this week marks the 25th anniversary of implementation of Section 504 of
the Rehabilitation Act, which extended civil rights protection to people
with disabilities in public accommodations for the first time. National
Public Radio broadcast a retrospective of the three-week 1977 sit-in of
offices at the Department of Health Education and Welfare in San
Francisco. The program speaks extensively with a blind woman who was
prevented from being a college professor and a woman in a wheelchair who
was prohibited from teaching. The H.E.W. Secretary at the time who
refused to sign the regulations into law and only relented after three
weeks of pressure, Joseph Califano, is also interviewed in the program.
An additional segment of the program speaks with a college professor with
polio who uses a wheelchair about the situation today. You can list to
this important program at:
http://www.npr.org/programs/wesun/features/2002/504/index.html
Vintage audio is generously included in the broadcast and additional
vintage audio is on the web page as well as vintage photos.
Kelly