Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

By Judith Heumann, with Kristen Joiner, 2020

218 pages, paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

In this moving memoir, Judith Heumann shares the story of her life and her lifelong career as a disability advocate. One of the nearly 43,000 U.S. children affected by the 1949 polio epidemic, she is a paraplegic who has used a wheelchair since childhood. She had remarkable parents, German Jews orphaned by the Holocaust. They refused to institutionalize her as a toddler after her bout with polio and fought for her to get an education in the New York City public schools. They raised her to believe that she could do anything, despite being in a wheelchair. 

Until the 1980, disabled people were largely made invisible, with no easy means of access to the systems of education, transportation, employment, and other things that most people took for granted.

 

Starting with a successful lawsuit in 1970 to gain a New York City teaching license; then leading the 1977 24-day sit-in of the office of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco demanding the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited exclusion of anyone from a program that received federal funds; and finally achieving the passage of the American with Disabilities Act in 1990, Judith Heumann played a major role in the struggle to ensure that people with disabilities are treated like everyone else.

She ends her memoir with this inspiring message: ” Change never happens at the pace we think it should. It happens over years of people joining together, strategizing, sharing, and pulling all the levers they possible can. Gradually, excruciatingly slowly, things start to happen, and then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, something will tip.”