Kitty Cone was a long-time member of the SWP.
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Overlooked No More: Kitty Cone, Trailblazer of the Disability Rights
Movement
Shunned in school because of her disability, she devoted her life to the
cause, organizing a historic sit-in that led to landmark federal
legislation.
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Kitty Cone was the lead organizer and strategist of the 504 Sit-In, a
nearly four-week-long protest in 1977 at the San Francisco office of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Kitty Cone was the lead organizer and strategist of the 504 Sit-In, a
nearly four-week-long protest in 1977 at the San Francisco office of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare.Credit...The Center for
Independent Living
ByWendy Lu
NYT, March 26, 2021
/This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about
remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in
The Times./
It wasn’t long after Kitty Cone had enrolled at the Mount Vernon
Seminary in Washington that she felt the grip of discrimination.
Cone walked with a cane, and the headmistress of the seminary, a private
women’s school, began imposing strange rules that segregated her from
the rest of the student body. For instance, she demanded that Cone bathe
in a separate tub outside of the suite that she shared with three other
girls. But the tub was so big that she struggled to get out of it, so
she just used the one in her suite. Another time, she was barred from
attending a school activity, but she went anyway. Those acts got her
expelled.
“For a variety of reasons, the headmistress threw me out, but all having
to do with disability,” Cone saidin an interview
<https://digital.library.illinois.edu/items/2796b860-e8b0-0133-1d3e-0050569601ca-a>for
the University of Illinois archives in 2009. “I think she was worried
about liability, looking back on it, because she gave me these
prohibitions.”
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It wasn’t the first time Cone would experience injustice because of her
disability, and it wouldn’t be the last.
More in ‘Overlooked’
Overlooked No More: Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Whose Art Chronicled
Black Life
Feb. 26, 2021
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/obituaries/aminah-brenda-lynn-robinson-overlooked.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
Overlooked No More: Jimmie McDaniel, Tennis Player Who Broke Barriers
Feb. 11, 2021
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/obituaries/jimmie-mcdaniel-overlooked.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
Overlooked No More: Jay Jaxon, Pioneering Designer of French Couture
Jan. 28, 2021
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/obituaries/jay-jaxon-overlooked.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
This was the 1960s, a time when people with disabilities did not have
basic civil rights in the United States — movie theaters could refuse to
sell tickets to wheelchair users, for example, and there was little
support for blind and deaf people. As evidenced by Cone’s experience,
even an education was not a guarantee. People with disabilities were
often institutionalized and largely isolated from society. It wasn’t
until 1990 that discrimination against them was banned under the
landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.
Cone’s expulsion from school helped inspire her to devote the rest of
her life to fighting for disability rights.
“Things that happened in my life determined the fact that I would be an
activist,” she said in a 2013oral history
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=759dirUhsKc>. “So many choices in my
life had been circumscribed by the fact that I had a disability.”
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Cone was the lead organizer and strategist of the 504 Sit-In, anearly
four-week-long protest
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/us/504-sit-in-disability-rights.html>in
April 1977 in which nearly 150 disabled people and their allies took
over the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Health,
Education and Welfare. Their intent was to pressure the Secretary Joseph
A. Califano Jr. to sign regulations that would implement Section 504 of
the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, prohibiting programs receiving federal
aid from discriminating against any “otherwise qualified individuals
with a disability.” The act paved the way for the A.D.A.
ImageKitty Cone, second from left, with fellow disability activists
Kathy Martinez, second from right, and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, right.
Kitty Cone, second from left, with fellow disability activists Kathy
Martinez, second from right, and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, right.Credit...Ken
Stein, via Mary Lou Breslin
Cone was the “organizational brains” behind the sit-in, said Mary Lou
Breslin, a close friend who was at the demonstration, helping to
mobilize a coalition of supporters among other activist groups,
including theBlack Panthers
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/obituaries/brad-lomax-overlooked.html>,
who supplied hot meals to the protesters, andmachinist union workers
<https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/504-sit-in-san-francisco-1977-disability-rights-advocacy>,
who rented trucks to help transport them when they took the fight to
Washington.
“She believed in the depth of her soul that the broader you build
something, the better chance you have of success,” said Lorrie Beth
Slonsky, who met Cone at a Section 504 advocacy training in 1979 and
remained her friend.
