Introductory Materials

Legal Information

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Johnnie Lacy dated January 21, 1998. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Johnnie Lacy requires that she be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Johnnie Lacy, "Director, Community Resources for Independent Living: An African-American Woman's Perspective on the Independent Living Movement in the Bay Area, 1960s-1980s," an oral history conducted in 1998 by David Landes, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2000.

Cataloging Information

LACY, Johnnie (b. 1937)
Community organizer

Director, Community Resources for Independent Living: An African-American Woman's Perspective on the Independent Living Movement in the Bay Area, 1960s-1980s, 2000, xx, 140 pp.

Childhood in Arkansas, Louisiana, and McCloud, California; Chico State University, 1954-1956; contracting polio, 1956, and rehab at Fairmount Hospital, San Leandro; majoring in speech therapy at an inaccessible San Francisco State University, 1958-1960; work for Volunteer Bureau of Alameda County; black nationalist and civil rights movements in Oakland;

Alameda County Health Department; anti-poverty work for Oakland Economic Development Council, 1965-1968; West Oakland Community Development Center, 1969; graduate studies in sociology at UC Berkeley, 1969-1972; Model Cities Program; UC Office of the President, 1973; Antioch College West, project coordinator, 1973-1977; reflections on the 504 demonstration, San Francisco, 1977, and independent living movement (CIL, DLRC, and DREDF); Community Resources for Independent Living, Inc., 1981-94; reflections on outreach to people of color with disabilities.

Introduction by Simi Linton, Ph.D., Co-Director, Disability Studies Project, Hunter College, New York.

Interviewed 1998 by David Landes for the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Project. The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Acknowledgments

The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Series was funded primarily by a three-year field-initiated research grant awarded in 1996 by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), an agency of the United States Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Any of the views expressed in the oral history interviews or accompanying materials are not endorsed by the sponsoring agency.

Special thanks are due to other donors to this project over the years: the Prytanean Society; Raymond Lifchez, Judith Stronach, and Dr. Henry Bruyn; and June A. Cheit, whose generous donation in memory of her sister, Rev. Barbara Andrews, allowed the Regional Oral History Office to develop the grant project.

Series Introduction--The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement

by Simi Linton

When I was asked to write the introduction to the Bancroft Library's oral histories on the disability rights movement in Berkeley, it reminded me of the summer of 1975, when I left New York City and headed out to Berkeley, California. For Berkeley was the place to be I told my friends, filled with hippies and free love. I would spend the summer, take courses at the university. I had been disabled just a few years and this was my first trip on my own, away from the tight circle of family and friends I had relied on in those early years.

Someone had told me that Berkeley was a center of disability activism, but I didn't tally that in my list of reasons to go there. I was a naive young woman in my twenties, and still new to disability. I "managed" my disability by keeping its profile low, and its needs in check. I use a wheelchair, and did then, and decided I would need to call the disabled students' office at the university to get help finding an accessible apartment near the campus, but also decided this would be the only concession I would make to my disabled state. I was fine, I told myself and my family, and by that I meant I could go anywhere, I could do everything. Disability would not bog me down and it would not mark me.

While bold on the outside, I harbored the deep fear that I might fail in my ability to keep disability in its place, that it would come crashing in around me and swallow me up. I, therefore, was completely unprepared for the headlong leap I made that summer toward disability, toward the people and the territory that I had shunned. I never imagined that I would move toward disability with interest and gusto. It didn't happen all at once in that brief summer, but I call that time in Berkeley my coming out.

I had arrived in a place where disability seemed more ordinary than it was where I had come from, where accommodations were apparent, where the curbcuts on every corner made it possible for me to go to the supermarket, to the bookstore and up to campus without having to stop someone at each corner, explain to them how to tilt my wheelchair back, take it down the curb, and lift it back up on the other side. Although Berkeley may not have had significantly more disabled people than other places, it seemed to. Maybe it was because I was out on the streets more than I was in New York. I saw people acting out the daily routines of life--going to the supermarket, school or their jobs--using wheelchairs or crutches, brandishing white canes, using sign language and all of the other indicators of membership.

And life started to become easier and more flavorful, not by avoiding disability but by living with it in a different way. The lure of the other disabled people I saw was great, and I learned that it was those people, most I never got to meet, who were responsible for the curb cuts, accessible bathrooms, the independent living center where I went for help, and the disabled students office that had found an apartment for me. I had never seen any place where disabled people were in charge and it thrilled me and made me optimistic about my life in a way that no other experience could.

I learned back then that it was not some benevolent church group that carved out those curb cuts, or a member of the town council trying to get votes who mandated accessible facilities, they were due to the deliberate actions and painstaking labor of members of the disability community who fought for the changes that were made. Their work set the stage for the ongoing struggle for rights and liberties that has engaged a nation of activists. Today, while discrimination remains a constant in disabled people's lives, the right to an accessible environment, to housing, employment, and transportation is governed by laws that are increasingly exerting influence on those who discriminate. Further, the idea of integration, in education, in public accommodations and in transportation, pervades the informed discourse on disability rights and is supported, again, by legislation that mandates desegregating society.

The Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office project, "The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement: The Formative Years in Berkeley, California, 1960s-1980s," exposes the brick and mortar of these victories. Present in the narratives are major players and significant events, as well as the vital auxiliary figures and contributing influences that form the connective tissue of the Berkeley portion of these movements. The histories also reveal the dilemmas and roadblocks that halted progress and interfered with the integrated and equitable society that the framers of this political agenda envisioned.

It is a critical time to look closely at the progress that has occurred, and to study the impairments and deficits that remain in our not yet fully integrated and equitable society. Researchers, activists and those who write policy need, of course, to examine the present moment, and evaluate the necessary steps to take to move forward. Yet, just as important, is an examination of what led us here. How are present problems connected to past struggles? How do ideas that we act on today, relate to those formulated in past eras?

The oral history project provides detailed answers to those research questions. The material they have assembled will be of value to researchers, artists of all kinds, activists and policy makers. This endeavor is made possible now by opportunities afforded by the present moment that were not readily available before. The early activities and ideas have had the opportunity to grow and take root. There has been time to evaluate their impact and to see the shifts in ideas, policy, and human interactions spurred by what at first glance might seem to be a random set of activities undertaken in reaction to specific concrete problems.

In addition, there have been a number of developments over the last three decades that have created both the need and the impetus for this work. I've grouped these into four sections that outline some of the cultural, scholarly and political activity that informs this work.

The Social Construction of Disability and the Significance of Community

What I witnessed in the summer of 1975 when I came to Berkeley from New York was that disability could mean something different just by moving to a new location. I wouldn't learn the term "social construction" for another fifteen years, but I did learn through direct experience that disability is not fixed. I also learned that the disability community is a powerful and meaningful entity.

Fundamental to the Regional Oral History Office project is an understanding of the social construction of disability. The efforts begun in the sixties by the people interviewed here to reframe disability as a social designation and to conceptualize obstacles to employment, education and integrated living as a civil rights issue, rather than an individual problem of impairments and deficits, made it possible to understand disability that way. Further, an essential prerequisite for the progress of the disability rights movement was the organization of the disability community, a coalition formed by the discovery of each other and the recognition of our common social status. Although medical and educational institutions continue to categorize and divide people by impairment status, the formation and the formulation of the "disability community" has had a major impact in the social/ political arena.

For all my early learning, and my ongoing study of disability, it is in reading these histories that I have begun to understand how profound and original the ideas are that drove the early activists. The voices that are heard here demonstrate the purposefulness of the activists and their comprehensive vision of an equitable society. If this research platform were to reveal nothing else, it would be invaluable as a means to contradict the stereotypes of disabled people, and of the disability rights movement as merely riding the coattails and mimicking the agendas of the civil rights and feminist movements.

Yet, not only does this collection of histories serve as an exemplar of social construction and the significance of community, it demonstrates the unique nature of the construction of disability and illustrates the struggle to define and assert rights as a minority group in the face of powerful efforts to confine disability within the province of medical discourse.

The Value of First-Person Narratives

A second domain that informs this project is the increased attention to the active voice of previously marginalized peoples. First person narratives, long discredited in academic circles, are now accepted by a wide variety of scholars and public historians as not only valid, but necessary research tools. ROHO's intent to bring disabled people's perspective to the forefront is consistent with that approach, and the nuanced and detailed data they obtained demonstrates again the value of the methodology. Disability has traditionally been studied as the effect of war or violence, the failures of medicine, or other causes. In these narratives, we see that what brought disability to the individual becomes much less important than what the presence of disability causes to happen. Significantly, the narrators show the ways that disability sets in motion certain social and institutional responses. As these histories reveal, a disabled person's presence in a school, a restaurant, a job interview, a social gathering, or other venue often caused events to unfold in particular ways.

While scholars outside of disability studies have rarely paid attention to disability narratives, this project provides compelling documentation of the place of disability within the larger social arena, and also demonstrates the ways that disability plays a role in shaping an historic moment. I believe that the rich insights of the narrators and their ability to reveal the complex consequences of disability oppression will engage scholars within disability studies as well as those outside the field. For instance, researchers might want to look at what the histories reveal about the parallels between the place of women in other early civil rights struggles and in the disability rights movement. They may want to examine disabled people's perspective on their exclusion from other social justice platforms or consider the obstacles that the disability community itself may have erected to coalition building with other disenfranchised groups.

Complex Representations of Disability and the Social Milieu

The oral histories provide detailed descriptions of the lives of the narrators and others in their circles. These materials will be useful not only to researchers and activists but to writers and artists interested in portraying the lives of the people interviewed, or developing fictional representations using these figures as stimuli. For instance, writers can turn to these histories for background information for projects that dramatize events of the sixties. The projects might relate specifically to the events or the people described in the oral histories, or the research might be aimed at gaining more accurate information about secondary characters or events. A writer might want to learn more about what the Cowell Residence really looked like, who lived there, what were the attendants like, some of whom were conscientious objectors doing alternative service during the Vietnam War, or what kinds of wheelchairs and other adaptive equipment were people using then. These histories are about disabled people and the genesis of the disability rights movement, but they are also histories of the period and will be useful in providing more accurate representations of both.

While mainstream cultural products continue to depict disabled people and disabled characters in inaccurate and narrow ways, a growing number of writers, artists, actors, and performance artists who are disabled or are insiders in the disability community are providing more realistic, interesting and complex representations of disability to a wider audience than the arts ever have before. Although the numbers are still small and the venues marginal, I expect that over the next decade, as increasing numbers of disabled people gain access to higher education and training in the arts, their ranks will grow and as they do, this material will continue to grow in value.

A Resource for Disability Studies Scholars

Finally, this project will be an invaluable resource to the growing ranks of disability studies scholars. Disability studies began to take shape as an organized area of inquiry in the early 1980s. Prior to that time, although there were isolated pockets of transformative scholarship in some liberal arts fields, the study of disability was housed almost exclusively in the specialized applied fields (rehabilitation, special education, health, et cetera). Disability studies came along and provided a place to organize and circumscribe a knowledge base that explains the social and political nature of the ascribed category, disability. The field has grown enormously, particularly since the early 1990s, as has the Society for Disability Studies, the organization that supports the work of scholars and activists interested in the development of new approaches that can be used to understand disability as a social, political and cultural phenomenon.

Certain ideas pervade disability studies. For instance, a number of authors have examined such ideas as autonomy and independence. The perspectives employed in a disability studies analysis of such phenomena afford a complex look at these hitherto rarely examined ideas. Scholars interested in the theoretical implications of these ideas will benefit from examining the ROHO histories. They will learn, as I did in a recent reading, how the early activists discovered that the surest route to gaining independence was to have access to attendant care. These young people, many just out of institutions, or living away from home for the first time in their lives, were creating a new type of community, one in which it was clearly understood that support and services are necessary for individual autonomous functioning. They recognized the irony that what is typically thought of as "total dependence" was instead the ticket to the greatest freedom and autonomy they'd ever known. Rather than wait for the nurse or orderly in their institution to "decide" if it was time to get out of bed, have a shower, eat dinner or watch television, with personal attendants available and under their direction they could make these decisions on their own. Rather than wait at home for their mother or other relative or friend to bring them food or take them somewhere, they could lobby the university for a lift-equipped van that would be at their disposal and provide them with access to the kinds of leisure activities non-disabled students take for granted. They learned by setting up their own wheelchair repair services, and hiring qualified mechanics, they could keep their manual chairs, and the power wheelchairs that they also had lobbied for, in working order.

