It wasn’t
long after Kitty Cone had enrolled at the Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington
that she felt the grip of discrimination.
Cone walked
with a cane, and the headmistress of the seminary, a private women’s school,
began imposing strange rules that segregated her from the rest of the student
body. For instance, she demanded that Cone bathe in a separate tub outside the
suite that she shared with three other girls. But the tub was so big that she
struggled to get out of it, so she just used the one in her suite. Another
time, she was barred from attending a school activity, but she went anyway.
Those acts got her expelled.
اضافة اعلان
“For a variety
of reasons, the headmistress threw me out, but all having to do with
disability,” Cone said in an interview for the University of Illinois archives
in 2009. “I think she was worried about liability, looking back on it, because
she gave me these prohibitions.”
It wasn’t
the first time Cone would experience injustice because of her disability, and
it wouldn’t be the last.
This was the
1960s, a time when people with disabilities did not have basic civil rights in
the United States — movie theaters could refuse to sell tickets to wheelchair
users, for example, and there was little support for blind and deaf people. As
evidenced by Cone’s experience, even an education was not a guarantee. People
with disabilities were often institutionalized and largely isolated from
society. It wasn’t until 1990 that discrimination against them was banned under
the landmark
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Cone’s
expulsion from school helped inspire her to devote the rest of her life to
fighting for disability rights.
“Things that
happened in my life determined the fact that I would be an activist,” she said
in a 2013 oral history. “So many choices in my life had been circumscribed by
the fact that I had a disability.”
Cone was the
lead organizer and strategist of the
504 Sit-In, a nearly four-week-long
protest in April 1977 in which nearly 150 disabled people and their allies took
over the San Francisco office of the US Department of Health, Education and
Welfare. Their intent was to pressure Secretary Joseph Califano Jr. to sign
regulations that would implement Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,
prohibiting programs receiving federal aid from discriminating against any
“otherwise qualified individuals with a disability.” The act paved the way for
the ADA.
Cone was the
“organizational brains” behind the sit-in, said Mary Lou Breslin, a close
friend who was at the demonstration, helping to mobilize a coalition of
supporters among other activist groups, including the Black Panthers, who
supplied hot meals to the protesters, and machinist union workers, who rented
trucks to help transport them when they took the fight to Washington.
“She
believed in the depth of her soul that the broader you build something, the
better chance you have of success,” said Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who met Cone at a
Section 504 advocacy training in 1979 and remained her friend.
The 504
Sit-In is the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in US
history.
The group
ultimately succeeded in getting the regulations signed, and in a victory speech
she gave on April 30, 1977, Cone said the disability community had “written a
new page in American history.”
“We showed
strength and courage and power and commitment,” she said, “that we the
shut-ins, or the shut-outs, we the hidden, supposedly the frail and the weak,
that we can wage a struggle at the highest level of government and win.”
Curtis
Selden Cone was born April 7, 1944, into a wealthy family in Champaign, in
eastern Illinois. Her father, Hutchinson Ingham Cone Jr, served in the Army for
two decades, giving his family a rootless life as he was periodically assigned
to a new base. He and his wife, Molly Mattis Cone, a homemaker, and Curtis and
her younger brother, George, lived in Augusta, Georgia, Bethesda, Maryland, and
Tokyo.
Cone learned
she had muscular dystrophy around her 15th birthday. At the time, doctors said
she wouldn’t live beyond age 20.
As an adult,
Cone traveled with friends and family members to Latin America and Eastern
Europe. By then she had started using a wheelchair, and inaccessibility became
a frequent problem. Buses had no lifts, bathroom doors were too narrow, and
buildings had no ramps.
“Whether it
was a hotel or a bus or an airport, she had many, many experiences on airplanes
where her wheelchair was broken, where she was bruised,” said Georgia Springer,
a cousin who lived with Cone for many years.
In 1972,
Cone moved to Oakland, California, for the warmer weather and to be closer to
friends. There she worked with the Center for Independent Living to push for
public resources that would allow people with disabilities to be self-reliant.
It was during this time that she met Judith Heumann, who would also become a
leader of the 504 Sit-In.
“Kitty was a
fireball,” Heumann said in a phone interview. “The way she expressed her words
was like lightning. People listened to her, and they followed her.”
Cone came to
date a blind woman, Kathy Martinez, the two bonding over disability politics,
and Cone became close to Martinez’s family in New Mexico.
“In many
ways, our disabilities complemented each other, because I could help Kitty with
physical tasks and she could help me with visual tasks,” Martinez said in a
phone interview. “She was in a power wheelchair, and I would put on roller
skates. We were kind of an iconic duo because we could speed around Berkeley a
lot faster than if I was walking.”
They could
not wed because gay marriage was illegal, but Cone still wanted a child. She
looked into adoption in the United States but encountered too much red tape. In
1981, she moved to Tijuana, Mexico, with Martinez and there adopted a baby,
Jorge.
They moved
back to the Bay Area a couple of years later, and Cone continued her activist
work, taking up jobs at the World Institute on Disability and the Disability
Rights Education and Defense Fund.
She died of
pancreatic cancer on March 21, 2015. She was 70.
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