Preserving and Promoting Disability History

NCDR engages in public education and the promotion of programs and initiatives to preserve disability rights history. NCDR joins forces with those educating communities about disabilities and disablity social history for the purpose of eliminating discrimination, implementing disability rights and increasing responsibility for disability rights. We seek to preserve disability rights social history to foster an understanding of disability rights as basic civil and human rights.

Most Americans are familiar, as they should be, with the struggles of African Americans, women and other minorities that led to the attainment of enhanced civil rights for these constituencies. Fewer Americans are familiar with the history of the disability rights movement, a “people’s movement” which includes traditional lobbying and grassroots organizing, as well as civil disobedience and mass arrests. Rather than a focus on sympathy, pity or charity, It is a story of inclusion, empowerment and the creation of a social movement.

NCDR seeks to preserve this social history by including leading disability historians such as Professor Paul Longmore on our National Advisory Council and by promoting the work of acclaimed disability rights photographer, Tom Olin. Olin’s work, illustrating Arlene Mayerson’s written “People’s History of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” is at the center of the Road To Freedom’s traveling disability rights history exhibit and will continue to be highlighted in the Disability Rights Concert series. His work will be central to the soon-to-be-released Road To Freedom documentary film and book.

The Road To Freedom traveling disability rights history exhibit also features the nationally acclained 24-panel disability history exhibit produced by Advocates Coming Together (ACT), as well as the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities’ Parallels In Time, a comprehensive history of disability through time.

The Road To Freedom traveling disability rights history exhibit has traveled to all 50 states and more than 120 cities, has received widespread media attention and has been formally recognized by scores of Governors, Mayors, Members of Congress, and other policymakers across America.