Through their lived experience they had the occasion to formulate a new way of thinking about such accepted ideas as what constitutes independence; what is freedom, equity, and integration; the ways that physical dependence and psychological independence are two separate and potentially unrelated variables. Disability studies, while dominated by theoretical formulations, social science research methodology, and modes of analysis employed in various areas of the humanities, will benefit enormously from the concrete examples given here of the abstract principles our work depends on.

The value of this project will ultimately be revealed as future research, creative endeavors, and policy initiatives are developed that have utilized this primary source material. Over the decades to come, researchers in all areas of inquiry will find within these documents numerous variables to be tested, relationships among people, events, and trends to be examined, cultural phenomena to be studied and dramatized, and ideas to be woven into theory or literature. The most exciting research opportunity that this work affords is the examination of the beliefs and behaviors of people whose demands for equity and justice upped the ante in the fight for an inclusive society.

The Regional Oral History Office staff are to be commended for their vision. They have brought us a vital piece of history, one that would be lost and forgotten if it were not for them. They have captured in these individual histories, a history. And a legacy.

Hunter College
New York, New York

SERIES HISTORY--The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Project

by Ann Lage and Susan O'Hara

Historical Framework

The movement by persons with disabilities for legally defined civil rights and control over their own lives took on its present framework in the 1960s and 1970s. Virtually simultaneously in several cities nationwide, small groups of people with significant disabilities joined together to change the rules of living with a disability. No longer content with limited life opportunities, nor willing to be defined solely as medical patients, they shared the willingness to challenge authority, discard received wisdom, and effect societal change that was the hallmark of the era. Not surprisingly, the disability movement paralleled other movements for equity and civil rights by and for racial minorities, women, and gay people. From our vantage at the close of the century, it is apparent that these movements, taken together, have changed the social, cultural, and legal landscape of the nation.

Berkeley, California, was one of the key cities where models for independent living were developed. A small group of young people, all wheelchair users, had one by one enrolled at the University of California in the 1960s. In an era prior to accessible dormitories or private housing, they were given living quarters in the campus's Cowell Hospital. In the midst of the campus maelstrom of free speech, civil rights, and anti-war protests, they experimented with radical changes in their daily lives, articulated a new philosophy of independence, and raised their experience to a political cause on campus and in the community.

By 1972, these students had created new institutions, run by and for people with disabilities, which soon attracted national attention. The first two of these organizations, the Physically Disabled Students' Program on the campus and the Center for Independent Living in the community, drew several hundred people with disabilities to Berkeley from across the United States. This early migration became the nucleus and the strength of the community that, for many, came to symbolize the independent living movement.

Political action kept pace with the developing awareness and institutional growth. In the early seventies, the Berkeley group successfully lobbied the city of Berkeley for curb cuts and the state legislature for attendant care funding. In 1977, scores of persons with disabilities sat in for twenty-six days at the offices of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco, as part of a nationwide protest that eventually forced implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, often called the Bill of Rights for Americans with Disabilities. Many participants trace their awareness of disability as a civil rights issue and their sense of membership in a disability community to the 1977 sit-in.

By the 1980s, a number of other important organizations had evolved from the Berkeley experience: the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), the World Institute on Disability (WID), Computer Training Program (later, the Computer Technologies Program [CTP]), the Bay Area Outreach Recreation Program (BORP), and others. All of these organizations shared the original philosophy of the Berkeley movement. Their example and their leaders have had national and even international impact on the quality of life and civil rights of persons with disabilities.

Genesis of the Project

The idea for a project to document these historic events germinated for nearly fifteen years before funding was secured to make possible the current effort. In 1982, Susan O'Hara, then director of the Disabled Students' Residence Program at the University of California, Berkeley, contacted Willa Baum, director of the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of The Bancroft Library, suggesting that the genesis of the Berkeley movement be recorded in oral histories with participants in the campus's Cowell Hospital Residence Program. Mrs. Baum and Ms. O'Hara began planning, enlarged the project scope, gathered faculty support, and initiated the search for funding. Their efforts produced three grant applications, the final one in cooperation with Professor Raymond Lifchez of the UC College of Environmental Design, to the National Endowment for the Humanities, none successful.

ROHO then secured funding from the Prytanean Society, a Berkeley campus women's service group, to produce oral histories with Arleigh Williams and Betty Neely, both campus administrators who oversaw the establishment of the early disabled students' programs. Herb Wiseman, a former staff member of the disabled students' program, conducted these two interviews in 1984-1985. Later, the California State Archives State Government Oral History Project funded an oral history with Edward Roberts, the first student in the Cowell program and later the director of the California State Department of Rehabilitation. This initial support proved essential; all three individuals were to die before the current project was funded.

By 1995, as the historical importance of the events in Berkeley and beyond grew increasingly evident, the fragility of the historical record became ever more apparent. The archival records of key institutions that grew out of the movement and shaped nationwide events were not collected and preserved in a publicly accessible library. The personal papers of key leaders of the movement were scattered in basements and attics. Moreover, the urgency of preserving the memories of participants through oral history interviews was underscored by the death of five pioneer disabled activists in the previous several years.

When Susan O'Hara and Mary Lou Breslin outlined the scope of the problem to The Bancroft Library, the then-curator of Bancroft Collections, Bonnie Hardwick, joined Willa Baum in support of the idea of developing a comprehensive disability collection at Bancroft. Baum, Hardwick, and Ann Lage, associate director of ROHO, worked with leaders of the disability community to design a plan for an archival collection at The Bancroft Library, to include both in-depth oral history interviews and written and photographic records of major organizations and activists. The Disabled Persons' Independence Movement collection was envisioned as "a primary historical resource of national significance, a research platform for future scholars, for persons with disabilities, and for public education." The National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research generously funded the three-year project in 1996.

Project Staff and Advisors

The collaborative nature of the project--among the disability community, academic advisors, oral historians, and archivists--has strengthened it in every respect. The advisory board included three Berkeley professors: Frederick Collignon of the Department of City and Regional Planning, who has worked on disability issues since 1970; Raymond Lifchez, Department of Architecture, who has conducted research on environmental design for independent living since 1972; and William K. Muir, Department of Political Science, who has chaired campus committees on disability issues, and is a scholar of U.S. and state government and public policy. Paul Longmore, professor of history from San Francisco State University and a specialist in disability history, was crucial in defining themes and topics to explore in oral history interviews. Mary Lou Breslin, president and co-founder of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, represented the perspective of the organizations to be documented as well as her personal experiences as an activist for disability rights.

Knowing that oral history is most often successfully carried out by persons who combine a compelling personal interest in the project with an ability to bring a historical perspective to their task, the Regional Oral History Office turned to the Bay Area disability community itself to staff the project's team of interviewers. Susan O'Hara became the historical consultant for the project and conducted a number of interviews as well as informing all of the project activities. All of the project interviewers had personal experience with disability. A majority had significant disabilities, several had participated in or observed the historical events to be documented and knew many of the key players and organizations. Interviewers included David Landes, former director of the Disabled Students' Program at UC Berkeley and former assistant director of the World Institute on Disability; Mary Lou Breslin, who crossed over from the advisory board; Kathy Cowan, librarian for a public-interest nonprofit organization; Denise Sherer Jacobson, a writer and educator on disability issues; David Landes, a college instructor of economics and coordinator of student affairs for the Computer Technologies Program.

Joining the team to interview narrators in Washington, D.C., was Jonathan Young, a Ph.D. candidate in American history at the University of North Carolina who had conducted oral histories on the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act. When Mr. Young resigned to accept a White House appointment, Susan Brown, long familiar with disability issues and other civil rights/social movements, became the project's Washington connection. Ann Lage coordinated the interviewing team for the Regional Oral History Office, and the office's regular staff, coordinated by production manager Shannon Page, provided transcription and other clerical support.

Bancroft Library project personnel included Bonnie Hardwick, curator; Lauren Lassleben, supervising archivist; and Jane Bassett, the project archivist whose job it was to contact the disability organizations, project interviewees, and other activists and survey their records to identify historical material. Once records and personal papers were donated to the Library--more than 300 linear feet before the project's conclusion--it was Jane and her student assistant, Amber Smock, who preserved, organized, and made the papers accessible to scholars with detailed finding aids. The archival and oral history projects, though separately administered, were in close cooperation, with the interviewing team providing contacts with the disability community and leads on papers to collect and the archivists assisting interviewers in their research in the growing collection of written records.

Interviewees and Themes

An overarching question for the project was to explore and document how this social movement developed in time, place, and context: how the movement in Berkeley was built, how it became effective, how individual life experiences contributed to and were changed by the movement. Lines of inquiry included identity issues and personal life experiences; social/economic/political backgrounds of individual activists; the roles of women and minorities in the movement; development of leadership; institution building and management; development of a disability community group identity; media, mythology, public image and the political process; impact of technology; the range of efforts to influence disability law and policy and to embed disability rights into the canon of civil rights.

Interviewees (narrators) were selected for one of several reasons: the individual was a founder or recognized leader of one of the key institutions, made a unique contribution to the movement, was a particularly keen observer and articulate reporter, or was a sustainer of the movement who provided a unique perspective. We attempted to choose narrators who had a range of disabilities and to interview nondisabled persons who contributed significantly to events or institutions.

Interviewees fell primarily into two categories: either they were involved in the residence program of Cowell Hospital on the Berkeley campus in the sixties or they participated in the building of early organizations in the 1970s.

Group One--UC Berkeley's Cowell Hospital Residence Program

A wing on the third floor of Cowell Hospital was the site of the first housing for students with significant disabilities on the Berkeley campus. This cluster became a breeding ground for the Berkeley phase of the independent living movement. About a dozen students--mostly men, mostly white, mainly in their twenties, with more and more autonomy within their grasp--spent several years in this benign but nonetheless isolated hospital residence, in the middle of a campus exploding with student protest movements. Six of these students were interviewed, including Ed Roberts, who narrated several hours of 1960s memories before he died with the oral history still in process. The former students all refer to their sense of community, intense camaraderie, the thrill of independence, an atmosphere of an-idea-a-minute, and the politics of their involvement.

Also included in this first group were certain early university and State Department of Rehabilitation officials--the hospital director, the nurse/coordinator, counselors--who might be called traditional gatekeepers but nonetheless allowed the unorthodox residence program to happen and in some cases encouraged it.

The majority of the narrators in the first group stayed involved in disability-related activities for many more years. Their recorded histories include these later activities, overlapping with the events documented in the second group of narrators.

Group Two--Builders of the Movement

The second group of interviewees are primarily founders and leaders who participated in the expansive phase which began in 1970 with the start of the Physically Disabled Students' Program (PDSP) at the university, followed by the founding of the Center for Independent Living (CIL) in 1972. These interviews reveal the grassroots politics, high energy, occasional chaos, unstinting belief in "the cause", seat-of-the-pants management, funding sources and crises, successes and failures of individuals and organizations. In the next few years a whole constellation of organizations evolved to sustain the independent living movement, including DREDF, CTP, KIDS, BORP, WID, Center for Accessible Technology (CAT), and Through the Looking Glass. This group of interviewees provide insight into the politics, leadership, and organization-building of both their own organizations and CIL.

Many key interviewees in this group are still in leadership positions and have had national and international impact on disability policy development. Also included in this second group are persons who were not in the top ranks of leadership but who were keen observers of the scene, could augment the basic history, and offer further points of view.

Oral History Process

All of the project interviewers received formal and informal training in archival oral history procedures and met monthly as a group to plan and evaluate interviews and review progress. Interviewers prepared a preliminary outline before each interview session, based on background research in relevant papers, consultation with the interviewee's colleagues, and mutual planning with the interviewee. In-depth tape-recorded interview session were from one to two hours in length; interviewees required from one to fifteen sessions to complete their oral histories, depending on the length and complexity of their involvement in the movement.