The 504 Sit-In is the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal
building in U.S. history.
The group ultimately succeeded in getting the regulations signed, and in
avictory speech
<https://soundcloud.com/timesawastin/kitty-cone-504-sit-in-victory-speech-april-1977>she
gave on April 30, 1977, Cone said the disability community had “written
a new page in American history.”
“We showed strength and courage and power and commitment,” she said,
“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.”
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Curtis Selden Cone was born on April 7, 1944, into a wealthy family in
Champaign, in eastern Illinois. Her father, Hutchinson Ingham Cone Jr.,
served in the Army for two decades, giving his family a rootless life as
he was periodically assigned to a new base. He and his wife, Molly
Mattis Cone, a homemaker, and Curtis and her younger brother, George,
lived in Augusta, Ga., Bethesda, Md., and Tokyo.
Image
Kitty Cone and her son, Jorge, in the early 1990s. She adopted him in
Mexico.
Kitty Cone and her son, Jorge, in the early 1990s. She adopted him in
Mexico. Credit...Georgia Springer
Cone learned she had muscular dystrophy around her 15th birthday. At the
time, doctors said she wouldn’t live beyond the age of 20.
She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study
English literature. It was there she became immersed in political
organizing and was elected to the Student Senate. She fought against
racial segregation in local housing and got involved in the advocacy
group Students for a Democratic Society. She left school for a semester
when her mother died of throat cancer in 1963. Though she went back, she
never graduated.
Cone then lived in Chicago for three years and worked as an antiwar
organizer with the Young Socialist Alliance, an offshoot of the
Socialist Workers Party. Her left-wing politics alienated her from her
father, a former lieutenant, and the two remained largely estranged for
the rest of their lives.
As an adult, Cone traveled with friends and family members to Latin
America and Eastern Europe. By then she had started using a wheelchair,
and inaccessibility became a frequent problem. Buses had no lifts,
bathroom doors were too narrow, and buildings had no ramps.
“Whether it was a hotel or a bus or an airport, she had many, many
experiences on airplanes where her wheelchair was broken, where she was
bruised,” said Georgia Springer, a cousin who lived with Cone for many
years.
In 1972, Cone moved to Oakland, Calif., for the warmer weather and to be
closer to friends. There she worked with the Center for Independent
Living to push for public resources that would allow people with
disabilities to be self-reliant. It was during this time that she
metJudith Heumann
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/us/judy-heumann-alice-wong-haben-girma-disability-activists.html>,
who would also become a leader of the 504 Sit-In.
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“Kitty was a fireball,” Heumann said in a phone interview. “The way she
expressed her words was like lightning. People listened to her, and they
followed her.”
Image
After Cone began using a wheelchair, she found that buses had no lifts,
bathroom doors were too narrow and buildings had no ramps.
After Cone began using a wheelchair, she found that buses had no lifts,
bathroom doors were too narrow and buildings had no ramps.
Cone came to date a blind woman, Kathy Martinez, the two bonding over
disability politics, and Cone became close to Martinez’s family in New
Mexico.
“In many ways, our disabilities complemented each other, because I could
help Kitty with physical tasks and she could help me with visual tasks,”
Martinez said in a phone interview. “She was in a power wheelchair, and
I would put on roller skates. We were kind of an iconic duo because we
could speed around Berkeley a lot faster than if I was walking.”
They could not wed because gay marriage was illegal, but Cone still
wanted a child. She looked into adoption in the United States but
encountered too much red tape. In 1981, she moved to Tijuana, Mexico,
with Martinez and there adopted a baby, Jorge.
They moved back to the Bay Area a couple of years later, and Cone
continued her activist work, taking up jobs at the World Institute on
Disability and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.
She died of pancreatic cancer on March 21, 2015. She was 70.
Cone’s efforts, particularly with the 504 Sit-In, helped give birth to a
new era that empowered many people with disabilities and gave them a
sense of pride.
“I am thankful for my disability,” she saidin the 1990s for an oral
history
<https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt1w1001mt&brand=oac4&doc.view=entire_text>.
“I feel like the constraints and the choices that it has given me have
made me who I am. And, you know, I like who I am.”
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