regulations, extending the guarantee of civil rights to the private sector. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PETER ONUF: But it was the history of civil protest that was most on the display when the first President Bush spoke at the law’s signing ceremony.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: It’s been the work of a true coalition of people who have shared both a dream and a passionate determination to make that dream come true.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BRIAN BALOGH: Emily Smith-Beitiks is the associate director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. She collected these oral histories as part of a project celebrating the 25\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> anniversary of the ADA. It’s called \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ci>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fi>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You can find a link to the exhibit on our website.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We heard from protesters Kitty Cone, Barry Ryan, Bonnie Regina, Joe Quinn, Judy Heumann, Dennis Billups, and Swami Suddhananda.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We had help from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[MUSIC: “Body Language” by the Jackson 5]\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":181,"tags":182,"thumb":183},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15],{"src":17,"caption":18,"derivatives":184},{"square_small":20,"square_medium":21},1790963911846]