Tapes were transcribed verbatim and lightly edited for accuracy of transcription and clarity. During their review of the transcripts, interviewees were asked to clarify unclear passages and give additional information when needed. The final stage added subject headings, a table of contents, and an index. Shorter transcripts were bound with related interviews into volumes; longer transcripts constitute individual memoirs.

More than forty oral histories are included in this first phase of the Disabled Persons' Independent Movement project. Volumes can be read in the Bancroft Library and at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections. They are made available to other libraries and to individuals for cost of printing and binding. Many of the oral histories are accompanied by a videotaped interview session to document visual elements of the interview and the setting in which the interviewee lives or works. Video and audiotapes are available at The Bancroft Library. If funding for a second phase of the project is secured, many of the oral history transcripts as well as a representative collection of documents and photographs will be available on the Internet as part of the Online Archive of California.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library's materials on the history of California and the West. The office is under the direction of Willa K. Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The catalogues of the Regional Oral History Office and many oral histories on line can be accessed at http://library.berkeley.edu/BANC/ROHO/.

Special thanks are due to donors to this effort over the years: the Prytanean Society; Raymond Lifchez and Judith Stronach; and June A. Cheit, whose generous donation in memory of her sister, Rev. Barbara Andrews, allowed the Regional Oral History Office to develop the grant project. The Bancroft Library's three-year Disabled Persons' Independence Movement Project, of which these oral histories are a part, was funded by a field-initiated research grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), U.S. Department of Education.

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley

Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Series
The Formative Years in Berkeley, California

August 2000

Single-interview volumes

Single-interview volumes
• Mary Lou Breslin
•     Cofounder and Director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Movement Strategist, 2000.
• Joel Bryan
•     Founder and Director of Disabled Students' Services, UC Riverside and UC Davis, 2000.
• Kitty Cone
•     Political Organizer for Disability Rights, 1970s-1990s, and Strategist for Section 504 Demonstrations, 1977, 2000.
• Charles Grimes,
•     Attendant in the Cowell Residence Program, Wheelchair Technologist, and Participant/Observer of Berkeley's Disability Community, 1967-1990s, 2000.
• Joel Bryan
•     National Policy Advocate and Leader of Disability Rights Organizations, 1976-1990s, 2000.
• Johnnie Lacy
•     Director, Community Resources for Independent Living: An African-American Woman's Perspective on the Independent Living Movement in the Bay Area, 1960s-1980s, 2000.
• Joan Leon
•     Administrator at Berkeley's Center for Independent Living and the California Department of Rehabilitation, Cofounder of the World Institute on Disability, 2000.
• Susan O'Hara
•     Director of the UC Berkeley Disabled Students' Program, 1988-1992, Coordinator of the Residence Program, 1975-1988, and Community Historian, 2000.
• Corbett O'Toole
•     Advocate for Disabled Women's Rights and Health Issues, 2000.
• Zona Roberts
•     Counselor for UC Berkeley's Physically Disabled Students' Program and the Center for Independent Living, Mother of Ed Roberts. Appended: Jean Wirth, Counselor at the College of San Mateo and Early Mentor to Ed Roberts, 2000.
• Susan Sygall
•     Cofounder and Director of Berkeley Outreach Recreation Program and Mobility International USA, Advocate for Women's Issues, 2000.

In Process, single-interview volumes:

In Process, single-interview volumes:
• Judy Heumann
•     Deputy director of the Center for Independent Living, cofounder of the World Institute on Disability, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. (in process)
• Arlene Mayerson
•     Directing attorney, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. (in process)
• Pat Wright
•     Director, Governmental Affairs Office of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, strategist for the Americans with Disabilities Act. (in process)

Multi-interview volumes:

Multi-interview volumes:
• UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA'S COWELL HOSPITAL RESIDENCE PROGRAM FOR PHYSICALLY DISABLED STUDENTS, 1962-1975: CATALYST FOR BERKELEY'S INDEPENDENT LIVING MOVEMENT, 2000.
  • Edward V. Roberts
  •     The UC Berkeley Years: First Student Resident at Cowell Hospital, 1962.
  • James Donald
  •     Student Resident at Cowell, 1967-1968, Attorney and Deputy Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, 1975-1982.
  • Cathrine Caulfield
  •     First Woman Student in the Cowell Program, 1968.
  • Herbert R. Willsmore
  •     Student Resident at Cowell, 1969-1970,Business Enterprises Manager at the Center For Independent Living,1975-1977.
  • Billy Charles Barner
  •     First African American Student in the Cowell Program, 1969-1973, Administrator in Disability Programs in Los Angeles.
  • John "Jack" Rowan
  •     Student Resident at Cowell, 1971-1973, and Chair of CIL's Board of Directors, 1976-1982.
  • Peter Trier
  •     Student at Berkeley: Transition from the Cowell Hospital Program to the Residence Halls, 1975.
• UC BERKELEY'S COWELL HOSPITAL RESIDENCE PROGRAM: KEY ADMINISTRATORS AND CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF REHABILITATION COUNSELORS, 2000.
  • Henry Bruyn
  •     Director, Student Health Services, 1959-1972.
  • Edna Brean
  •     Nurse Coordinator, Cowell Residence Program, 1969-1975.
  • Lucile Withington
  •     Department of Rehabilitation Counselor, Cowell Residence Program, 1969-1971.
  • Karen Topp Goodwyn
  •     Department of Rehabilitation Counselor in Berkeley, 1972-1983.
  • Gerald Belchick
  •     Department of Rehabilitation Counselor, Liaison to the Cowell Program, 1970s.
  • John Velton
  •     Department of Rehabilitation Administrator: Providing Oversight for the Residence Program, Fostering Career Placement and Computer Training, 1970s-1980s.
• BUILDERS AND SUSTAINERS OF THE INDEPENDENT LIVING MOVEMENT IN BERKELEY
  • VOLUME I, 2000.
    • Herbert Leibowitz
    •     Research and Training Specialist for the Rehabilitation Services Administration, 1971-1990.
    • Mary Lester
    •     Grant Writer for the Early Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, 1974-1981.
    • Bette McMuldren
    •     Assistant to Judy Heumann and Grant Writer at the Center for Independent Living, 1975-1980.
    • Kenneth Stein
    •     Public Information Coordinator for the Center for Independent Living and Participant/Observer of the Disability Movement.
  • VOLUME II, 2000.
    • Carol Fewell Billings
    •     Attendant and Observer in the Early Days of the Physically Disabled Students' Program and the Center for Independent Living, 1969-1977.
    • Michael Fuss
    •     Attendant for Cowell Residents, Assistant Director of the Physically Disabled Students' Program, 1966-1972.
    • Linda Perotti
    •     An Employee Perspective on the Early Days of the Cowell Residence Program, Physically Disabled Students' Program, and the Center for Independent Living.
  • VOLUME III, 2000.
    • Eric Dibner
    •     Advocate and Specialist in Architectural Accessibility.
    • Hale Zukas
    •     National Disability Activist: Architectural and Transit Accessibility, Personal Assistance Services.
  • VOLUME IV, 2000.
    • Janet Brown
    •     Student Member of the National Federation of the Blind and First Newsletter Editor for the Center for Independent Living, 1972-1976.
    • Phil Chavez
    •     Peer Counselor at the Center for Independent Living, 1970s-1990s.
    • Frederick C. Collignon
    •     UC Professor of City and Regional Planning: Policy Research and Funding Advocacy.
    • Hal Kirshbaum
    •     Director of Peer Counseling at the Center for Independent Living.
    • Michael Pachovas
    •     Berkeley Political Activist, Founder of the Disabled Prisoners' Program.
    • Raymond "Ray" Uzeta
    •     Independent Living Centers in Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego: Perspective on Disability in Minority Communities.
  • VOLUME V, 2000.
    • Jacquelyn Brand
    •     Parent Advocate for Independent Living, Founder of the Disabled Children's Computer Group and the Alliance for Technology Access.
    • Doreen Pam Steneberg
    •     Parent Advocate for Educational Rights for Children with Disabilities.
• MAINSTREAM MAGAZINE: CHRONICLING NATIONAL DISABILITY POLITICS, 2000.
  • Cynthia Jones
  •     Mainstream Magazine Editor and Publisher.
  • William Stothers
  •     Journalist and Managing Editor of Mainstream Magazine.
• UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATORS RECALL ORIGIN OF THE PHYSICALLY DISABLED STUDENTS' RESIDENCE PROGRAM, 1987.
  • Arleigh Williams
  •     Recollections of the Dean of Students.
  • Betty H. Neely
  •     Recollections of the Director of Student Activities and Programs.

In Process, multi-interview volumes

In Process, multi-interview volumes
• Neil Jacobson
•     Cofounder of the Computer Training Project and Cochair of the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.
• Scott Luebking
•     Cofounder of the Computer Training Project, Specialist in Accessible Technology.
• Maureen Fitzgerald
•     Early Deaf Services Programs at the Center for Independent Living.
• Anita Baldwin
•     Deputy Director and Head of Blind Services for the Center for Independent Living, Early 1980s
• Joanne Jauregui
•     Activist in the Deaf Community: Deaf Services at Center for Independent Living.
• Raymond Lifchez
•     Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley.

Videotaped Interviews

Videotaped Interviews
• Mary Lou Breslin, Kitty Cone, Charles Grimes and Larry Biscamp, Neil Jacobson, Joanne Jauregui, Joel Bryan, Johnnie Lacy, Joan Leon, Susan O'Hara, Zona Roberts, Ken Stein, Herb Willsmore, Hale Zukas.

Interview History

by David Landes

Johnnie Lacy was asked to participate in the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Series because of her experience in several important disability rights organizations. In addition, she contributes an important perspective on the issue of disability and its relationship to race, gender and poverty.

Ms. Lacy became disabled as a result of polio in the summer of 1956. Her life as a disabled person spans the the seminal years of the disability rights movement. As an African-American, Ms. Lacy experienced discrimination during her childhood; she was outspoken both as a child and as an adult regarding this discrimination. She became active in community struggles against racism and worked in anti-poverty agencies in Oakland.

Her interview traces her growing awareness of disability as a civil rights issue, spurred in part by the 1977 504 demonstrations and sit-in at the San Francisco office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which she observed on television. She soon attended a 504 training and then began working at the Disability Law Resource Center at the Center for Independent Living. Her interview includes critical insights on the problems that CIL had in expanding outreach and service to communities of color. Ms. Lacy then served as executive director of Community Resources for Independent Living in Hayward from 1981 until her retirement in 1994.

The interviews were conducted during five sessions in February and March 1998 at Ms. Lacy's home in Hayward, California. The interviews were lightly edited by the interviewer and then by Sharon Bonney. They were then reviewed by Ms. Lacy who made some corrections and editing changes. A one-hour video interview was conducted on July 2, 1998; it is available at the Bancroft Library as part of its Disabled Persons Independence Movement Collection.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library's materials on the history of California and the West. Copies of all interviews are available for research use in The Bancroft Library and in the UCLA Department of Special Collections. The office is under the direction of Willa K. Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

November 1998

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley

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I Growing up African-American, Poor, and Disabled

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Early Years in Arkansas and Louisiana: 1937-1947

Landes

Johnnie, let's begin by having you talk a little bit about your family background, who your parents were, where they grew up, and what type of work they did.

Lacy

My father was born and partly raised in Mississippi. He was born in a small town called Chunky, Mississippi, which is about nine or ten miles outside of Meridian, which is a larger town. My mother, on the other hand, was born in Louisiana. The name of her birthplace was Cory, Louisiana, and it was around ten or twenty miles from Monroe, Louisiana, which was a larger town there.

I don't know how my mother and father met. It's interesting. But I know both of them moved around the area and travelled around the area a lot and so probably met in some lumber town around that area of Louisiana.

Landes

Did they work in the lumber industry?

