Two 504 Figures: Kitty Cone and Brad Lomax

Kitty Cone and Brad Lomax were key players in the 1977 sit-ins which pressured the Department of Health and Human Services to establish policies to implement section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:08Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Today's episode was inspired by some stuff that's been going on here in the United States for a while now. Honestly, hard to figure out exactly when to start the clock on this one. But in September of 2024, 17 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS had issued its final rule implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. And those 17 states were challenging language from the preamble of that rule, and that language indicated that gender dysphoria could be

• 3:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  considered a disability under the law. This lawsuit also argued that Section 504, as a whole, was unconstitutional. We ran a Saturday Classic related to this in February of last year, when it was in the news. That was six impossible episodes from Sippens to Fishens, which talked about the 504 sit-ins, which pressured what is now known as the Department of Health and Human Services to establish the policies that would implement Section 504 back in 1977. When all this was happening in the news, I also wanted to find a new episode that was related in some way, but I wound up just focused on other topics.

• 3:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  That lawsuit was effectively dismissed in October of 2025. Among other things, the 17 states that filed it dropped their argument that Section 504 was unconstitutional. And HHS issued guidance calling that preamble that mentioned gender dysphoria unenforceable. Under the Day One Executive Order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," the federal government's also basically on the same side as the plaintiffs now when it comes to gender dysphoria. But Section 504 and the sit-ins are still deeply relevant.

• 4:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Other executive orders targeting DEI have been interpreted as implying to things like disability and accessibility, and those and other related terms have showed up on things like widely-reported lists of words that are banned from applications for government grants and head start funding. So the 504 sit-ins have continued to be on my mind even after that lawsuit was dropped. And today, we're going to take another look at Section 504 and a couple of the people who were a big part of this sit-in.

• 5:04Holly Frey?

  So to briefly recap and add a little more detail to what Tracy just talked about, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was focused primarily on vocational rehabilitation, meaning services and programs intended to help disabled people prepare for employment or to be able to work. It also authorized programs to figure out how to meet the needs of people for whom a vocational goal is not possible or feasible, although that wasn't one of its primary purposes. It was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, who vetoed earlier versions of the law because he said that those would be too expensive to implement.

• 5:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  If you look at the whole of this law, I would call it kind of a mixed bag. At its core, it is a law that views disabled people as needing to be rehabilitated, and it's really underpinned by a mindset that a person's value is tied to their ability to work. At the same time, it included requirements and funding for programs and services that really would make things more accessible, including interpreter services for deaf people, reader services for blind people, telecommunications services, and mobility services. It required federal agencies to assess things like transportation barriers that could prevent disabled people from being able to work or to participate in these programs.

• 6:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  It also required federal departments and agencies to create affirmative action plans for the hiring, placement, and advancement of disabled people and to have a plan to meet the needs of those employees. If the words affirmative action gave you an internal yikes, that just means taking proactive steps to make sure disabled people were not being discriminated against and were being provided with reasonable accommodations to access their workplace and do their work.

• 7:00Holly Frey?

  The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 built on earlier laws, and it was amended and adjusted by laws that came afterward. One of the parts that's still discussed the most today is Section 504, which was the broadest piece of disability rights legislation in the United States until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. When the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was passed, Section 504 read, quote, "No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States as defined in Section 7.6 shall solely by reason of his handicap be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits

• 7:43Holly Frey?

  of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." It has been amended by other laws since then, and the language that's in place today uses the term disability rather than handicap, as that is no longer really considered the current way to manage those words. Today, Section 504 also specifies that it applies to the United States Postal Service.

• 8:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is about 40 pages long, and some of its other sections had a lot more detail, including things like dollar amounts for the funding and definitions of terms, references to how this federal law relates to the states and to state agencies. But Section 504 was just that bit we read. It had no direction about how it could actually be implemented. So the agencies that Section 504 applied to had to draft rules and regulations that would allow them to implement it. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was selected as the lead agency, meaning that they would draft their regulations first, and then other departments and agencies

• 8:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  would follow based on those regulations.

