DC’s first Disability Services director Judy Heumann; disability rights activist, dead at 75
Revered “Mother of the Disability Rights movement,” Judith “Judy” Heumann, died Saturday afternoon in D.C., after decades of activism and federal service. She was 75 years old.
The disability rights activist, podcaster and author of “Being Heumman” and its young adult counterpart “Rolling Warrior” died while in care at a District hospital, a spokesperson told WTOP.
One of the titular characters behind the award-winning documentary “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution,” her work has been critical to developing a path to more than “good enough” for disabled people around the country.
Heumann began life in D.C. in 1993, initially moving to the area to serve in the U.S. Department of Education’s special education and rehabilitation services office under then-President Bill Clinton. She remained in the position until 2001 when the World Bank asked her to act as Advisor of Disability and Development.
Heumann made her transition back to federal service in 2010, working in the Obama Administration as the first Special Advisor for International Disability Rights in the State Department’s history. By 2017, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty had appointed Heumann to serve in the District’s Department of Disability Services as the agency’s first director.
Fighting against the odds
Heumann was born in 1947 in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where her parents Ilse and Werner Heumann raised her. At age 2, her parents were informed that she contracted polio and would likely be unable to walk for the rest other life.
Her parents had the choice of institutionalizing her or keeping her at home.
“When I was 5, the principal said I was a fire hazard,” Heumann told WTOP Entertainment Editor Jason Fraley in 2021, adding that the label never stopped her or her family from fighting back and demanding access to a classroom.
Heumann made it through years of limitations to gain access to a classroom through high school. In 1969, she graduated from Long Island University with her bachelor’s degree and, some six years later, from the University of California, Berkley, with a Master’s in Public Health.
Fighting for change
She became a central figure in the fight to increase federal guardrails and legislation that empowered people with disabilities after attending Camp Jened — one of few camps in the Catskills for those with disabilities and the focus of Crip Camp.
“When Rosa Parks was denied her right to sit on a bus, there was the Montgomery boycott,” Heumann told WTOP. “In the case of disabled people, just saying that you could go on a bus didn’t mean anything because you couldn’t get on the bus.”
After years at Camp Jened, Heumann spent the 1970s working to gain a teaching license in her home state of New York. The pioneer, still labeled a fire hazard, was considered a serious risk by those on the state’s board of education, who argued that she wouldn’t be able to help get students out of a burning building if a fire occurred.
Judy Heumann sued the New York Board of Education and eventually gained prominence as the first teacher in the state to use a wheelchair.
In the years that followed, Heumann’s protests and legal actions would begin to pull her away from New York and California, inching her closer to national action and the nation’s capital.
In 1972, Heuman shut down traffic in Manhattan in a long fight for civil rights after Richard Nixon vetoed the 1972 Rehabilitation Act, eventually moving her protests to a federal building in San Francisco, California, for a 26-day sit-in.
For the following decades, Heumann worked to found centers for independent living and the World Institute on Disability, served on several boards and worked to ensure that disability rights and human rights were not ignored. Heumann was credited with helping to improve and develop U.S. disability rights legislation, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, and an international convention of the United Nations focused on disability rights.
All the while, a spokesperson said Heumann maintained a full life.
“Judy loved to attend musicals and movies, travel the world, make new friends, and hang out with old ones, many of whom were introduced to each other at dinners that she convened,” a spokesperson said.
Details on funeral arrangements have yet to be announced.