Lacy

My father worked in the lumber industry from the time he was nine years old, when he carried water to the mill workers in Mississippi. That had an interesting outcome because while hanging around at the mill with the older men, he started to drink with the lumber workers, and so when World War I came around and they were conscripting blacks to join the army, they took my father, who was only sixteen or seventeen at the time. They said if he was old enough to drink, he was old [chuckling] enough to serve in the army. So it turned out to be a fairly fortuitous event for him because they took him to the army, and the war was

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over by the time he was seventeen, so he had spent about six months in the army and was later on eligible for veterans' benefits.

But at any rate, they were married somewhere in the early twenties, I guess. I don't know whether they were married in Huttig, Arkansas, or whether they moved to Huttig, Arkansas, because there were lots and lots of lumber towns around in Mississippi, Louisiana and that area.

Landes

What kind of work did your parents do in the lumber camps?

Lacy

Well, it wasn't a lumber camp. We have to be really clear about [that]. Lumber camps were areas that were way out in the woods, where only men, usually, were housed and usually white men because this was really a high-paying, highly-skilled job, and black men in some areas weren't considered to be highly-skilled laborers, even though they might have had the skills. So lumber towns were where the sawmills were and where the raw trees were brought to be processed, to be cut and processed.

The lumber towns were where less skilled workers--African-American skilled workers--would usually be. My father was considered one of the high-paying, semi-skilled workers because he had had a lot of experience from childhood in the mills, but he was called what you would call an edgerman. That was about as high up as most African-American men got. The next job would be a skilled job as a sawman. I never knew of any African-American sawmen in the lumber mills.

Landes

Where were you born?

Lacy

I was born in Huttig, Arkansas, which is a little lumber town in Arkansas, about fifty miles from the Louisiana border.

Landes

How many siblings do you have?

Lacy

I have two brothers, two sisters. I'm the youngest of five.

Landes

How long did you live in Huttig?

Lacy

I was six years old when we moved to Monroe, Louisiana, which is, again, about fifty miles--my mother moved back and forth. Sometimes when she'd get mad with my father, she'd move to Monroe, or when she went to have her children, because there was better medical care in Monroe. So I was six years old. I started to school at five, and so I was already in the first grade. There was no kindergarten there. That's the time when I wound up in the

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same class with my twin brother and sister, so the three of us grew up in the same class all the way through high school.

Landes

So one of your brothers and sisters are twins?

Lacy

Yes, both [chuckling]. Yes, one of my brothers and one of my sisters are twins to each other.

Landes

What do you remember about either Huttig or Monroe?

Lacy

Let's see. Well, I think the main thing that I remember about Huttig was the fact that my parents also ran kind of a recreational facility. It was called a juke joint in those days. [chuckling] It was like a community center, really. It was owned by the lumber company, as most things were owned by a lumber company in small lumber towns during those times. So we lived in this large facility that had a living area in it, but it also had a restaurant, dining area, where some of the single lumber workers came. My mother made lunch for them, and they came, so it was kind of a boarding house. And it was also a dance hall.

The one thing I remember was being around community people all the time. My father was a great jazz fan. He was just a really all-around kind of community-minded person. He liked jazz, and so he booked jazz bands into the dance hall on a number of occasions. As a child, I can remember people like Duke Ellington and Count Basie and people like that playing in Huttig at the dance hall.

Landes

So you met some immortals at a very young age.

Lacy

Well, let's not say I met them, but I can say I was introduced to them and introduced to jazz as well at a very early age. They had a gambling house out in the back, I can remember. For a little kid, it was really an exciting place to be because all these activities were going on. It wasn't until way, way, way later on I realized how my mother had actually protected us from some of the other kind of negative things that took place around those places. But that environment I remember really, really well.

Landes

So it was a very positive experience for you being around so many community people.

Lacy

I think so. I still remember a lot of the folks that hung around there.

Landes

And you were about five when you moved to Monroe?

Lacy

Yes, I was about six, I'd say, yes. I was born in '37.

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Landes

Why did your family move to Monroe?

Lacy

They bought a house in Monroe.

Landes

And did your father continue to working in lumber towns?

Lacy

Yes. My father stayed in Arkansas and worked. My mother and my sisters and brothers came to Monroe, except there was one exception: my older sister, Mary, went to live with my father's sister in Washington, D.C., when she was about six years old. She left Arkansas and went directly to Washington, D.C., and she came home to Monroe during the summer and on occasion might stay a little while, but she basically grew up in Washington, D.C.

Landes

How long did you live in Monroe?

Lacy

I think we must have lived there about five years, during the war. We lived there all through the war. We moved to California in 1947.

Landes

What do you remember about World War II?

Lacy

I think there are some real kind of flashes of memory. The one that I think about the most is the Japanese train, the internment train that came through the town and how we thought they were Japs from Japan. We had no idea as a child of the internment camps where Japanese people had been removed from their property and their land and taken to places like Arkansas and Texas, and they travelled through Monroe on the train.

I can remember as they travelled through the town, someone would come along and pull the shades down so people couldn't see who were on the train, and getting a little glimpse of these Japanese people was something of a curiosity because we had no idea who they were or where they came from or where they were going.

I think the other things I remember were the blackouts and how everybody had blackout shades. They had the neighborhood wardens that came through. The sirens would go on and the planes would fly really low, and everybody would get in the house and pull down the shades and turn out the lights because that was part of the practice of war in case we ever were under attack. Obviously, we were never under attack.

I can remember the school that I went to, which was called Monroe Colored High. We had to sing "Dixie" when we had our assemblies. The books we got were second-hand books that were

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donated from the white school, which was a nice, clean school on the other side of town.

Landes

How did you first become aware of the inequities between white people and African Americans? Was it in school or prior to that?

Lacy

Well, it was just a given, you know? For example, when we had our school assemblies, sometimes the white school officials would come down and pat our principal on the head and tell him he was doing a good job and maybe made speeches to us about what a wonderful education we were getting and blah-blah-blah. Actually, in comparison to what kind of education kids are getting now, we were getting a good education, even though we got second-hand books. But it was something that was commented on over and over and over again. You have to remember that the teachers didn't like it any better than the parents, so it was just part of that whole segregated society that that was talked about.

Landes

When you say it was commented on, by whom?

Lacy

Everyone. By parents, by teachers. It was just kind of ingrained into us as children because of the comments that the teachers would make about "we don't have enough books because the white school superintendent threw away all the books" or "they kept some of the books." It was kind of almost like a law that when the books were finished with in the white school, we would inherit them in the black schools. Everything we got was hand-me-downs, second-hands.

Landes

What do you recall about your reaction to that or how you felt about that?

Lacy

It was kind of an accepted practice that you knew wasn't right and it was a very annoying kind of thing, but at that point in time you couldn't do anything about it. I can remember hearing the principal of the school reporting that he had gone to the superintendent about getting better books for his school and being told that it just wasn't possible because they didn't have enough money to buy books for the white school and the black school. And these are things that were, you know, talked about openly among the faculty and overheard by children. And when the superintendent, the white superintendent, would come down, he would make an apology about the budget didn't allow for enough books for the colored school and so on and so forth. But it was a very typical colored school, like all other colored schools [chuckling] in the area.

Landes

When you say that you had a good education, can you describe what you think made that a good education?

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Lacy

I think it was definitely the dedication of the teachers--teachers who lived in the community, who were your neighbors, but who were very much aware of the inequities of the educational system and tried to make up for it by trying to provide the best education that they possibly could. When I came to McCloud, for example, I knew all of my time tables, which had not been started in McCloud. I think I was in the fifth grade. It was common practice for us to know the geography. This was like a common exercise daily that we did. Our time tables--for example, in the second grade, we may know our time tables from 1 to 3, and then the third grade from 3 to 6 or 7, and so on until we got the fourth and fifth grade and we knew all of our time tables all the way up to what we called the "twelvsies."

In addition to that, we knew pretty much the geographical map based on similar kinds of patterns where we would learn to--I'm trying to remember the name of the process that we used. Oh, the boundaries. We had to learn the boundaries of our city, we had to learn the boundaries of our parish, what we call counties. In Louisiana they are called parishes. We had to know the boundaries of the states, all forty-eight states at that time, by the time we got to the fifth grade. And we had to know some of the territorial boundaries of North and South America. We knew that North America was bounded by South America [sic] and Mexico, etc. This was all before we came to California, none of which we learned there.

Move to McCloud, California

Landes

Why did your family move to McCloud, California, in 1947?

Lacy

My father lost his job in Arkansas, and then he just kind of moved around to different lumber jobs until he was--I don't even remember how it was. He learned about jobs in California, and so he and my cousin and one or two other men caught the bus and came to California to work. He moved around lumber towns until he settled in McCloud. In McCloud they had family housing, and the other towns it was more seasonal. So when he settled in McCloud he could get a house for his family, and then he sent for us.

Landes

How did you feel when you found out that you were going to be leaving Monroe, Louisiana, for California?

Lacy

Well, we were really excited. A lot of our friends had moved to California because that was just past the war years and during the war years, and a lot of people had moved to Oakland and San

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Francisco to work in the shipyard, so we heard a lot from our friends about California people who'd come back in the summertime, so it was really exciting.

Landes

What are your first memories of McCloud? What was that town like when you first saw it?

Lacy

Well, I can remember getting off the bus in a very thin little summer dress and sandals, with no socks, into about nine inches of snow. That was in September, and we were trying to arrive there in time to go to school. I can remember the stage ride. They called the old bus the stage, that went from Mt. Shasta, where the Greyhound bus station was, to McCloud, about ten miles further into the valley. And waiting for the stage to come and being frozen because I lost my coat on the bus.

And then, once the stage came, it was one of these old rickety buses, and we had to go over the hill from Mt. Shasta. As you come into McCloud, you can see the town--I started to call it a city [chuckling]--you could see the town as you crest the hill, and there you saw this huge lumber mill, and then you saw these little houses, these little wooden houses.

I can remember my sister and brother and I started to wail, "We don't want to go here. We want to go home!"

Landes

Why did you want to go home?

Lacy

Well, number one, we had lived in the city, where there were lots of people. We always lived in an area that was fully populated by blacks, and this looked like--this was just a little dump to us, you know. We could see it just from looking out.

Landes

When you took the stage--that is, what you called the bus--where did you sit on the bus?

Lacy

Well, we were the only ones there. [laughs]

Landes

The only ones on the bus?

Lacy

Yes, the only ones on the bus.

Landes

Did you go to the back of the bus by habit?

Lacy

I think the bus driver probably told us we could sit anywhere we wanted to sit. As kids, we just kind of bounced up back and forth, you know. But this was one of the most uncomfortable buses I'd ever been on, even [chuckling] as a kid.

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Landes

So there were no comfortable seats, even in the front.

Lacy

No, no, no. It was like the old school bus with the bench seats and stuff. I think it would be equivalent to a ParaTransit program now.

Growing Up with Racism and Segregation in McCloud: 1947-1954

Landes

What proportion of the town of McCloud was African-American, would you guess?

Lacy

We had two streets, Orange Street and Beaumont Street. Orange Street and Beaumont Street were named by the black leaders of the time. Interestingly, though--this is something I learned way, way later--is that blacks and whites were not always segregated, that in fact black leaders in the twenties or thirties requested that they have a community of their own, and so these two streets were built for the black community, and all the black families had moved from other parts of town into this community, by their own desire.

But there was another kind of intervening situation that came up--also was that during the time when blacks were being recruited from the South, white managers were also being recruited from the South, and their lifestyle was the style of segregation, and the black lifestyle was also a style of segregation. So basically, segregation was transplanted from Louisiana and Texas with the workers and the managers who came to McCloud. And this is something I learned much, much later on.

Landes

What differences did you notice about the relationship between the races in McCloud when you first arrived?

Lacy

The differences were more subtle.

Landes

You went to an integrated school.

Lacy

I went to an integrated school. We were not allowed--or we didn't--it was kind of given that we didn't socialize very much with the white kids, but I belonged to the Girl Scouts; my brother belonged to the Boy Scouts. He was, like, considered the first black to ever climb Mt. Shasta that anyone knew of. So we were very actively involved. But there was kind of a silent understanding that blacks didn't visit white homes, and whites didn't visit black homes. We didn't dance with each other; we danced among ourselves at social events.