• 8:59Holly Frey?

  But not much actually happened after Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act into law on September 26, 1973. He resigned as president on August 8, 1974, and his successor, Gerald Ford, left office on January 20, 1977. Their administrations had drafted regulations, but had not actually implemented anything. After Jimmy Carter took office, activists demanded that the drafted regulations be put into place, but instead, Joseph Calafano, Carter's Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, assigned a task force to start reviewing them. A lot of people interpreted this as a delaying tactic and an opportunity

• 9:42Holly Frey?

  for the government to try to water things down.

• 9:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is where the 504 sit-ins come into the picture, which we talked about in that Saturday classic that we mentioned at the top of the show, which ran in early 2025. In 1977, after years of other advocacy, disabled activists started taking over HEW offices around the country. A lot of these occupations were brief. They ended within a day or two after activists were either removed from the buildings, or they left on their own because they didn't have the food or the supplies that they would need to stay longer than that.

• 10:20Holly Frey?

  But in San Francisco, disabled people and their attendants occupied the HEW office 24 hours a day for 26 days. Eventually, the demonstrators selected a delegation of people to go to Washington DC to try to meet with legislators and Secretary Calafano directly. The International Association of Machinists helped pay for plane tickets from San Francisco to Washington DC, and because there were no accessible options for ground transportation, they also paid for a moving truck with a lift that could accommodate wheelchairs.

• 10:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  After being turned away from the Washington DC office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the demonstrators had a candlelight vigil outside of Califano's house. They also demonstrated outside the church where the president and his family went to Sunday services. Califano finally signed the regulations on April 28, 1977, almost four years after the law had been passed.

• 11:23Holly Frey?

  We talked about this sit-in and the delegation to Washington in that Saturday classic that we mentioned earlier. But we didn't really talk about any of the people who organized it or kept it going. One person we did mention briefly is Judith Hume, who went by Judy. She became disabled after surviving polio when she was a child, and she was an enormous part of this sit-in and the disability rights movement more broadly. She has been referred to as the mother of the disability rights movement. In our earlier episode, we quoted her as saying, quote, "Through the sit-in, we turned ourselves from being oppressed individuals into being empowered people. We demonstrated to the entire nation that disabled people could take control over our own lives and take leadership in the

• 12:08Holly Frey?

  struggle for equality. We overcame years of parochialism."

• 12:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  We really cannot overstate what a huge part of this sit-in Judy Hume was. She was deeply involved in organizing it and carrying it out and just keeping people going day after day. She was one of the people who traveled to Washington DC, and some of the people who stayed behind in San Francisco said that they kept occupying the H W building there, not just for their own rights and the rights of other disabled people, because they just did not want to disappoint her.

• 12:44Holly Frey?

  Today's episode is not focused on Judy Hume, though. She died on March 4, 2023. She was 75. And there are some various challenges with trying to cover the life of someone whose death was in the very recent past. Her work also continued until the very end of her life, meaning a lot of it took place in really recent years as well. She was the Assistant Secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services during the Clinton administration, and President Barack Obama appointed her Special Advisor on Disability Rights for the US State Department. She was the first person to ever fill that role.

• 13:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I know, Holly, there have been times we have tried to do episodes on someone who just died. And that has been something that I ultimately wish we had done differently, at least once or twice.

• 13:34Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are just various things that make it more difficult with someone whose death was in the recent past. In addition to all of that, her memoir, Being Human: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, was published just in 2020. And she was a big part of the 2020 film, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. That film is about Camp Janed, which is a summer camp for disabled teenagers that ran from 1951 to 1977. Hume worked as a counselor at the camp, and a lot of other people who either went to or worked at Camp Janed wound up being a huge part of the disability rights movement, including in the 504 sit-ins.

• 14:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  The last episodes of her podcast, Human Perspective, were also recorded just a few weeks before her death and published posthumously. So there's really a lot of information about her, a lot of it very recent, and a lot of it in her own words.

• 14:31Holly Frey?

