Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Berkeleyside’s books column leads with Scot Danforth’s first full biography of a Berkeley organizer whose work helped define disability rights: An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights. The piece situates Roberts’ leadership in campus and city history and names his role in building what became widely known as the independent living movement.
Danforth traces how a small cohort of UC Berkeley students—often called the Rolling Quads—built services run by and for people with disabilities, pressed university and state officials, and formed coalitions. The column emphasizes strategy and outcomes—how disabled people organized to remove barriers rather than wait for ad-hoc exceptions.
The biography follows Roberts from childhood polio and years sleeping in an iron lung to enrolling in 1962 as the first severely disabled student at UC Berkeley and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science. It places that path within the city’s protest backdrop—Free Speech, anti-war, and People’s Park—and the shift toward the Social Model of Disability that names barriers—and the decisions that create them—as the problem to fix.
Roberts co-founded the Physically Disabled Students Program, which became the model for Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living and informed hundreds of centers nationwide. The story’s legacy is visible in curb cuts, campus and transit access, and community hubs like the Ed Roberts Campus—changes often described as The Curb Cut Effect, where barrier removal led by people with disabilities benefits everyone.
Read the Full Article: Ed Roberts, hero of Berkeley’s disability rights movement, gets his first biography.
By: Joanne Furio
