Americans have come together in community for entertainment, support, service, politics, and many other reasons.
Parents meet, share information, and advocate for their children. Many of the thriving disability charities, such as Easter Seals, United Cerebral Palsy, and Muscular Dystrophy were founded by parents. Children form friendships in schools, places of worship, camps, and clubs, and as adults, they do the same thing. Historically, such affinities have been the seedbed of transformative political and social movements.
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New Mexico School for the Deaf yearbooks, a Kentucky School for the Blind pennant, a March of Dimes collection can, an Easter Seals volunteers photo, and summer camp ephemera represent some of the ways people come together around disability.
Faith traditions have organized around specific disability issues by offering pastoral care, support groups, coffee houses, meals, and similar activities.
This beige and red uniform came from the Michigan School for the Blind, established in the 1880s. It closed in 1995.
School communities often became lifelong communities, as shown in this photo of several generations of alumni posing outdoors with their families.
Traditional print media have tied people together around common interests and information sharing, here with The Mouth, In Motion, the Bumble Bee, New Mobility, New World, the Disability Rag, Madness Network News, Mainstream, and Toomey J. Gazette.
Adults frequently recall the freedom and acceptance at summer camp as especially powerful in their emotional development. This brochure for Pine Tree Camp in Maine shows kids and counselors engaging in sports and other activities.
The Easter Seals Society sponsored camps named after founder Edgar Allen. This postcard of boys and girls on a cabin porch was sent to donors and supporters.
Groups form for professional and intellectual exchange. This group of people in wheelchairs and respirators in a Chicago hotel ballroom were at the first public meeting to discuss effects that occur years after infection with the polio virus.
This woman is speaking to a large group of people in a lecture hall. She has forearm crutches and stands at a podium.
These students in choir robes perform with sign language.
Founded in 1987 in San Francisco, the AIDS Quilt brings people together by sewing memorial quilt panels to remember those who have died of AIDS.
The message of this red and black button—an R marked out—is that the word “retarded” used in relation to people is unacceptable.
According to Jim Sinclair, a founder of Autism Network International (ANI) in the mid-1990s, “a dozen or so core members drove hundreds of miles back and forth taking every opportunity to be together. We discovered that several of us shared an interest in llamas. Llama artwork, llama shirts from the first Autreat in 1996, and references to square-dancing llamas are instances of llama celebration.”
The group Not Dead Yet, founded in 1996 by attorney Diane Coleman, fights for rights and exposes discrimination. They protest physician-assisted suicide and oppose right-to-die laws.
These two women, standing in a living room behind an Easter Seals display, volunteered for “crippled children.” The National Easter Seals Society, a pan-disability charity and advocacy organization, was founded in 1919 by Edgar Allen.
The March of Dimes, founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, began as a volunteer organization supporting both care for people affected by polio and research into the disease.
Meals on Wheels programs began in the United States in the 1950s to deliver food to elderly people in their homes. Kitchen Angels is a version of this activity, founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1992. It is one of many groups focused especially on people with AIDS.