  While we are focused on two other people who are not as widely known today, we just did want to acknowledge how important Judy Hume was to the 504 sit-ins and the disability rights movement before we move on. So after we take a quick sponsor break, we will talk about Kitty Cohn.

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• 17:29Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 18:14Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 18:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Section 504 sit-in that took place in San Francisco was the work of a large number of disabled people, supported by a broad coalition of allies and organizations. And Kitty Cohn was a big part of the reason why the demonstrators had that coalition.

• 18:52Holly Frey?

  Curtis Selden Cohn, known as Kitty, was born on April 7, 1944, in Champaign, Illinois. Her parents were Molly Mattis Cohn and Hutchinson Ingham Cohn. Kitty's father was in the military, and the family moved several times when she was a child, including to Japan.

• 19:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  When Kitty was in first grade, her teacher noticed that she walked on her toes all the time, and the teacher pointed this out to Kitty's mother. It seems like Kitty's family wasn't really concerned at first, but as her symptoms progressed, they took her to the doctor. It took a really long time to get an accurate diagnosis. At first, doctors thought she had cerebral palsy and then polio. Some of the treatments she received after these misdiagnoses seemed to make things worse. Eventually, she was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at the age of 15, and she and her family were told that she probably would not live far into adulthood.

• 19:50Holly Frey?

  In addition to changing schools when her father was transferred, Kitty also had to change schools for accessibility reasons, like school buildings having lots of stairs that she could no longer climb. And she often faced discrimination from teachers and staff, like being told that she wasn't allowed to participate in activities because of her disability. Or when she was at boarding school, being housed away from the other students, which was not only isolating, but it also forced her to use a bathroom with a tub that she couldn't get into or out of on her own. Between her father's moves and issues like these, she changed schools more than a dozen times over the course of her K through 12 education.

• 20:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  When she was looking at colleges, Cohen wanted to go to an Ivy League school or maybe to a women's college. But a lot of their campuses weren't accessible either. She described her college decision as being made by her family. She enrolled at the University of Illinois at her Bonnechamp pain, which was close to some family members and also had a significant number of other students who also used wheelchairs.

• 20:58Holly Frey?

  In 1963, Cohen's mother died. Kitty was only 19 at this point, and she was still in college. And she took some time off after the funeral before going back to school. And when she did, she really threw herself into activism. Being interested in things like equal rights and racial justice was not new to her. She had started getting into fights about her classmates' racism during her early school years. And she had fierce disagreements with her father over the subject of school segregation. After getting back to college, she protested against apartheid in South Africa and against the Vietnam War. She joined the Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and raised money for civil rights protesters who were arrested in the South.

• 21:43Holly Frey?

  She got arrested herself during protests, something that infuriated some members of her family, including an uncle who was running for public office and her father, who actually disowned her. They thought that Kitty was making them look bad. Over time, Cohen started focusing more on activism than on classwork. And she actually left school in 1967 without graduating.

• 22:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  At this point, Cohn wanted to be a parent, but her doctors had concerns about the physical effects that a pregnancy would have on her body. She also still believed that she was not likely to live long. She ultimately decided to be sterilized. We have talked about the eugenics program in the United States and involuntary sterilizations that were enacted on disabled people. The impression that I have from this and from what she said about it was that she made the decision that she felt like was best for her, based on the information that she had, and that some of the concerns that her doctor had, she really agreed with. Other things, maybe not so much, but like this was an informed decision that she made for herself, not something someone else decided for her.

• 22:52Holly Frey?

  In the early 1970s, Cohn became a socialist, and she also came out as a lesbian. She moved to Berkeley, California, and started working with the Center for Independent Living. We talked about that in our episode on Ed Roberts and the Independent Living Movement. We ran that episode as a Saturday classic on December 3rd, 2022. Cohn also became active with the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities.

