On Saturday, March 4, 2023, we lost a champion in the ongoing fight for civil and human rights. Judith (Judy) Heumann passed away at age 75 in Washington, D.C., after a lifetime of advocacy and effective organizing of people with disabilities.

 

With the loss of Judy, the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (CIL) lost a beloved founding and early staff member. Judy’s advocacy was central to a vibrant disability rights movement that won legislation to secure federal funding streams in order to establish independent living centers across the U.S. As the first center in the United States, the CIL became the model for what are now 400 centers nationally and internationally and helped to launch the Independent Living Movement. We had the honor of hosting Judy for our 50th anniversary events this past October.

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Judy was an internationally recognized disability rights activist at the forefront of disability rights demonstrations, and on behalf of CIL, was a primary organizer and spokesman in the prolonged campaign for national disability rights legislation that culminated with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. She founded several local, national, and international disability advocacy organizations that remain today. As a young adult, Judy authored Rolling Warriors and co-authored her more recent memoir, Being Heumann. Her legacy of youth leadership and advocacy was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary film, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. She advised the Clinton and Obama administrations in several senior federal government positions.

 

Born in 1947 in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Judy contracted polio at age two. Her mother and father, Ilse and Werner Heumann, had been among 1,400 Jewish children and teenagers sent by their parents from Germany to the US to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Neither of them ever saw their parents again. Judy’s parents raised her with the belief that you should always speak up if you see any wrongdoing and treat everyone in the world equally.

 

When her doctor advised her parents to institutionalize her when it was clear that she would never be able to walk, they refused. Throughout childhood, her mother advocated for her. When Judy attempted to enter kindergarten, the principal blocked her family from entering the school, labeling her a “fire hazard.” Her mother fought back and demanded that Judy have access to a classroom. This experience helped Judy understand not to accept the limitations that others and institutions place on you based on their prejudice and discrimination. Judy eventually was able to attend a special school, high school, Long Island University (from which she earned a B.A. in 1969), and earned a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley. 

 

In the 1960s, Heumann attended Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities in the NY Catskills, and she later returned there as a counselor in the 1970s. A focus of Crip Camp, several of the leaders of the disability rights movement attended the camp where the seeds of their activism were planted and grew.

 

During that time, the New York Board of Education refused to give Judy a teaching license fearing she could not help evacuate students or herself in case of fire. She sued and went on to become the first teacher in the state to use a wheelchair. With a group of activists with a diversity of disabilities, races, genders, and sexual orientations, Judy co-founded Disabled in Action and continued her fight for civil rights. The group led a protest that shut down traffic in Manhattan against Richard Nixon’s veto of the 1972 Rehabilitation Act. 

 

In 1977, she co-launched a sit in that took place at the San Francisco headquarters of the federal Health, Education, and Welfare administration to protest its delayed adoption of Section 504 regulations implementing the Rehabilitation Act’s mandate to guarantee nondiscrimination and equal access for individuals with disabilities in federally-funded programs, activities, and services. Section 504 says that “no otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall solely on the basis of his handicap, be excluded from the participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”