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Landes

You had separate dances or you just danced with yourselves at the same event?

Lacy

We had integrated dances, where we danced with blacks and the whites danced with whites. So that was strange. Blacks were not allowed to swim in the swimming pool, and they had all these strange excuses for that. So it was almost like being integrated but segregated at the same time.

Landes

What do you remember about how your feelings changed, your attitudes about this changed? We're talking what, junior high school and then into high school?

Lacy

Yes, elementary--we didn't have junior high in McCloud. This was a real small town. But in elementary school I think the kids wanted to socialize, but there were some strong underlying parental objections. For example, kids might invite us to a party and when we got there the parents wouldn't allow us to go into the house.

Landes

White kids.

Lacy

White kids, yes. We played together on the school grounds, and we went on school trips and, of course, in high school the sports teams were integrated. Something I failed to notice as a kid was that when we went to other towns on school outings, we were not segregated--only in McCloud. On a trip to Bend, Oregon where I was chosen to go as a high scholastic achiever, the counselor rushed ahead of the group to talk to the swimming pool manager. As I arrived at the gate, I overheard the manager say, "We don't care what color she is, as long as she pays her fare." I was puzzled by that comment until I realized that the counselor felt she had to run interference for me.

Landes

What were your parents' attitudes about this?

Lacy

Well, my father, who wasn't like an activist in the sense of his being a part of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] or anything like that, but I know he had real strong resentments toward white power structure type people, as we would call them later on.

Landes

In McCloud?

Lacy

In McCloud. My mother had lots of white friends, but she spent most of the time educating them. [laughs]

Landes

About what?

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Lacy

About race and how black people were dignified people and we had self-respect, and she never let white people walk all over her. [laughs] Those were kind of her educating sermons to her white friends and to anybody who would listen. She was well liked in the community, both in the black community and in the white community. She worked part time in restaurants, in the kitchen, washing pots and stuff like that because the cooks were all white. The better jobs were white.

Landes

She had been a cook in Louisiana.

Lacy

She had been a maid, which is quite different from being a cook because a maid did everything. They raised the children, they prepared the meals, they kept the house, they did the shopping.

Landes

But she also worked--I thought you said she had also worked in the juke joint as a cook.

Lacy

She was like the proprietor, the manager there, and so she had her own staff there.

Landes

So she had had skills, not only managing an establishment but doing a variety of the work.

Lacy

Oh, absolutely.

Landes

But when she got to McCloud, she was relegated to the kitchen?

Lacy

Yes, exactly. One interesting story that's typically Southern is that coming from the South, around meals, we always had three square meals a day. My father worked hard in the lumber mill, but that was how everybody from the South pretty much lived. You had three squares a day with meat in each meal. I can remember my mother taking this maid's job in this white woman's house, and she came and she had to do the laundry and she had to scrub the floors and blah-blah-blah. And then she was called in to lunch, and this woman gave her a sandwich of cream cheese and--oh, I'm trying to think--watercress. [chuckling]

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Lacy

Like I said, the Southern tradition was that we had three square meals a day, and they were full meals. And so in McCloud my mother got this job as a maid for this white woman, Mrs. Hamilton, as I recall. She was the wife of the mill superintendent whom my father worked for. My mother had worked really hard, as I said, scrubbing and doing the laundry, and when it was time for lunch Mrs. Hamilton called her in for lunch and she sat down and very

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proudly, I must say, as I recall the story, gave this watercress and cream cheese sandwich to my mother.

And my mother started to cry, and so Mrs. Hamilton, being a really, really kind lady, and who became a lifelong friend of my mother's, as a matter of fact--during those times, she started to cry too, and she wanted to know what was the matter. And so my mother looked at her through her tears, and she said, "I work hard," she said. "I just can't eat this sandwich. I need more than this." So Mrs. Hamilton explained that she thought that she was honoring her with this cream cheese and watercress sandwich.

Landes

So there was a real miscommunication there.

Lacy

Yes, absolutely, because this is what Mrs. Hamilton served her bridge club, and my mother was being served the same kind of food that her bridge club ate, but she forgot that her bridge club didn't just get through with laundry and scrubbing the floors. So she never did that again. As a matter of fact, after that they became lifelong friends--of course on a black/white arm's-length basis.

Landes

What are your most fond memories of McCloud?

Lacy

Oh, I think the community life has to be the most fond memories, and I'm always telling people about how, during my school years, where you had all these activities but you had to sell a lot of stuff, we sold Girl Scout cookies and dish cloths, just anything to raise money for the Girls League in the high school or for Girl Scout trips, etc. I could always sell all of my stuff and then some because we were never turned down by the neighbors. Whatever we had to sell, they were going to buy some of it.

I can remember especially the dish cloths. I sold the most dish cloths of all of the girls in the school because my neighbors kept ordering the dish cloths. They didn't just want a token number; they just got dish cloths, and then the next year they'd want to know, "Are you going to sell dish cloths again?" But that kind of community support was very common in McCloud, even down to the lumber mill, where all families were invited to an annual Christmas party, and all the families received free turkeys, the children received free Christmas gifts and the Christmas candy. As a matter of fact, I still look for and buy the little hard Christmas candy that we got. I have some in my bowl right now, as a matter of fact. So that was one positive thing I remember.

And the church activities, I think, too.

Landes

So your family was active in the church?

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Lacy

Yes. My mother and the children. My father didn't go to church.

Landes

Do you have any painful memories about McCloud?

Lacy

Oh, I'm sure I must have. Someone said the other day that as time goes on, it's funny how the good memories get better and the bad memories get less. One of the things that I think about from time to time was when I was in high school. Out of a high school of maybe 150 population in the time I attended, the highest number of blacks in the school might have been six or seven.

Landes

In your class or the entire high school?

Lacy

In the entire high school.

Landes

So maybe one or two black kids a class?

Lacy

Yes, maybe.

Landes

And a lot of those were you and your siblings.

Lacy

Right. When I graduated, I was the only black kid who graduated from McCloud High School, and that was from a class of fifty-four. So a lot of times we'd get mixed messages from teachers and administrators because there were some people that we really felt weren't in our corner, that they were not for us, and so we were treated differently. But a lot of times, on the surface, it seemed like we might have been being treated equally, but kind of glitches would come up.

This one glitch I remember was our choir. We had choir first thing in the morning. It was mostly an uncontrollable situation that the teacher didn't have very much control over. It was all girls; the girls would run around and would cuss each other out, etc., etc.

But anyhow, in this strangely integrated situation, some-times questionable things happened, and this was very questionable in that my sister and I were goofing off one morning--

Landes

In choir?

Lacy

Yes, in the choir room. We both were acting up, and I called her an asshole. All of a sudden, my teacher was so shocked that he sent me to the principal's office. Of course, that was really unnerving because I wanted to know why I had to be picked out and sent to the principal's office when this went on all the time. And so I can remember going to the principal and being really,

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really scared that if they sent me home I was going to be in deep trouble.

I can remember the teacher coming down with me, and I started to cry and said, "You're just picking on me because I'm colored." And everybody was really shocked that I would accuse them of being prejudiced, but I can remember how they really backed off. The vice principal takes me home and explains [chuckling] that I'm sick. Of course, I had a headache by then. But she did not tell my mother about the incident. She just brought me home, sick. But for me that was a real significant difference in the way that I was treated as opposed to my white classmates.

Landes

So it sounds like you often saw--

Lacy

Inequities.

Landes

--the African-Americans in the school being treated very differently from the whites?

Lacy

Oh, absolutely. For me, that was a small amount.

Landes

Can you give another example?

Lacy

Again, I think the major, major problem, if you will, was at the integrated social functions, where black students and white students were closely watched to be sure there was no social interplay between us. Black kids sat on one side of the gym; white kids sat on the other side of the gym. We might meet outside and talk. We might even take off and go to an outside beer party or something, but in the school we were watched very carefully to be sure that we did not mingle together.

Landes

What about the expectations that your teachers had of you for after school?

Lacy

That was a really, really sore point with me. I'm glad you brought that up. Because throughout high school we were shunted off into classes that were less academic, and my mother insisted that--we expected, because we came from the South--expected to have high academic skills and interests. And so I can remember the first--well, there were other, more subtle kinds of problems, but the one that really became a loggerhead for me was when, after taking biology, I wanted to take chemistry, and the vice principal, Mrs. Gerligher, who was the gatekeeper for everything, decided that I wasn't going to college, and we had blowups about that earlier, where I said I was going to college and she said I

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wasn't going to college, that I was just going to be like the rest of my people and have babies.

Landes

How did you feel when she told you that?

Lacy

Oh, I was very resentful of it, and I told her so. As a matter of fact, it was a motivational factor for me to [chuckling] going on to college. You know, people talk about role models. She was my role model for doing everything that she said I wasn't going to do. But she put stumbling blocks in our way. But because my family had a much higher expectation--

Landes

Of you five children, how many went to college?

Lacy

All of us eventually graduated.

Landes

And how many of the other--

Lacy

Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. All but one. My sister Janie did not. She went to college after her kids were grown. As a matter of fact, she went back to high school and graduated after her children were in college. That was the one person who--

Landes

She eventually graduated also?

Lacy

From high school and then took college courses later on, but she did go to college.

Landes

Did other African-American students in McCloud go on to college?

Lacy

No. There was one person, Ben Anderson, who had graduated from high school years and years and years before, and he was kind of famous because he went to college. He went to Chico State for three years. He didn't graduate. But I was the first black college-bound student to graduate from McCloud High.

Landes

And Mrs. Gerligher was your motivation?

Lacy

Yes, yes, right. I think maybe when she asked students to raise their hands about whether or not they'd go to college, I had to think about that because I hadn't really thought about it before. I can remember just trying to--raising my hand a little bit, you know, and finally, when she said, "You're not going to go to college," I determined that absolutely I was going to go to college. But in the meantime I had been taking college-accredited courses, so I must have had it in my mind somewhere.

---

Landes

You have cited a couple of examples where you spoke out very clearly about the issue of race. Why do you think you were able to do that? What led to--

Lacy

Because of my mother and father. No other reason. My mother was extremely outspoken, and she was a very proud and dignified person, and she passed that on to us.

The other thing, though, too, about all of this education stuff was my mother didn't have an education. She didn't know how to read and write, as a matter of fact.

Landes

As an adult as well?

Lacy

As an adult. My father, on the other hand, had graduated from a Mississippi school at eighth grade, which was considered the ultimate in education for most blacks. But my memory of my mother is her constant telling of how her father wouldn't allow her to go to school. Now, her grandmother and her step-grandfather were both people who were literate, who read and could write. Her step-grandfather was a very skilled buggy maker, as I recall my grandmother telling us.

But at any rate, they had often sent for her at school time so she could go to school, and they would buy her school clothes and would buy her books and her shoes. As soon as she was enrolled in school, her father would send her mother down to bring her home. The father, as I recall, his comment was, "She doesn't need an education. God damn it, I'm okay. I'm livin' without an education, so she doesn't need one either." So he would always make my grandmother come and take her out of school, and they always said, "How apt, a-p-t, she was as a student," meaning she was smart. But she was not allowed. So this was one of the major regrets that she had in her life, and she talked about it constantly. I think that was the major motivating factor for me.

Landes

As a child, did you know any people with disabilities?

Lacy

Oh, yes. I knew lots of people with disabilities. Of the ones I remember most were blind. In McCloud, as a child I was kind of farmed out to the lady next door--Aunt Kate, we called her; Katie Winbush, who was blind. She needed someone to stay overnight with her because she was nervous, I guess. Well, there were a number of women I was farmed out to (women whose husbands worked at night), but Aunt Kate just happened to be blind. But, you know, this woman was extremely independent, and I was just amazed at how she managed in her own house. You know, doing her own cooking and housekeeping and stuff like that. So she was one person that I remember having a real close relationship with.