• 23:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the things Cohn talked about a lot was how important it was for organizations that were working on an issue to get the broadest level of support possible. So, for example, she thought disability rights organizations should not connect only with one another, but they should also connect with abortion rights groups, anti-war groups, women's rights groups, and labor unions, forming a really powerful network of solidarity anywhere they could find some common ground with other people who had other objectives. She made connections like this with organizations all over the San Francisco Bay Area.

• 23:55Holly Frey?

  And that coalition building was a huge part of why the 504 sit-ins in San Francisco went on for almost a month, when most of the sit-ins at H E W offices in other cities ended after just a day or two. When disabled activists took over the San Francisco H E W offices, their support system included so many organizations. There was Glide Memorial Church, a nondenominational church dedicated to social justice that was founded in San Francisco in 1929. Brick Hut Lesbian Cooperative, the Gay Men's Butterfly Brigade, which coordinated safety patrols to protect gay men in the Castro District, the Delancey Street Foundation, which was a nonprofit providing residential services

• 24:38Holly Frey?

  for people with substance use disorder or who had been released from prison, multiple labor unions, including the International Association of Machinists, the Teamsters, the Federal Workers Union, and the United Farm Workers, the Black Panthers, which we will be talking about more in just a bit. The demonstrators also had some support from H E W employees, who helped out where they could, and the San Francisco City Government. Mayor George Moscone brought in portable showers, getting them authorized by the White House after H E W officials turned him away. And that's just a sampling of the support coalition. Cohen called it one of the broadest coalitions she had ever seen.

• 25:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, in terms of H E W employees, obviously, for the most part, H E W, like, leadership did not want them there. But the employees would be kind of like, here's where the soap is. We made it so you can open this window. That kind of thing.

• 25:34Holly Frey?

  A little subversive assist.

• 25:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. These and other organizations supported the 504 sit-in, both within and outside the building. Doctors and nurses offered care to people who had complex medical needs, and volunteers from across multiple organizations provided attendant care, like helping people dress and take care of their hygiene. Organizations donated food and blankets and cots to sleep on, soap and cleaning supplies. While people occupied the offices in the building, other supporters picketed outside, and they signed petitions, and they contacted their legislators demanding action on the 504 regulations.

• 26:14Holly Frey?

  This coalition also involved organizations for people of different disabilities, who sometimes had very different needs and perspectives. For example, the proposed 504 regulations got a lot of criticism from deaf people, because part of the focus was on mainstreaming or assimilating disabled people into non-disabled culture. But a lot of deaf people saw and still See deafness as a unique culture with its own language and norms, not necessarily as a disability and not something that should be assimilated away. But Organizations for the Deaf were also part of the sit-in, with deaf activists taking the lead with communicating with people outside the building, signing conversations through the windows after authorities cut off the phones.

• 26:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  All these intersecting layers of support helped the demonstrators deal with the realities of living in a government office 24 hours a day for almost a month. That would be uncomfortable for pretty much anybody, but it came with additional, specific challenges for a lot of the 504 demonstrators. A lot of people had particular medical and physical needs and no real way to accommodate them the way they would where they normally lived. For some demonstrators who relied on specialized medical equipment or skilled nursing, this could actually be life-threatening. So people did a lot of improvising and jury-rigging and just doing their best with the help of supporters both inside and outside the building.

• 27:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Kitty Cohn, in particular, dealt with a lot of pain over the course of the sit-in and had to take a lot of painkillers to try to deal with it. She also needed to be turned over during the night, and that was something that other people helped her with over the course of the sit-in.

• 27:56Holly Frey?

  Kitty Cohn was one of the people chosen to be part of the delegation to Washington DC to discuss the 504 regulations with legislators. The coalition that Cohn had built helped arrange and fund the trip, including the Machinists Union, which we mentioned earlier. After the new regulations were signed, Cohn gave a victory speech in which she said in part, "We showed strength and courage and power and commitment, that we, the shut-ins or the shut-outs, we the hidden, supposedly the frail and the weak, that we can wage a struggle at the highest level of government and win."

