Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Apple TV has released the teaser trailer for Being Heumann, a film that carries the disability rights movement to a wide audience through the life of the activist Judith Heumann. Ruth Madeley plays Heumann, with Mark Ruffalo and Dylan O'Brien starring alongside her. Siân Heder directed it and adapted it with screenwriter Rebekah Taussig from Heumann's own 2020 memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist. Heder's 2021 film CODA won Best Picture and earned her Best Adapted Screenplay. The account belongs to Heumann, and it reaches select theaters on November 6 and Apple TV on November 13.
Heumann contracted polio at eighteen months old in Brooklyn, New York. No Wheelchair User had ever taught in a New York classroom before she did, and the film reaches back to that beginning. First is not a compliment. It is a measure of how long People with Disabilities were kept out.
In 1977 hundreds of people occupied a federal building in San Francisco for twenty six days, because the government had failed to pass Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 was the most significant disability rights legislation the United States had passed to that point, and it bars any program funded by the federal government from discriminating against a Person with a Disability. Judy Heumann's phone calls went unanswered, so she and hundreds of others took the offices instead. A young Woman with a Disability and a coalition of scrappy outsiders decided they had had enough, and they refused to leave until action was taken. Nothing before or since has held a federal building in this country that long.
Rights that no one acts on protect no one. The film's synopsis calls them a movement's accidental leaders, searching for a way forward where nobody had ever paved one. It describes people the country had counted out, trying what everyone called impossible, and changing the lives of millions. Heumann went on working from inside government after 1977, as Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in the Department of Education and, from 2010 until 2017, as the first Special Advisor for International Disability Rights at the United States State Department. She died at seventy five on March 4, 2023. Barriers are removed by planning ahead, and by consulting the People with Disabilities who meet those barriers while our plans can still change.
Two things are ours to decide: whether the phone gets answered, and who gets to teach. So we answer every access message the week it arrives, and we open the teaching and leading roles in our programs to People with Disabilities before anyone has to be the first. A community earns the words Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible for People with Disabilities when nobody has to spend twenty six days in a federal building to be heard.
Answering is the smallest act there is, and it is the one that was refused.
Read the Full Article: Ruth Madeley Is Disability Rights Activist Judith Heumann in Powerful Being Heumann Teaser Trailer (Exclusive).
By: Tommy McArdle
