A San Francisco Exhibit On the Longest Ever Takeover of a Federal Building
In 1977, protesters in San Francisco staged the longest ever takeover of a federal building.
That year, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act passed. Part of the bill was Section 504, which, for the first time, granted civil rights to people with disabilities.
Unfortunately, section 504 had no teeth: the disability community had to work with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to agree on a set of regulations that would make it possible to implement the legislation’s provisions for civil rights. After the OCR presented these regulations in 1975, the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) delayed their passage for two years.
On March 18, 1977, the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities warned President Jimmy Carter that if the regulations weren’t signed by April 4, there would be public demonstrations.
What followed was unprecedented.
Members of the disability community held massive protests at every HEW office in America. The largest protest took place in San Francisco. For 26 consecutive days, more than one hundred protesters had a 24-hour presence in the San Francisco Federal Building.
On May 1, 1977, Joseph Califano, HEW’s secretary, finally signed the regulations that would make jobs and accommodations for people with disabilities accessible for the first time.
I recently spoke with Fran Osborne, curator of “Patient No More,” an exhibition about the San Francisco protest. The exhibition will be on display at the San Francisco public library starting on June 10th, 2017.
I’d never heard of this protest — Fran confirmed that it fell out of common knowledge. But she said that those involved “talk about it as this amazing life changing thing.” She also indicated that nearly all participants went on to “become activists, lead organizations, start their own organizations or campaign.”
According to Fran, the core protest organizers were “white lesbian wheelchair riders,” who built a huge support that included the women’s movement, labor organizations, the growing LGBT movement, politicians, religious leaders, and the Black Panthers, who fed the protesters every single day. The food was hot.
The whole idea of public history exhibits about people who are still living is fraught. One thing I gleaned from my conversation with Fran was the importance of zeroing in on a few elements of the final product that are considered non-negotiable by the community that is the subject of the exhibit. In this case, one such feature, accessibility, was about form rather than content.
We talked about the ubiquity of so-called design thinking in the Bay Area. As a designer, Fran sees people interpreting the design principle of being empathetic as sitting down with someone for an hour and thinking you’ve figured out all you need to know.
This is particularly relevant for the disability community, which Fran describes as having a history of being medicalized and handed solutions rather than being treated as the generator of ideas.
Fran’s self-deprecation defied my stereotype of successful designers. She said that the process of figuring out how to include braille is one of many things that only happen when “you talk to people for a long period of time, and you throw out loads of ideas and they get rejected and you go back.”
For her research, Fran and a team from the Longmore Institute on Disability interviewed around 30 protesters and their supporters, many of whom had conflicting stories about what happened at the San Francisco protest. Much of the exhibition is video testimony.
Fran points to an image on the wall of a guy named Bradley Lomax. He and his attendant, Chuck Jackson, were both Black Panther members. They were the reason that the Panthers started bringing food to the protesters every day.
She points to another picture, of a black man named Ron Washington. Washington, who was gay, spoke in his interview of the homophobia within the Black Panthers, and their hesitance about people with disabilities.
I think the most foundational responsibility of the public history curator is to show the stakes of a given event. But showing what is at stake often involves revealing the conflicts in how events are perceived and interpreted by participants.
The curation team’s inclusion of strong and persistent conflicts in people’s stories about the protest reflects the number of important issues that were at stake.
Much of how Fran framed her curation of the project focused on learning to be an ally of the disability community.
When I asked her what she thought she’s learned from this project about being a good ally, she brought up a disability community slogan: “Nothing about us without us.”