• 28:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Cohn was also one of the many people to point out the importance of the 504 sit-ins in the disability rights movement, including growing awareness of how accessibility was a political issue. She was quoted as calling it, quote, "the public birth of the disability rights movement." For the first time, disability was really looked at as an issue of civil rights rather than an issue of charity and rehabilitation at best, pity at worst.

• 29:00Holly Frey?

  After the 504 sit-ins, Cohn's work as an activist continued to be focused on building coalitions among organizations. This included connecting disability rights organizations and the League of Women Voters when Bay Area Rapid Transit, which is commonly known as BART, proposed removing agents from stations.

• 29:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, there were a lot of reasons that a person might need to talk to a human employee at a transit station. And a lot of those reasons applied mainly to women and to disabled people more than they did to non-disabled men. Although the federal government had recognized the civil rights of disabled people through Section 504 and its associated regulations, in practice, after those regulations were signed, a lot of things didn't really change that much. For example, as Cohn tried to travel for her activism work, she often found that things like hotels and public transportation were still inaccessible to someone who used a wheelchair.

• 29:57Holly Frey?

  Around 1980, Cohn started a relationship with Cathy Martinez, who was blind. Cohn talked about getting around town with her in her power wheelchair and Martinez keeping up with her on roller skates. The two of them traveled together, including to Nicaragua, which had a large population of disabled people who had experienced spinal injuries, amputations, and other injuries due to the Nicaraguan Revolution. Around this time, Cohn, who had struggled with alcohol misuse, became sober and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

• 30:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  She also still wanted to have a child. And at this point, it seemed like her doctor's worries about her life expectancy being really shortened, that seemed unfounded.

• 30:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1980, when she and Martinez started trying to adopt, they were rejected as adoptive parents for multiple overlapping reasons. They were both disabled. Since they were both women, they could not legally marry. Martinez was Latina, so they were regarded as an interracial couple. Ultimately, they went to Mexico and they adopted a son named Jorge. They returned to the United States a couple of years later. At some point after this, Cohen and Martinez separated.

• 31:11Holly Frey?

  After adopting Jorge, parenting became Cohen's primary focus. She was still an activist, but a lot of her activism was through organizations where she could be paid for her work so she could support herself and her son. She worked with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund for years, eventually becoming its development director in 1993. She retired in 1999 at the age of 55, but she continued to be involved in the organization's work well after that point.

• 31:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Toward the end of her life, Cohen reconciled with some of her family members who had ostracized her due to her activism. She died of pancreatic cancer on March 21st, 2015, at the age of 70.

• 31:54Holly Frey?

  And now we are going to take a little break and then we are going to talk about Brad Lomax.

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• 32:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

• 33:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 35:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  The other person we're going to talk about today is Brad Lomax. One of the things that comes up a lot in descriptions of the 504 sit-in is that the Black Panthers brought food to the demonstrators in the San Francisco AGW offices every day. Brad Lomax was a big part of the reason for that. His full name was Bradford Clyde Lomax, and he was the oldest of three children, born to Katie and Joseph Lomax. He was born in Philadelphia on September 13, 1950.

• 36:15Holly Frey?

  There's actually not a lot of information that's publicly available about Lomax's life. His father was a World War II veteran and an electrician. Growing up, Lomax was a Boy Scout and an athlete. He played football. He's said to have had his first experiences with civil rights activism when he visited his mother's family in Alabama when he was in his early teens and saw firsthand the differences between life in Alabama and life in Philadelphia.

• 36:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  As Lomax started getting close to graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School, he thought about joining the military. But his graduation was in 1967. And at that point, the United States was really escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War. We talked about this in our episode on the draft board riots that took place during the Vietnam War in April of last year. That's one of the other subjects I wound up focused on rather than going back to 504 in the spring of last year. Lomax understood how the war and the draft were disproportionately affecting Black men. So rather than volunteering for service, he went to Howard University in Washington, DC.

• 37:25Holly Frey?

