Judith Heumann

Judith Heumann (born December 18, 1947, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 4, 2023, Washington, D.C.) was an American disability rights activist who fought for the integration and equality of disabled individuals in the United States and internationally. Because of her pioneering work in this area, Heumann is often referred to as the “mother of the disability rights movement.”

Heumann was born in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn. She contracted polio when she was 18 months old and was permanently paralyzed by the disease. Her parents, Werner and Ilse Heumann, German Jewish immigrants who had fled Nazi Germany when they were children, refused medical advice to institutionalize her. Heumann was later denied admission to public kindergarten and labeled a “fire hazard” because she used a wheelchair. Her parents protested, and she was eventually allowed to attend public school in a segregated classroom until she reached high-school age, when school district policy required wheelchair-using students to be homeschooled. However, Heumann’s parents and her disabled classmates’ parents worked together for their children to gain entry into public high school in 1961.

Heumann graduated from Long Island University with a degree in speech and theater in 1969 and sought employment as a public school teacher in New York. The state denied her a teacher’s license because she used a wheelchair, arguing that this made her incapable of helping with a potential school evacuation. In 1970 Heumann sued the New York City Board of Education even though the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had declined to represent her, having decided that her situation was not an instance of discrimination (the ACLU later formally apologized). Heumann won her lawsuit and in the 1970s became the first teacher in New York City to use a wheelchair, but she soon left her teaching work to focus on advocating for the rights of disabled people.

In 1970 Heumann cofounded the political action group Disabled in Action, which led a protest that shut down rush-hour traffic in Manhattan to protest U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon’s veto of the Rehabilitation Act of 1972. Heumann then enrolled in the public health program at the University of California at Berkeley (Master of Public Health, 1975). During her time in graduate school, she campaigned to pass the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which included the first ever federal antidiscrimination protections for people with disabilities. Although the act became law in 1973, a key provision, Section 504, which specified that no agency or business that accepted federal funds could discriminate against people with disabilities, was not implemented by the executive branch.

In April 1977 Heumann and several dozen other activists led a nearly monthlong sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco in protest of U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr.’s refusal to sign regulations that would have put Section 504 into effect. The sit-in, commonly referred to as the “504 Sit-in,” attracted international media attention as the government increased pressure on the activists (many of whom were disabled) to leave by cutting off phone lines and water. The protesters’ creative responses to these measures included deaf protesters’ use of sign language to communicate with people outside the building. Organizations such as the Black Panther Party provided the protesters with supplies and food. The sit-in ended when Califano agreed to sign regulations implementing Section 504.

Heumann’s success as a leader of the 504 Sit-in led to an expanded public role for her in the disability rights movement. In the 1970s Ed Roberts, an American disability rights activist, asked Heumann to help launch the independent-living movement, aimed at giving people with disabilities access to community life. Heumann served as deputy director for the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, which she described as “the first organization in the world to be run for and by the disabled.” In 1983, along with Roberts, Heumann founded the nonprofit World Institute on Disability. Her public profile grew as she attended the ceremony at which U.S. Pres. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law on July 26, 1990. Heumann married Jorge Pineda, an accountant, in 1992.

In 1993 Heumann accepted U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton’s appointment as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. In that role she oversaw federal education programs related to students with disabilities until 2001. From 2002 to 2006 Heumann served as the adviser on disability and development at the World Bank, working to expand global knowledge of disability. In 2010 U.S. Pres. Barack Obama named Heumann the special adviser on international disability rights for the U.S. Department of State. Heumann left the State Department in 2017 to accept an appointment from the mayor of Washington, D.C., as the city’s first director of the Department of Disability Services.

Heumann served on various nonprofit boards throughout her life and traveled extensively in the early 21st century as the disability rights movement became increasingly globalized. She was featured in the award-winning 2020 documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. In 2020 she authored her memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, with Kristen Joiner. In response to comments that she had changed the world, she wrote in the memoir, “I simply refused to accept what I was told about who I could be. And I was willing to make a fuss about it.” Heumann died suddenly on March 4, 2023.