Judy Heumann

Heumann was born in Philadelphia in 1947 to German Jewish parents who had fled the Nazis, though much of the extended family did not get out and died in the Holocaust. She grew up in Brooklyn and contracted polio at eighteen months, leaving her a wheelchair user for the rest of her life. Her local public school refused to enroll her, calling her a fire hazard, and she spent years on home instruction before her parents got her into a segregated school for disabled children and, eventually, a mainstream high school in 1961. Summers at Camp Jened, a camp for disabled teenagers in the Catskills, connected her from age nine to the friends who would become the core of the disability rights movement. She graduated from Long Island University in 1969.

New York denied her a teaching license in 1970, arguing she could not evacuate children in a fire — the story ran in the papers under the headline You Can Be President, Not Teacher, With Polio. She sued, won an out-of-court settlement, and became the city's first wheelchair-using teacher. The same year she co-founded Disabled in Action, and in 1977 she led the 28-day occupation of the federal building in San Francisco that forced the government to sign regulations for Section 504, the first disability civil-rights law in the country, the longest occupation of a federal building at the time. She went on to run the Center for Independent Living, direct special-education policy under Bill Clinton, advise the World Bank on disability, and serve as the first U.S. special adviser on international disability rights under Barack Obama.

The 1977 sit-in worked because the government could not simply wait it out: Joseph Califano's Health, Education and Welfare Department cut off food and medication to the roughly 150 people occupying the building, and protesters improvised, hiding insulin and other medicine in a hollowed-out air conditioner, while local restaurants and, notably, the Black Panther Party — reached through a disabled Panther named Brad Lomax — brought in hot meals every night for 28 days. The alliance across such different movements was itself unusual and largely went unrecorded at the time. Decades later, the position she had held for seven years was eliminated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017, then reestablished by the next administration only after she was already gone from it.

Heumann died in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2023, at 75. She had spent her last years reaching an audience far larger than any she had during the fights themselves: a 2020 memoir, Being Heumann, and the same year's Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, about the summer camp that had formed her, introduced her to people who had never heard of the 504 sit-in. Time magazine named her its 1977 Woman of the Year retroactively, in 2020, forty-three years after the year in question. A biopic based on her memoir began filming in 2025. She is remembered inside the movement as the person behind its founding phrase: nothing about us, without us.

Judy Heumann's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Individuals with Disabilities Education Act law
  Helped draft it as a U.S. Senate legislative aide 1975
• Section 504 regulations law
  Signed after the 28-day sit-in she led in San Francisco 1977
• Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist book 2020
• The Heumann Perspective other
  Biweekly podcast interviewing disabled changemakers 2021

• December 18, 1947 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia
• 1961 aged ~14 Enters a mainstream high school for the first time
• 1969 aged ~22 Graduates from Long Island University
• 1970 aged ~23 Sues New York City and becomes its first wheelchair-using teacher
• April 5, 1977 aged 29 Leads the Section 504 sit-in at the San Francisco federal building
• April 28, 1977 aged 29 Califano signs the Section 504 regulations
• 1993 aged ~46 Joins the Clinton administration's Department of Education
• 2010 aged ~63 Becomes the State Department's first special adviser on disability rights
• March 4, 2023 aged 75 Dies in Washington, D.C.

• Huey Newton 1942–1989
  Co-founder of the Black Panther Party who paired armed self-defense with free breakfast and clinic programs. party that fed the sit-in
• Helen Keller 1880–1968
  Deafblind author and lecturer who became the leading American advocate for blind and disabled people. earlier model of disability advocacy
• Jimmy Carter 1924–2024
  39th president who emphasized human rights, brokered the Camp David Accords, and built a major post-presidential humanitarian legacy. administration signed the regulations she forced
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. appointed her State Department adviser