  If he hadn't changed his mind, it's possible that he wouldn't have been able to pass the physical needed to enlist. In his late teens, Lomax started experiencing some physical symptoms, including losing his balance and falling when he walked. He was eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and started using a wheelchair. He started experiencing the many ways that society was not accessible to wheelchair users, things like a lack of curb cuts and doors that were too narrow to get through. And he also saw the ways in which Black disabled people faced multiple layers of discrimination, like housing. Buildings could be inaccessible. And then on top of that, there were landlords who just refused to rent to tenants based on their race.

• 38:10Holly Frey?

  This was outlawed federally under the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

• 38:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1969, Lomax helped found the Washington, DC, chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party was first founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California in 1966. It was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and a big part of its initial focus was the forming of armed patrols to protect Black neighborhoods, including protecting them from police brutality. Soon the Black Panther Party started establishing community service programs in black neighborhoods, including medical clinics, ambulance services, legal aid, education programs, and breakfast programs for schoolchildren. Lomaxes worked with the Black Panther Party in Washington DC, including helping to build

• 39:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  a free health clinic that provided screenings for sickle cell disease, running the first aid tent at various Black Panther events, and helping to organize the First African Liberation Day in 1972. That was a demonstration on the National Mall, whose speakers included Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and Jesse Jackson.

• 39:21Holly Frey?

  At some point, Brad moved to Oakland, California with his brother Glenn, which seems to have been largely at Glenn's encouragement. In addition to being where the Black Panthers had been founded, the San Francisco Bay Area was becoming more accessible than many other parts of the US were. There were multiple interconnected reasons for this. The Bay Area had generally mild weather, which made it easier for people using wheelchairs and other mobility aids to get around. California had established an attendant care program in the 1950s to provide grants for elderly and disabled people to pay for home care services. Organizations like the Center for Independent Living, founded by Ed Roberts, were being run by and for

• 40:06Holly Frey?

  disabled people, providing information and support and advocating for accessibility in services. Even so, when Brad and his brother got to California, they found that the buses were not accessible. If Brad wanted to take the bus, Glenn had to go with him and then physically lift him onto the bus and then go back for Brad's chair.

• 40:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  In theory, the Center for Independent Living served Berkeley and Oakland. But in reality, a lot of the services did not extend into Oakland's predominantly black neighborhoods. So in 1975, Brad Lomax worked with Ed Roberts to establish a new chapter of the Center for Independent Living in East Oakland. And Lomax did this with support from the Black Panthers.

• 40:52Holly Frey?

  In 1977, Lomax became part of the 504 sit-in at the San Francisco H E W office. Another Black Panther Party member, Chuck Jackson, acted as Lomax's attendant, and he also provided attendant care for some of the other demonstrators inside the building. The Black Panther Party was heavily involved throughout the sit-in, bringing food and other supplies, including making sure all of the demonstrators got a hot meal every day and leaving food for the next day's breakfast and lunch. Multiple demonstrators said they would not have survived without the Black Panthers.

• 41:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, we talked about the enormous coalition of organizations that were involved before the break, but the Black Panthers are repeatedly cited as just holding the whole thing together with food and that without enough food, it wouldn't have worked. In a documentary short called Brad Lomax: Creating Communities of Care, 504 demonstrator Corbett Joan O'Toole said that she asked one of the Panthers why they were helping when almost everybody in that building who was demonstrating was white. That was really true of a lot of disability rights organizations in the Bay Area. Their answer was because the demonstrators were fighting for social justice and willing

• 42:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  to put their lives on the line for it and because Brad was there.

• 42:13Holly Frey?

  In addition to providing food, the Black Panthers helped spread the word about what was happening at the H E W office by covering it in their newspaper that was also called The Black Panther, and that paper had a national circulation. They also helped raise funds for the delegation's trip to Washington, D.C.

• 42:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  After the 504 sit-in, Brad Lomax continued to be involved with the Black Panthers and with disability rights activism for as long as he was able. But eventually, he started experiencing cognitive changes due to multiple sclerosis, and MS had also affected his ability to speak. He died of complications from MS on August 28, 1984, at the age of 33.

• 42:55Holly Frey?

