Christine la Barraque (c1878-1961), and more new disability content on Wikipedia

Hey! A new post at DSTU. 

As I've mentioned, in recent years I've been putting some energy into Wikipedia. I like writing new entries there, because it feels like that's going to reach a much bigger audience than a journal article or a paywalled reference. And, as part of WikiProject Disability, some of my entries are about disability topics (of course). Since last BADD in May, I've started new entries for baseball coach Mary Dobkin, businessman Dwight D. Guilfoil Jr., South African activist Maria Rantho, wheelchair manufacturers Everest & Jennings, blind biochemist Dilworth Wayne Woolley, playground builders Shane's Inspiration, and blind singer/lawyer Christine la Barraque. I also built out an existing stub entry on educator Elizabeth E. Farrell, during the "Justin Dart Jr. Virtual Edit-a-thon 2015" in August.


None of these are exhaustive entries; they're a good solid start, I think, but if anyone reading this blogpost has more to add, with reliable sources to back up any new information, please jump in! Christine la Barraque has me especially curious right now (because I just wrote about her on Friday). She seems, pretty definitely, to have been the first blind woman to pass the bar in California; but was she the first in any state (as some sources suggest)? Was she the first blind woman to graduate from the University of California, in 1896 (when she was about 18 years old, by the way)? Anytime "the first" is on the table, there are questions and complications: who counts as blind? or graduating? or a woman? La Barraque was said to have been born in France, but exactly where is sketchy and mentions contradict each other. If she was, her parents came to America with a blind child, through immigration screens intended to prevent that scenario. So I would love to know more about them, too. (I think they lived in Tres Pinos or Paicines, California--when she was living in Boston at the time of the San Francisco earthquake, she sent a telegram to the governor of California asking after "my people in Tres Pinos.")

La Barraque wasn't an obscure singer or advocate; she performed for Helen Keller and Mark Twain, she was a founder and president of the San Francisco Workers for the Blind, she testified before the Massachusetts Legislature, she toured blind schools in Italy, she performed all over the US and apparently also in Canada. I've seen mentions of her working with disabled veterans after both World Wars, but not enough to include in the entry (yet). 

January 23: Ed Roberts (1939-1995)

I'm tired of well meaning noncripples with their stereotypes of what I can and cannot do directing my life and my future. I want cripples to direct their own programs and to be able to train other cripples to direct new programs. This is the start of something big -- cripple power.

[from a 1970 letter by Ed Roberts to Gini Laurie]

On this date in 1939, Edward Verne "Ed" Roberts was born, one of four sons raised by Zona and Verne Roberts of Burlingame, CA. He was fourteen when his whole family contracted polio in 1953. He finished high school only when his mother persuaded the district to waive requirements like physical education and a driver's license. Then he set his sights on college: Berkeley.

He had to sue the state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, and he encountered significant resistance at Berkeley, where a dean declared, "We've tried cripples before and it didn't work." Eventually, he was admitted as an "experiment" in 1962, and settled into the student infirmary, which was the only building where he could live with his iron lung. Other quadriplegic students soon followed, also housed in the infirmary--and the independent living movement began to brew. In the 1960s, there were no curbcuts on campus--these students (the "Rolling Quads") had to lobby for them, and for a disabled students program on campus.

Ed Roberts earned a BA and an MA from UC Berkeley, in political science. (He began doctoral studies in the same department, too.) He became known as the "Father of the Independent Living Movement," founded the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (1972), and was later appointed state director of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation (the agency he once had to sue). He also helped establish the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, in 1984--the same year he won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship for his vision and leadership. "I've always figured it took no more energy to dream big dreams as little ones," he explained.

After a Washington DC memorial service held for Roberts in 1995, Ed's chair was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains in the National Museum of American History, as part of a growing collection related to the US history of disability and disability rights.