---

But even as a small child, with my family running this boarding house, we had people coming in and out who were either boarders or roomers who came to spend the night. One of the things I remember was that I liked to imitate people. So if someone came that had a physical disability--he had a crutch or something--I would grab the crutch, you know, when they laid it down, and I would limp along like they did, you know? And they thought that was so cute.

Landes

You were doing it for fun.

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

You weren't making fun of them.

Lacy

Oh, no, not at all! I wouldn't dare make fun of anybody. I'd get killed. That was just a way we were raised.

But the other incident that comes back to me from time to time is as a little kid I used to wander from bed to bed in the middle of the night, and I wanted to sleep with my mother and father and I'd crawl into bed. But this particular night, they blocked me. I went to the side, and they blocked me; and I went to the foot, and I couldn't get in. I tried all around the bed [chuckling]. So finally I gave up, and I wandered into this blind man's room, and so I tried to get in bed with him, so he boosted me up on the bed, and I went back to sleep! The next morning, everybody was looking for me. They couldn't figure out where I was. They were calling for me. And this man says, "She's in here. She's in here with me." And I can remember how scared and frightened my mother was when she found me in the bed with this blind man [chuckling]. But I don't know what transpired after that because he never came back! The man didn't harm me or molest me or anything. It was not a bad thing, but I think, you know, the adults might have suspected all kinds of things.

Landes

That he crossed a line.

Lacy

Yes, right.

Landes

Any other types of disabilities that you had experience with as a child?

Lacy

Well, obviously, there were lots of people with language impairments, stutterers. One of my favorite playmates before I went to school was a little boy the same age as I, named Jack. We called him Jack Jr. He was tongue-tied, as we called it then. What would you call it now where, you know, your speech isn't clear?

---

Landes

Probably a speech impairment.

Lacy

It was a speech impairment of some kind. And that was my best friend. His mother would get him dressed and cleaned up, and my mother would get me all dressed and comb my hair, and then we would meet at the clay dirt hill, and we would play in the clay dirt. We would eat a little bit, and we would make toys. It was just a fun place, and we just had automatically met there every morning after we'd have our breakfasts, until we started to go to school. So that was one of my early playmates.

Landes

Did you know any people with polio, or that had polio?

Lacy

Probably later on. I didn't know any people I can remember who were in wheelchairs. I don't remember anybody too much with spinal cord injuries who used wheelchairs. I knew a lot of people who used crutches and canes for one reason or another, either because they had been in some kind of accident or they had been injured, shot or whatever. But using a wheelchair was just not something--. The only person that I knew used a wheelchair was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he was famous.

Landes

And you remember him using a wheelchair?

Lacy

Oh, yes.

Landes

Despite the fact that he tried to hide it?

Lacy

Yes, despite the fact. There were times when we would--of course, there was not television, but we would maybe see pictures, rare pictures of him using a wheelchair. I guess one of the reasons I remember him so well was because he was just an extremely admired president, adulated by most black people, I would say, in the South but especially by my family. I can remember the Fireside Chats, where we all had to sit under the radio and listen to his conversations. And the really scary and sad time when he died and, you know, the funeral. I can remember just so many memories, doing the stumpings during his campaigns on the train. And we always listened to the Democratic--and the Republican--conventions from early childhood. So he was a hero, and I remember a lot about him.

Landes

And you were aware that he had had polio?

Lacy

Yes, I'm sure I did, even though I didn't know what polio was.

Landes

What did these experiences with a variety of disabled people mean to you? What did you draw from that?

---

Lacy

Again, because it was mostly my mother's influence. They were just people, like everybody else was. I didn't see them in any stereotypical way. [chuckling] The only thing I remember is Mother commenting that blind people pretended that they couldn't see so they felt you. They'd take the opportunity to feel on the women. And I still hear that comment, you know, about Ray Charles! But they were just people.

Landes

What experiences and influences in what we've talked about so far in your early life do you think were instrumental and important in shaping you as a future leader?

Lacy

Oh, I think my involvement in all aspects of community life, including church. I think being actively involved in the church gave me an opportunity to be a leader because there I was. I could teach Sunday school as a child. I could, in my early years, do speeches, the little Christmas and Easter speeches, where you'd get up and perform in front of an audience.

Again, I have a really, really neat memory that's going to go in my book when I get it written. When I was about nine years old, I was chosen to represent my church at the Baptist convention, which came to Monroe at the time. I remember going to the convention and waiting to be called to perform, and in the meantime I went to sleep and when I woke up there was this really, really crowded church, and all the kids had gone home, and here my sister and I were sitting there, and I had fallen asleep. Finally, the deacon of our church came over, and he wanted to know why we were still there--because all the other kids had gone. And so we explained to him that I was waiting to sing because that's what I was supposed to do. He said, "Well, all the other kids"--He said, "Wait. I'm going to go over and talk to the man in charge, and I'm going to see if he'll let you sing before the main event comes on." So he went over, and he came back, and the minister in charge said, "We have a young lady who was supposed to be on the program." As time went on, I remember his words more clearly because he said, "Before Sister Haley sings, we want to have this child come up." And he says, "You don't mind," he says, "Haley, that this child sings." And she said, "Oh, no, Reverend" whatever the reverend was. She said, "I'll let my accompanist accompany her." And so I got up and I sang, and they had this big booming organ and the piano was playing, and I was like the big hit of the convention that night. Everybody gave me a big clap.

Well, of course, children were revered in the South. That's number one. But it was years and years and years later that I realized that Miss Haley was Mahalia Jackson and that I had in fact sung prior to her coming on to give her concert. So that took on quite a lot more meaning as time went by.

---

Landes

So you did a lot of public speaking and a lot of public performing as a child.

Lacy

Yes. Pretty much, yes.

Landes

So that certainly provided you with good skills that you used later.

Lacy

Oh, yes. I was always the one chosen to go to any kind of speaking event from the school. I can remember being--

Landes

From McCloud?

Lacy

Yes, in McCloud. And in Louisiana, as well. I didn't do as much speaking in Louisiana because I was much younger, but certainly in McCloud I went to all of the events that required participation.

Landes

Is there anything else that you'd like to say about your experience growing up in McCloud and how you think it shaped you as a person later in life?

Lacy

Well, coming from a small town, I think I did have a lot greater opportunity to take on the role of leader. One of my former bosses commented on it. It seems like people who come from small towns tend to be much more community-minded and have more leadership, and I think at that time he used Warren Widener, who was the mayor of Berkeley at the time, coming from a small town in northern California, as being an example of that kind of person. But I think it is true that we are less inhibited because we're much more accepted and more nurtured by adults.

Attendance at Chico State University

Landes

So you graduated from high school in 1954? Is that right?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And you then went to Chico State?

Lacy

Exactly.

Landes

Why did you choose Chico State, and what did you want to study when you went there?

Lacy

I chose Chico State, number one, because it was the closest college to home, and I wanted to be able to get back home if I

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needed to. I didn't want to be too far away from the family. But the other part was that out of this high school graduating class--we were a very unique class. We were very close. And all of the students, pretty much, who went to college went to Chico State. It was our local college.

##

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Landes

You were talking about you and a lot of your classmates going to Chico State, which was the closest college to your hometown. What was it like when you arrived on the campus of Chico State? What were your first impressions?

Lacy

Well, I lived in the dorm. It was very exciting to be away from home. I can remember one of the first significant things that I did was to smoke a cigarette openly [chuckling], instead of hiding in the bathroom or something like that. So I really felt very grown-up, adult, and yet at the same time close enough to keep base with my family at home.

But the other thing, I think, was having other kids from McCloud be there made me feel still like I was part of McCloud. I can remember one of the things that was almost an afterthought from being part of a segregated, non-social with whites in McCloud was that when I signed up for a dorm room, I signed up for an African-American roommate. When I got there, my roommate that had been assigned to me who was African-American decided to drop out, and so I was really, really concerned about having a white roommate at the time.

My major concern was about my hair. I didn't want whites to know that I pressed my hair and that I needed to press my hair, and that was not something I was ready to expose myself to at that time.

Landes

So did you have a white roommate that first year?

Lacy

No. It turns out that a black girl from Red Bluff showed up, and so I was assigned to her in the dorm.

Landes

In your time at Chico State, did you ever have a white roommate?

Lacy

No. I was there for two years, and of those two years I had the same roommate.

Landes

Was there much social interaction among whites and blacks at Chico State?

---

Lacy

Some. For some, and for others--oh, dear. I don't even know how to describe that situation. In spite of all of these things--exposure to public stuff--I was really, really shy. My roommate, on the other hand, was very, very outgoing. And so we mostly, based upon her interaction, became involved with the big hunks on campus, all who had much more of an integrated experience than I ever did. My roommate, being from Red Bluff, was the only African-American in the whole entire school, so all of her experiences were integrated.

Landes

You mean the only African-American in her high school.

Lacy

In her high school, yes. And so we hung around a lot on campus. We hung around the cafeteria--

Landes

How many African-American students were there at Chico State?

Lacy

At that time--let's see--Frances--six. There were six. Two commuters from Oroville and four who lived on [campus].

Landes

Six out of the thousands of students.

Lacy

Yes. At Chico State at that time there must have been 1,200 students. It's not the same Chico State in terms of buildings and people. It's a real huge campus now.

Landes

What was your experience like at Chico State?

Lacy

Oh, I loved Chico State. It was wonderful. And that wasn't to say that I didn't experience certain racial kinds of incidents, but being on the campus, it was like all of these students were together and everybody treated everybody the same. There were one or two incidents in which I would go to a party and I'd hear racial things being said--not to me but just generally. But we partied a lot. We hung out with each other. But there was still that close tie among the blacks on campus, but not exclusively.

Landes

Did you as a black person feel relatively comfortable at Chico State?

Lacy

Yes, very much.

Landes

How did your instructors treat you? Did they have high expectations for you, or do you feel they in some way talked down to you?

Lacy

I think less expectation. As I was saying in high school, I was never expected to earn more than a C, even though I might have done A and B work; that there were some teachers, especially Mrs.

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Gerligher, who never saw fit to--if I got a B from her, that meant I was really, really good. If I got an A from another teacher, she'd make them trim it down to a B or less.

I think the attitude was pretty much the same at Chico State. One of the things I remember is when we took our entrance exam--placement exam is what they called it--to see what level you were in terms of your knowledge. From that, you had to go the dean and they would interpret this in terms of whether or not you could take advanced courses or whether you could take average courses. For some reason or other, his interpretation really stuck in my head because--at the time, it stuck in my head because he said that I'd have to work really, really hard in order to succeed. Well, again, [chuckling] I learned later on that he said this to most of the students because we were all considered average.

Landes

Most of the black students?

Lacy

All the students, whites and blacks. But I really felt very strongly that it was racially motivated.

Landes

When, in fact, he didn't have very high expectations.

Lacy

That's right! [chuckling] As a matter of fact, I babysat for him over the years, and as it turns out, he was also from the South, and it was my first introduction to white people eating beans, because I thought only black people ate beans and corn bread. [chuckling]

But I really liked Chico State. I loved the atmosphere, the campus atmosphere.

Landes

What did you major in there?

Lacy

Nursing.

Landes

Why did you choose nursing?

Lacy

I really don't know! Out of any number of things I thought about, education and teaching and nursing were the most tangible kinds of subject matter.

Landes

And when did you decide to major in nursing--at Chico State or prior to Chico State?

Lacy

When I graduated from high school and I applied, I applied to the nursing division. This was a brand-new school at Chico State. Again, I was the first black person to be accepted in the nursing

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program. When I left, there were three blacks. It was very small. I think maybe there were, out of the all of the nursing students, there were twelve students at that time. So it was a real new program at that time.

Landes

And you were at Chico State for two years?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

Studying nursing?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And then what did you do after that two-year period?

Lacy

I was a student at the hospital where we did our practical nursing, which was San Francisco General Hospital.

Landes

So after two years at Chico, you moved to San Francisco?

Lacy

Right. Or I would have moved--I moved there for the summer, to do a summer course, and then I spent part of the summer in Oakland with my sister. That's when I got polio. I would have gone back to San Francisco for two years to finish up.