  As we've said in this episode, that one brief paragraph of Section 504 was really the biggest piece of civil rights legislation for disabled people in the US when it was passed. But in spite of the regulations that were eventually created around it, a lot of the same barriers to access and patterns of discrimination remained for years. Section 504 also applied only to the federal government and government contractors. It did not apply to private businesses at all. Ongoing advocacy to try to close these gaps and ensure equal rights and access for disabled people eventually led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That happened in 1999.

• 43:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  If it was a private business that was getting federal funding, then that would apply. But I mean, otherwise, there were a lot of things that were not affected by Section 504. Some of the language of the ADA is rooted in Section 504, and it applied a lot of the same protections of the Equal Rights Act of 1964 to disabled people who had not been included in the Civil Rights Act. The Act was amended in 2008, and Part II addressed some court decisions that had limited the scope of the ADA as it was originally written. Even so, even with the Americans with Disabilities Act, there are still a lot of barriers to access. Some of this is because the world changes. Like, the Department of Justice

• 44:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  just issued a final rule on how the ADA applies to state and local government websites in 2024. That is many, many years after governments started communicating with their constituencies online. Some of this is because of ADA standards just not being followed, even in new building construction. And some of it is because the Americans with Disabilities Act represents a minimum level of access requirements, and that minimum level is just not enough to make things accessible to everyone. In some cases, not enough to make things accessible to a lot of people, not just a few people who may be seen as having different needs than others.

• 45:04Holly Frey?

  Do you also have listener mail for us today?

• 45:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes, I do have listener mail. This is from Anna. Anna wrote and said, hello, I have always wanted to write in and after two mentions of Montana over the past couple of episodes, I finally had a reason. I live an hour away from Hamilton, Montana and the Rocky Mountain Labs. I remember learning during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that the local hospital was one of three in the nation that could accept and treat people with Ebola due to its partnership with the lab. I was pretty shocked to learn our little local hospital was in the same rank as massive hospitals in New York and LA. I foster kittens for my local animal shelter and have four of my own kitties. When I've had particularly

• 45:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  spicy kittens, I've played your podcast to help get them used to human voices and hopefully foster a love of history. I fostered 21 kittens and one moma cat this year and all have found loving homes. The pictures include my cats Gracie, the one-eyed beauty, Todd and Wendy as babies on my lap, Sammy Brown Tabby, and a photo of a foster family and one of Tink, a foster kitty, meeting our chickens. Thanks for all that you do. You bring so much joy, Anna. Anna, playing our show for spicy foster kittens is, I think, the best use of our show I have ever heard in my life.

• 46:31Holly Frey?

  By a wide margin.

• 46:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. If you are fostering any kind of animal, or if you have maybe a dog who's a little anxious and does better with voices, if you want to use our podcast for that purposes, just go for it. Go for it. Do that every time.

• 46:49Holly Frey?

  Such an honor.

• 46:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love it. Thank you so much.

• 46:52Holly Frey?

  I feel like we should start to bake in little secret messages for kitties now.

• 46:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  For kitty cats?

• 46:57Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  One time, a long time ago, somebody sent us a note that said, hey, was there maybe a cat in the background at this time code in this episode? Because all of a sudden, my cat was very interested. And I think at that point, I had started recording at home, but we hadn't told listeners that was happening. And I was like, there's not, not a cat.

• 47:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Possibly.

• 47:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  These pictures are all really adorable. So cute. Thank you so much.

• 47:28Holly Frey?

  Also, Anna, thank you for fostering animals. It's such a big, important step in animal welfare in the US, and you clearly have a very big heart. I appreciate it.

• 47:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Foster families for animals also make a huge, huge difference in how those animals live as pets afterward. The fact that our kittens, whose mother was feral, were incredibly well-socialized and tolerated having their nails clipped and, you know, great around people. I really credit with the family that took care of them after their mother returned to the feral colony because they were not thriving in the shelter. So, thank you so much, Anna. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, word

• 48:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  [email protected]. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

• 48:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 48:48Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:19Tracy V. Wilson?

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