Excerpt from Builders and Sustainers of the Independent Living Movement in Berkeley, Vol. 4
When I was asked to write the introduction to the Bancroft Library's oral histories on the disability rights movement in Berkeley, it reminded me of the summer of 1975, when I left New York City and headed out to Berkeley, California. For Berkeley was the place to be I told my friends, filled with hippies and free love. I would spend the summer, take courses at the university. I had been disabled just a few years and this was my first trip on my own, away from the tight circle of family and friends I had relied on in those early years.
Someone had told me that Berkeley was a center of disability activism, but I didn't tally that in my list of reasons to go there. I was a naive young woman in my twenties, and still new to disability. I managed my disability by keeping its profile low, and its needs in check. I use a wheelchair, and did then, and decided I would need to call the disabled students' office at the university to get help finding an accessible apartment near the campus, but also decided this would be the only concession I would make to my disabled state. I was fine, I told myself and my family, and by that I meant I could go anywhere, I could do everything. Disability would not bog me down and it would not mark me.
While bold on the outside, I harbored the deep fear that I might fail in my ability to keep disability in its place, that it would come crashing in around me and swallow me up. I, therefore, was completely unprepared for the headlong leap I made that summer toward disability, toward the people and the territory that I had shunned. I never imagined that I would move toward disability with interest and gusto. It didn't happen all at once in that brief summer, but I call that time in Berkeley my coming out.
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