Landes

So you would have gone to San Francisco County General?

Lacy

Yes, exactly.

Contracting Polio at Nineteen Years Old: 1956

Landes

Tell me about getting polio. What happened? What do you remember about getting sick?

Lacy

The thing I remember was that this was a major epidemic. I remember that the Salk and the Sabin vaccines came out just prior to my getting polio.

Landes

And you had polio in the summer of 1956?

Lacy

Yes. And I remember nursing students all around me were getting sick.

Landes

With polio?

---

Lacy

Yes. One or two of them died. When I returned for the fall semester, I would have gotten the polio vaccine, but two weeks--and the time is really grey now because I'm getting sick, and I'm not really making a lot of sense in terms of time sequence, but it seemed like about two weeks prior to my going back to San Francisco State, I went to Highland Hospital on Labor Day, and I was diagnosed with polio.

Landes

What were your first symptoms?

Lacy

I was going back to that, in tracing back. I started getting really severe headaches. Because I knew I was going to go home, I thought I needed my glasses. I needed glasses, and I thought I had to have my eyes examined because I was feeling blurred vision and headaches. But I was still functioning at a minimal level, and each day getting worse and worse, to a point where I was just kind of laying around. I'd get up and get dressed, but--

Landes

You were living at your sister's home?

Lacy

Yes, I was living with my sister at that time. I remember my aunt in Washington, D.C., was visiting and so on Labor Day, after she had been there overnight, she saw my condition. She suggested that I see a doctor, and so we called one of the local doctors in West Oakland and described the symptoms to him. He suggested that I be taken to Highland immediately. So we went in a taxi to Highland, and I can remember waiting, the emergency waiting room, and then finally being called to go into an examining room.

In the meantime, a nurse or a doctor or somebody had come along to kind of do the--

Landes

Initial workup?

Lacy

Yes. What do they call it now? There's a fancy word they call it--triage. But at any rate, they asked me if I had a stiff neck; they asked me if I had a sore throat. I told them about the headache, and they immediately moved me into another room and said that I was going to have to take a spinal tap.

Landes

They immediately suspected polio?

Lacy

Yes. Well, it was right in the middle of a huge epidemic. That was the obvious diagnosis. [chuckling] I had all the signs. The only thing was that I was still walking. So I was taken into the room. They gave me a cot to lie down on. And so some others would come back in to check on me.

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In the meantime, they brought a little boy into the room. He was given a cot also. And then somebody came in and said, "What is this child doing in here? Don't you know this woman is suspected of having polio?" And they immediately rushed the little boy out. This is in spite of the fact that I was a nursing student. I had no idea what was happening to me.

Landes

How did you feel when you heard them inadvertently talking to each other?

Lacy

There was urgency in their voice that made me know that I was in serious trouble.

Landes

And how did you feel about that?

Lacy

I was in denial. I still thought that it was my eyes and that I had a headache because my eyes needed examining, so when I was finally seen by a doctor to do the spinal tap--which they said it didn't hurt, but it was really painful [chuckling]--and they sent the spinal fluid to the lab, this is when I found out that I really did have polio. My recollection was that they wanted me to stay in isolation overnight or for a few days so that they could observe me, so I was put in isolation.

Even though I was weak, I'd say for two or three days I would get up and go to the bathroom and everything, until the last day that I walked. I can remember getting out of bed, going in the bathroom, very painfully and all that. Came back to get in the bed, and I couldn't quite make it. And I was struggling to get in the bed, and someone peeped through the window and saw me, and said, "You're not supposed to get up. Don't get out of bed again." And so I gradually became totally paralyzed.

Landes

Were you able to move your arms?

Lacy

Initially, I was not able to do anything, not even breathe.

Landes

So you were in an iron lung?

Lacy

Yes. I was placed in an iron lung. Also, that was when I also learned that I experienced--was a near-death experience, which I was not aware of in terms of the connotation of near-death experience. What I can remember--things that happened that--in the middle of the night--that were very urgent, like my family was there. I went through this experience of drifting toward the light and almost reaching the light, with the tunnel, and being brought back. I can remember being--what is it you put in your veins?

---

Landes

The IV?

Lacy

IV. And the doctors searching for a vein and winding up with the IV connected to my ankle because that was the only vein they could find. And later on, having the breathing tube in my throat and being in the iron lung and being fed by nurses and stuff like that. So these are just things I remembered, just all kind of like snatches of memory, but not really completely aware of what was happening.

Landes

Do you remember anything about your emotional reaction to all of this?

Lacy

I was angry, frustrated. I can remember one incident because at the time it seemed like I cried a lot, just like I'm doing now--you know, the tears come down--but that it wasn't really crying; it was the loss of control and the paralysis, even down to the facial movements, the tear ducts involuntarily flowing. I can remember they put a little--oh, what do you call it? Like a speaker in my room, and then there was a speaker on the outside because--

Landes

Intercom?

Lacy

Yes, intercom. And having to talk to people through the intercom because they weren't allowed in the room.

Landes

Your family was not allowed in the room?

Lacy

No. Only the nurses who were masked and the whole thing. I was still in isolation.

Landes

What do you remember about the initial reaction of your parents and the rest of your family?

Lacy

Well, I was going to say that, because I couldn't see them. Only through this little peep hole. I was aware that more than just my mother was there, but I can remember me getting just so angry with her because I guess she was trying to comfort me, but she was telling me not to cry and all kinds of stuff. You know, This happens to other people and you just--and I can remember getting so angry at her words because "Don't cry"? How can I not cry? Here I am, locked up in this room and I can't move, and I can't breathe and all of those things, so it was really kind of a ridiculous admonition, as I recall.

Landes

So you were angry at your mother as well.

Lacy

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

---

Landes

How long were you in the iron lung? Roughly.

Lacy

I'd say two weeks, and then they went to a chest respirator, and I used that for a couple of weeks.

Landes

So after a couple of weeks you began to regain some of your muscle?

Lacy

Oh, no. Not at all. After two weeks, the fever subsided and the real paralysis took place. I still had to be fed, turned over several times, but the next sensation for me was the pain that the fever had left. My muscles were just totally, like, full of fire, and I could barely stand to be touched at all. This was my education about what polio was really like. After the fever subsides, they immediately transferred me to Fairmont Hospital, which was the polio rehab center at the time. That's when all the treatment of the hot packs, those scratchy wooly things, were applied to your muscles.

Landes

How long were you at Fairmont?

Lacy

Nine months, initially. And that's--after the hotpacks--it was just a full therapy program. They did the muscle stretching to keep my muscles from tightening up. I never got the water treatment that everybody always said, "You should do the water treatment." I never got water treatment.

Landes

Like Warm Springs.

Lacy

Yes, right. And they did have them there, but I never got them. But that's when I started to regain some of my strength. But it actually took a couple of years before I reached the minimal strength, which was not a lot. I'm still not considered to have a lot of strength.

Landes

So you were rehabbing for what? A couple of years?

Lacy

Yes. Initially, nine months. Then I went home to McCloud for three months for the summer, and then I came back. For about two or three years, I'd come back for reevaluation and more rehab, and I would stay about three months each time.

Landes

Where were you doing this? At Fairmont Hospital?

Lacy

Fairmont Hospital.

Landes

Were there other people at Fairmont that you remained friends with that had polio?

---

Lacy

Billy Tainter, Ed Roberts.

Landes

So you knew Ed and Bill? They were all there at Fairmont?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And Bill Tainter later--well, Ed became the first disabled director of the Department of Rehab. [California State Department of Rehabilitation]

Lacy

And then later on Bill also became director of the Department of Rehab. Bill was one of the originators of independent living centers in southern California. Ed was eventually the director of CIL [Center for Independent Living], and later on I was also the director of an independent living center in Hayward, CRIL. [Community Resources for Independent Living, Inc.]

Landes

So there were at least three very important people in the independent living movement who came out of that--shall we say the graduating class of '56?

Lacy

Yes, yes. Well, they all had--Ed was one of the earlier post-polios, and then Bill. And so when I came in, they were doing what I would have later done, which was come back for reevaluations and stuff like that.

Landes

So they had had polio prior to you.

Lacy

Yes, right.

Decision to Attend San Francisco State University, 1958-1960

Landes

Once you realized that you had polio and once you realized that it was quite likely you were going to have a lifelong disability, what did that lead you to think about the remainder of your life? Did you think that you were going to be able to get a job and work and live independently?

Lacy

Oh, absolutely. There was never any doubt in my mind. People were amazed at this, but unquestionably I was going to go back to college. I must have talked about this so much that even before there was any thought of my leaving the rehab center, I had already been referred to the Department of Rehabilitation. I had all of my aptitude tests and skills tests and all of that were started while I was at Fairmont.

---

Landes

Who was your counselor to the Department of Rehabilitation?

Lacy

Initially, I don't remember. There was a man who came to the hospital and did all my tests and that kind of stuff, more intake kind of stuff. And then I was immediately assigned to Miss Butcher, Catherine B. Butcher.

Landes

What was that experience like, going to the Department of Rehabilitation?

Lacy

Actually, I didn't go. They came to me. You mean being a client.

Landes

Becoming a client of the Department of Rehabilitation.

Lacy

Well, I've been told that this was an unusual reaction, but what I've learned is that DR counselors and the Department have so few highly-motivated individuals that if you had motivation and knew what you wanted, they did everything. They turned over the world for you. And I was very clear about what I wanted.

Landes

So Catherine Butcher found a very motivated individual.

Lacy

Right, exactly.

Landes

And so how did plans proceed for you to return to college?

Lacy

Let's see. Well, all the aptitude tests and stuff first. They even gave me an intelligence test and told me that I was intelligent, which was the first time I had heard that from anybody white.

##

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Landes

We were talking about your getting into the Department of Rehabilitation as a client.

Lacy

Right. I was assigned a counselor while I was still in the hospital. That was really important for me because I had decided not to go back into nursing, even though I was offered a scholarship by the Nursing Department while I was flat on my back at Fairmont Hospital. My nursing director and the whole group, students and all, came to visit me, and they were pleased to announce that they were offering a scholarship. I had discovered to myself that I really didn't [chuckling] like the nursing program all that well. There was a lot of prejudice there.

Landes

A lot of prejudice at Fairmont?

Lacy

No, at the nursing school.

---

Landes

At Fairmont.

Lacy

No, at Chico State. These were Chico State faculty and staff who came to visit me at Fairmont from San Francisco because that's where my class had gone. My entire class had gone that fall. So they all came over to visit me, and this is when the director of nursing for the school--not for the hospital--offered me a scholarship. I was really resentful of that because before I got polio, I was really very much in need. The only way that I was able to go to school was my mother taking a live-in job as a housekeeper so she could pay for my expenses, and my working part-time in the school cafeteria. In the meantime, they had given out scholarships to other needy students, but I was not considered.

Landes

This was at Chico State.

Lacy

At Chico State. What was even sort of interesting was that they gave this one girl all of her uniforms, they gave her a watch, they gave her all the new equipment that she needed. They totally ignored me. A nursing instructor observed this and, interestingly enough, this was a nursing instructor who was from New Orleans, Louisiana. Observed this and one day she gave me her own watch that she had used when she was a nursing student. She was really, really ticked off by the fact that my needs had been ignored. So that kind of transferred to me. When I got this offer of a scholarship--in my opinion, lying flat on my back, not being able to move a muscle--I couldn't imagine how I could use a scholarship to become a nurse. I found out that there were administrative positions in nursing that I could have taken, but by this time I was totally turned off to nursing.

And so therefore my rehab counselor had to help me explore another area that I wanted to go into, and I chose speech therapy. And that's a long story! Probably we can hold it till next time.

Landes

But the short version is that you went back to San Francisco State.

Lacy

San Francisco State.

Landes

When?

Lacy

In 1958.

Landes

Can you sum up your initial experience with the Department of Rehabilitation? How did you feel about your relationship with your counselor and the Department?

