The pioneering Disability Rights Movement activist Judy Heumann, who passed away on March 4, 2023, was honored and remembered at a recent campus event sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program (WGS), disability rights champions Elaine Kolb, and WGS and English Adjunct Professor Sarah Rizzuto.
An article in Arts Paper looks at the remembrance of Heumann, who is widely regarded as the mother of the Disability Rights Movement. In 1970, she sued the New York City Board of Education on the basis of wheelchair accessibility, and her case was the first disability civil rights case ever brought to a federal court in the United States.
As a graduate student, Rizzuto interviewed Heumann as part of her project on people with disabilities and their experiences with romantic relationships. Kolb closed the recent event with a call for all to embrace disability rights; the article quotes her as saying, “Disability Justice is interracial, multicultural, intergenerational, gender fluid with cross-disability solidarity. That’s everyone. There’s no exceptions.”
Read the full article, “SCSU Gathers To Remember, Honor Judy Heumann” (by Danielle Campbell | April 25th, 2023)
