Ed Roberts (activist)
Edward Verne Roberts ( born January 23, 1939 † 14 March 1995) was an American activist in the independent living movement and the first student with severe disabilities ( paraplegia ) at Berkeley University in California, USA. He was a pioneer at the forefront of the disability rights movement in the United States in the 1970s.
Biography
Early years
1953, at the age of fourteen he contracted polio, two years before the polio vaccine of Dr. Salk put an end to the epidemics. When he arrived in hospital after 18 months home, he was paralyzed from the neck down, except for two fingers on one hand and some toes. He spent the nights on the iron lung and rested there often during the day. After ventilation with the iron lung, he survived with the frog breathing, a technique for swallowing of air by means of the facial and neck muscles.
He attended school by telephone contact until his mother Zona insisted that he should go to school for a few hours once a week. In school, he was to be confronted with his deep fear, stared at and transformed his self-confidence. He gave up trying to think of yourself as a " helpless cripple " and decided to see himself as a star. He benefited from the fact that his mother had taught him by their example, to fight for what you need, when the school administration had objected to his graduation because he did not meet the requirements of physical education and driver's license training.
Activism
Ed Roberts (in the U.S.) often called the father of the disability rights movement. His career as an advocate (of human rights ) began when an officer threatened to deny him his degree because he had not participated in the training and license in physical education. After attending the College of San Mateo, he was inducted into the University of California at Berkeley. The support that he needed from the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation California for admission to the course, he had to fight hard because his rehabilitation counselors thought he was too severely disabled to get a job. One of the deans of the university remarked known when he learned of Roberts' severe disability, " Previously, we have tried it with cripples and it did not work ," but others supported his project and expressed the opinion that the University should do more.
1962 Roberts was enrolled, two years before the Free Speech Movement ( FSM movement for freedom of expression) Berkeley turned into a hotbed of student protests. When he came across in his search for an apartment for his 800 -pound iron lung resistance, the director of the Campus Health Service offered him a room in the vacant wing of the Cowell Hospital. Roberts accepted his condition, that the area where he lived, should be considered a bedroom rather than a medical facility. His approval " broke the ice " for other students with severe disabilities, the zugesellten to him in the next few years. From the Cowell - living program developed.
The group developed a sense of identity and began with Elan to write a political analysis of disability and called the Rolling Quads, to the surprise of some non-disabled observers who had never heard such an expression of a positive self-image disabled. In the year 1968, when two were threatened by the Rolling Quads by an authoritarian rehabilitation counselors of the evacuation from the Cowell Residence Program, the Rolling Quads organized a successful revolt which led to the displacement of this consultant.
Your success on campus inspired the group to begin to work for curb cuts to allow access for the general public and for the creation of the Physically Disabled Student's Program ( PDSP ), a program of support for disabled students by the first students was conducted. Ed Roberts flew 3000 miles from California to Washington DC without respiratory support to participate in a conference on the launch of the Federal TRIO program, for which the PDSP later provided protection financing. The PDSP offered the students of the University services, including provision of escorts and wheelchair repair, but it soon came calls from people with disabilities with the same problems that were not students.
Ed Roberts earned the bachelor 1964 and 1966 the Master's degree in political science from the University of Berkeley. In 1969 he became an official Ph.D. Applicants (C. Phil ) in political science at the Berkeley, but without a degree.
The need to serve the larger community led to the establishment of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (CIL ), the first independent living ( Independent living ) program for services and advocacy, led by and for people with disabilities. Contrary to popular belief, neither Roberts was the founder of the Berkeley CIL nor its first managing director. He taught political science at an alternative college, then returned to Berkeley to take over the leadership of the young organization. He led the CIL to rapid growth during a critical time for the emerging disability movement. The CIL provided a model for a new kind of community organization, geared specifically to the needs and requirements of people with a variety of disabilities. The newly elected governor in 1976, Jerry Brown appointed Ed Roberts to head the Ministry of Vocational Rehabilitation - the same authority that once hampered him as too difficult to work, called. He held the post until 1983 and returned when the policy in California again swung to the right, back to Berkeley, where he founded the World Institute on Disability ( World Institute on Disability ) with Judy Heumann and Joan Leondas.
Roberts died on 14 March 1995, at the age of 56 years.
His papers are kept in the Bancroft Library, the main library for special collections of the University of California.