Well-known advocate for the rights of individuals with disabilities Judy Heumann has passed away at the age of 75.
Her website and other online profiles announced her death on Saturday, and the American Association of Persons with Disabilities verified the news. The circumstances surrounding the death were first unknown.
According to her website, Heumann is known as the “mother of the disability rights movement” for her decades-long activism on behalf of handicapped people through rallies and court action after she lost the ability to walk at the age of 2.
She advocated for laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the People with Disabilities Education Act, and the Rehabilitation Act, all of which were passed at the federal level as a result of her efforts. Beginning in 1993 during the Clinton administration, she worked as the assistant secretary of the United States Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services until 2001.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities was approved in May 2008, and Heumann had a role in its approval.
According to her website, she is a co-founder of the Berkley Center for Independent Living, the Independent Living Movement, and the World Institute on Disability and has served on the boards of directors for a number of other organisations in this field, such as the American Association of People with Disabilities, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Humanity and Inclusion, and the United States International Council on Disability.
Heumann wrote her autobiography and a YA adaptation named “Rolling Warrior
Heumann, a native New Yorker who was born in Philadelphia in 1947, wrote her autobiography and a YA adaptation named “Rolling Warrior.”
Her parents’ arduous efforts to enrol their daughter in school are chronicled in her book. “Children with impairments were considered a hardship, economically and socially,” she wrote.
After finishing high school, she attended Long Island University for her undergraduate degree and the University of California, Berkeley for her master’s in public health.
At a press conference held on October 21, 1982, in the nation’s capital, Judy Heumann, a former employee of the State of California’s rehabilitation agency, and Ed Roberts, the director of the California State Department of Rehabilitation, on his left, spoke.
Another documentary film on Heumann, “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution,” will be released in 2020. This film will focus on Heumann’s experience at Camp Jened, a summer camp that was instrumental in the beginning of the disability rights movement. One Academy Award was up for grabs with this movie.
She sued and successfully disproved the New York Board of Education’s assertion that her wheelchair posed a fire threat, making her the first teacher in the state to do so in the 1970s.
In addition, she played a pivotal role in the peaceful 1977 occupation of a federal facility in San Francisco that paved the way for the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was finally signed into law in 1990.
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