During the 1970s, a time of increasing concern about the limits of public resources and governmental action, the federal government issued a mandate that people with physical and mental disabilities must have equal access to programs and activities supported with federal funds.¹ The mandate was unequivocal, without regard to cost or disruption to the recipients of federal funds. Why was such a commitment made? Was it only a well-meaning gesture? Was it the result of political pressure from the disabled community? Was it an isolated effort, or part of some larger public strategy for assisting disabled people?

Section 504 of...

In most cultures, disabled people have been supported within the context of the family and the community. In the West, however, as family and community support systems broke down, physically and mentally disabled persons were relegated to custodial institutions. Until the late Middle Ages, they were typically placed in institutions with a variety of other individuals who did not play a productive role in the social and economic life of the community. For the most part, these institutions were supported by religious groups and private benefactors. Virtually all of them took disabled children and adults out of their communities and...

By 1972, concerns about permitting greater participation by disabled people in social institutions had been building among those involved with the developing organizations of disabled people and with the vocational rehabilitation program. These concerns were beginning to be voiced in terms borrowed from another social movement of the excluded—black Americans. In the 1960s, blacks had made emotionally powerful, and in many ways effective, demands for greater participation in white-dominated social institutions. While blacks did not gain full integration, many formal and traditional barriers to participation were struck down by statute and judicial ruling as a result. Civil rights evoked...

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 became law in September 1973. However, it was by no means clear how this statement of nondiscrimination was to be translated into government policy and put into effect. The provision was largely unknown outside of Congress, and not particularly well known within Congress. There was no guidance in the Rehabilitation Act or its legislative history on how or when discrimination on the basis of handicap was to be eliminated in federally assisted programs or on what constituted illegal discrimination. Conceivably, Section 504 could have remained a simple statement of good intentions.¹ However,...

Until 1974, there had been little or no attempt by the various organizations of disabled people to join together in attempts to influence public policy. For years several groups with active organizations, notably blind people, deaf people, and disabled veterans, had sought to influence federal legislation. Despite their related objectives, however, they had not tried to affiliate in any formal way. The annual meetings of the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped provided a forum for communication among some of the younger, more militant disability rights activists. Several remained in contact in the times between meetings, and an evolving...

The model for federal policy on discrimination against disabled people was established in the HEW regulation issued by Secretary Califano on May 2, 1977. That regulation began to be implemented immediately in programs funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Further, it became the starting point for other federal agencies and departments, each of which was mandated to develop a regulation implementing Section 504 for its own grant recipients.

The requirements of Section 504 were also shaped by legislative changes and judicial rulings in the years following the issuance of the HEW regulation. However, the basic concept of...

The history of Section 504 relates a sequence of events quite different from those typically found in case studies of social reform. Where social movements develop in response to some problem, and these movements seek policy changes dealing with the problem. The success of a movement in achieving desired changes is often based on its ability to wield political power.¹ The shape of policy initiatives is typically formed through the negotiations of various interest groups and their political representatives.

The addition of Section 504 to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, however, was not the result of the efforts of a...

The first edition of this book, published in 1984, followed more than a decade of change in American public policy concerning people with disabilities. I characterized this change as a shift away from a long-entrenched charity model associated with a medical model of disability, in which people with disabilities were presumed unable to function independently in the mainstream of social, economic, and political life. The corresponding public policy response was to provide government subsidies to compensate for this supposed incapacity. Unlike the charity model, the newer approach proposed that the major barriers to social and economic participation facing people with...