Reconstructing Disability’s Status Quo

On January 23 each year, Berkeley, California, and the International Disability Movement commemorate their monumental hero and pioneer, Edward Verne Roberts, known worldwide as, Ed Roberts. The day is dubbed Ed Roberts Day.
Why should the world celebrate Ed?
Not only had Ed paved a breakthrough and developed an unprecedented critique that later grew to smash the ‘individualization’ and ‘medicalization’ of disability, he also had practically conceptualized a reincarnation of ‘disability’ itself as one of the many invaluable beauties of life; a constructive facet of one’s identity, not more, not less.
It was this ingredient of self-actualization that multitudes of persons with disabilities across the globe had desperately needed (and still need), in order to disentangle centuries’ old attitudinal shackles. It was this vital ingredient that many of our fellow ‘non-disabled’ compatriots had found (and still find) so difficult to swallow, until Ed (and others) barged into their lives to help them broaden the territories of their minds.
That was what the “Rolling Quads” – a squad of revolutionary ‘Crips’ led by Ed Roberts in the 1960s – did in Berkeley. The mind is always the primary playground!
When Ed and a handful of students with severe disabilities at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, (where he was the first student with disability) formed the Rolling Quads, it predictably came as a surprise to numerous onlookers, both on and off campus.
Why such surprised?
Well, never before had these observers thought, or ever wanted to think, about ‘disability’ as a positive identity in its own right; not even remotely so, let alone as was audaciously portrayed, orchestrated and realised by the Ed-led quad-brigade.
I suppose, taking people by surprise was but a marginal agenda that the Rolling Quads had in mind. These lads were more into the business of deconstructing and reconstructing an entire system. Hence, in just a little over a decade after the quads started rolling, Ed Roberts was appointed as Director of the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation – the very agency that had once labelled him “too severely disabled to work.” Now, is that a change or change?!
I started reading about and keenly following the Ed Roberts story some eleven years ago, while attending law studies in my hometown of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia – only about 9,000 miles away from Berkeley! Ever since then, he has been, and will continue to be, a tremendous inspiration and personal role model for me in multiple ways.
Like myself and countless others, Ed contracted polio as a child; his bio tells us that he had spent eighteen months in hospitals and returned home paralyzed from the neck down. Like so many of us, Ed had been told perhaps a zillion times, that he just was not ‘good enough’ in the eyes of those who considered themselves better positioned to judge, regardless of the giant speck in their own eyes. And yet, in a profound lesson to me and countless others, Ed later emerged, against all odds, to be unanimously called the father of the international disability rights movement by disability advocates all over the globe.
A central figure in Ed’s quintessential accomplishments and trajectories was indeed his mother, Zona Roberts. It was such an immense honour for me to have had the chance to meet Zona Roberts in person in the Spring of 2012 when my long-awaited aspiration of visiting Berkeley, the genesis the Independent Living dictum, came to fruition.
I have since revisited both Berkeley and UC Berkeley a few more times, my latest trip there being as recently as August 2015. This time, I went as a Fellow of the Mandela Washington Fellowship, Class of 2015 – a flagship programme of President Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). I will write soon about this last visit, which I have no shred of doubt will be of interest to readers.
Two decades after his death in 1995, we are still and will always be reinvigorated by the ‘Ed stamina’. We, within the disability fraternity, irrespective of where we are in the world, aim consistently at de/re-constructing the status quo and vicious threads of thought that have held us back since time immemorial. Inevitably, the process begins with me and us – people with disabilities ourselves; at a juncture where we unequivocally say “Hell No!” to any form of discrimination, suppression, compromise and/or devaluation of our inalienable rights.
TODAY, I stand and salute Ed Roberts, Zona Roberts and Berkeley – the trio that broke the iceberg, and not just the ice!