---

Lacy

I just felt warm and fuzzy. This woman was totally interested in me, in my desire to go back to school. She and the Department did everything they could think of to prepare me for returning to college. They arranged for me to do field trips to check out the various professions. I wanted to stay in the medical profession. They arranged for me to have meetings and interviews with people who were in speech therapy, to see what it was like and what it might be like for me as a person with a disability to enter that profession. They arranged for me to have paid transportation when I went back to school, because at that time motorized wheelchairs were just not very common, and they weren't very reliable even if they were around. There was just so much that was done to prepare me for re-entering the academic world. As much as I think DR was capable of doing.

The one criticism that I have of DR--and I think it still exists--is that they can prepare you educationally or vocationally. They can train you, but they are not that successful in getting you a job. My rehab counselor eventually found me a job.

Experiences at Fairmont Hospital Rehab

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---

Landes

Johnnie, I'd like to go back to something we were talking about earlier, and that is when you were at Fairmont Hospital, you met Ed Roberts and Bill Tainter. Did any of the three of you, or collectively, do any talking about what we might conceive as independent living?

Lacy

No, not in a way that it was preconceived. I was nineteen at the time. I think Bill was fourteen, and Ed was somewhere in the middle of us. I didn't see Ed a lot. As a matter of fact, I saw his mother probably more than I saw Ed, mainly because Ed was not quite as mobile as the rest of us because he needed to use the iron lung.

Landes

His mother is Zona Roberts?

Lacy

Yes, Zona. And so I knew who Ed was and I had gone down to his ward and said hello, but I think most of my interaction was with Bill. Also, I need to probably add that the polio ward at Fairmont at that time was a thriving, booming disabled community, mostly of young people between the ages of, say, twelve or thirteen up through, oh, probably the oldest person was thirty. But within that group there was a core group of teenagers of about six, maybe six or seven, at the highest number.

Our discussions were more around Elvis Presley and Little Richard, who Bill loved and played at the highest volume. You

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could hear it all over the ward. And any other kinds of teenage subject matter, including our disgust and our dislike for the authoritarian atmosphere that went on. I think that was a major thrust of our conversations, was how we were ordered around, how we had to go to bed at a certain hour, that--

And let me just give you an example, for--I was going to say for example. One day, while we were sitting around, just talking and pitching bull, somebody got the bright idea that we were going to run away because we were just sick and tired of being basically ordered around by the nurses. Since we all were kind of confined to the ward, we cooked up the scheme that we were going to all take ourselves up to the roof because nobody would ever look for us there.

That was an interesting kind of practice in independence, as I think about it. There--as I said, like six or seven, seven or eight teenagers. I was the oldest. I was nineteen. And then everybody else kind of flowed from me: seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen and so on and so forth. There was a lot of flirting and courtship that was going on also among the teenagers, but that's another story.

But the difference in disabilities was what was the interesting part because there were one or two of us who walked with braces; there were several of us who used wheelchairs. Bill used a wheelchair, but he walked around because he's an upside-down polio, so his legs were really strong but he had no musculature in his arms and upper body. Also, he had to use a portable respirator which he pulled around.

So the exercise of taking the elevator and getting up the stairs with all these various kinds of people with various kinds of disabilities was interesting, so we had to really organize this so that, for example, June couldn't push herself that well. She could push some, but she had the old paraknobs that they use on the old push wheelchairs. So that was going to be difficult for her. So it was organized--I think mostly Bill because Bill had the biggest beef with the nurses. He was really catching it, catching hell from them because he was so independent and they were trying to keep him under control, keep him under wraps, and not very well.

Landes

Were you one of the organizers also?

Lacy

I was in on it. I think I was going along for the ride. I felt, you know, like I was a little too adult for these kind of things. But I wanted to be part of the group, and so I was--everyone was throwing in ideas. But as it turned out, the folks who had more

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mobility helped the folks who had less mobility. At that time, I think I used one of those right-hand drive kind of wheelchairs. There was no such thing as motorized wheelchairs in those days, so it really was an exercise. We made several trips up to the roof, and we were snickering and sneaking in and trying to be quiet so the nurses wouldn't know what was going on.

So we succeeded in getting up to the roof and just were up there, having a ball. Dinnertime passed and people started looking for us, but we had been there, say, a couple of hours and just really having a couple of hours of freedom, without anybody interfering with us and stuff like that. Eventually, a nurse decided to look up on the roof and so she found us. Of course, everybody had to be "taken back." We had gotten up there okay, but we had to be "taken back" down.

Landes

It sounds like it was a collective effort and--

Lacy

Oh, absolutely.

Landes

--that you were working together--

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

--and that you saw yourselves with common problems, mainly the staff and the nurses.

Lacy

Yes. The institutionalization, I think, was really it. Everybody could pretty much agree to at least some of those issues, if not everything.

Landes

Did you at all talk about what you thought your lives were going to be like once you got out of Fairmont?

Lacy

No. I don't think we did. I really don't. But I think everybody--to me, the key was that everybody wanted to be self-sufficient, and we wanted to be able to be involved in our own decision-making and that the rules and the guards, the nursing guards, stood in our way of our freedom. That's, to me, the basic tenets of independent living, to this day.

Landes

So the roots were already there, and it sounds like you were clear as a group that you did not want to be institutionalized for the rest of your life.

Lacy

Oh, absolutely. And this was encouraged. This was not the kind of rehab center where people expected to be there for any long periods of time. The idea was to prepare us to then move out to wherever we were going to move out. But I don't think the concept

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of us moving out on our own and living on our own at this point in time was anything that was discussed. Perhaps it was thought of by other people, but for me, living on my own happened many years after, because this was in 1957. The first time I lived on my own was in the mid-sixties.

Landes

While you were at Fairmont, did you have any fears or concerns about how you were going to live when you left Fairmont?

Lacy

No, not at all. I think mostly because of the supportiveness of my family and, you know, friends. I had lots of friends. I wasn't deeply concerned about how I was going to--all I knew was that I was going back to school and that I was going to have to get myself organized in a way that I could get the kind of support I needed. Like, I needed someone to push me around on campus, stuff like that.

Landes

When did you make the decision to go back to school, to San Francisco State?

Lacy

That decision pretty much was made from day one. San Francisco State was not the--I think one of the rehab counselors must have recommended San Francisco State because by this time I was in a rehab facility, and all of my rehab was going to be centered around the Bay Area, and San Francisco State was really the closest college because we didn't have Cal State; we didn't have San Jose State--well, we might have had San Jose State just kind of just getting started, but a lot of the California campuses were not in existence. Chico State would be the next closest one.

Landes

So where did you live when you left Fairmont?

Lacy

I lived in West Oakland. One of the first things that happened was that arrangements were made for me to live with my sister, who lived in the Harbor Homes in West Oakland, over by the estuary. She was upstairs, so the housing project management found a two-bedroom unit in what was called Peralta Villa, which is around Tenth and Cypress. And they built a ramp for me, so we moved there. I lived in West Oakland until 1974.

Accessibility, Personal Relations, Expectations at SF State

Landes

And then you enrolled in San Francisco State in January?

Lacy

Yes, I started in the spring semester of 1958.

---

Landes

What do you remember about the first day that you went to San Francisco State?

Lacy

Mmm.

Landes

How did you get there?

Lacy

I'm trying to think. How did I get there? Seems to me my sister went with me to enroll, so she must have done the driving. But thereafter, my parents--my mother and father--took me every day that I had classes.

Landes

So your mother and father lived here in the Bay Area.

Lacy

They moved down to the Bay Area after I got polio.

Landes

And then they drove you to San Francisco State every day.

Lacy

Every day.

Landes

And how did you get around campus?

Lacy

I had various people that I hired through the Department of Rehab to push me from class to class. So my parents would drive me there, I would meet my pusher--at one time, my cousin--I think initially my cousin went with us, and so she pushed me around. I can remember the first day she showed up in a nursing uniform. [chuckling] I about had a fit!

Landes

You had a fit?

Lacy

Yes. And everybody accused me of being unreasonable and totally stubborn. And I said, "I'm not going if she goes in a uniform." So that put a stop to that.

Landes

Because you wanted to blend in with the other students?

Lacy

Well, I just didn't want to be perceived as being sick. That was all.

Landes

And were all the buildings accessible?

Lacy

None of the buildings were accessible.

Landes

So how did you get to class?

Lacy

I was pushed, literally pushed, initially by my cousin and then by people that I hired to push me. They would push me to my class,

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leave me there, and then they'd come back and push me to my next class.

Landes

Did they have to get you up stairs?

Lacy

No. I did ask for accommodations if I needed them in terms of classes being on a ground-level floor, but there was not that many situations where I needed to have the class moved to another floor; but on the one or two occasions, people did move, with no problem. Later on, I just kind of got pushed around by students who were moving along. I'd sit at the top of the hill, for example, and if I'd see somebody going down the hill, I'd hitchhike a ride down to the next class. I got really good at that, too.

Landes

How was the university in accommodating your requests?

Lacy

Not at all. They didn't want to accommodate my requests.

Landes

So, for example, when you would ask to have a classroom moved, how would that happen?

Lacy

I would have to contact the instructor.

Landes

So you went through the instructor, not the university.

Lacy

No. As you know, instructors have at least that power over their class. They can say yes or no to any kinds of requests that a student might have. But I can remember asking that they take a door off the bathroom stalls, and they wouldn't do that. They said there was some kind of state law that required that every stall have a door. And when I asked them to put up a curtain, they said no, they couldn't do that, either.

Another incident which I thought was absolutely silly was I learned to drift downhill in my push chair. It was right-arm drive. At that time, right-arm drives had steel bars that ran from one wheel to another, and sometimes this bar would kind of work its way out. I happened to be going from the uppermost part of the hill down a fairly--it wasn't a steep slope, but it was a slope that I had learned to negotiate. Unluckily for me, my bar came loose just as I was going past the administration building, and an administrator must have looked out as I stopped the chair with my one hand and kind of was struggling with it a little bit, but managed.

And the following week, in the student newspaper, there was a letter from the chancellor saying that students who used wheelchairs were not any longer allowed to be on the campus by

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themselves, and since I was only one of two people in wheelchairs on the campus, it had to be me [chuckling] that they were referring to.

Landes

So how did that make you feel when you saw that?

Lacy

Angry.

Landes

What did you do about it?

Lacy

I ignored it and proceeded to continue, without even a second thought. I got really good at that. Like I said, rolling back, organizing my classes, at the top of the hill, and coasting down to the next class and so forth, until I could manage to get to all of my classes pretty much in one day on my own.

Landes

In what other ways did the administration fail to accommodate your needs?

Lacy

There was this other incident which I thought also was really, really silly. And up until that time, rather than having a confrontation, I would just sort of deal with it myself and just kind of let it go. There was a doctor at the student health center who decided that--I went to be excused from P.E. because they didn't have any P.E. courses that were accessible. And she said she wasn't going to excuse me because there was an adaptable P.E. course. As it turned out, the adaptable P.E. course was taught by a very, very tight-assed woman who felt that everybody had to be treated the same, and you had to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know, the old concept around disability, that you had to do it on your own; you didn't need accommodation; you had to do it. You know, you just had to do it the best way you could.

I would go there, and I would get hooked up to pulleys. You know, the pull bars for exercising the muscles? I was never on time. My driver was never on time, so I always came in late. Eventually, one day she decided to confront me about coming in late and not being able to get to the class on time. I just became so angry I started to cry, because that's what I do when I get angry. I usually will start crying. And so I decided that I would go to the dean of students, and I would tell her that I wanted to get out.

Landes

That you wanted to get out of the P.E. class.

Lacy

Out of the P.E. class. So she says, "Well, why are you in there in the first place? You push yourself all over campus." I said, "Yes, that's right. I don't need that kind of exercise. And

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besides, I'm always late and I have to change my clothes and get back into my clothes. Then I'm late for the next class." And so on and so forth. But that was my first time really advocating for myself to the administration. Of course, she excused me and excused me out of the class. So I felt that I had gotten some support. That was the first support that I asked for and actually got, administratively.

Landes

How did you feel when you found yourself advocating for yourself?

Lacy

Oh, it felt powerful. I felt a new kind of power that I didn't realize.

Landes

And then did you do that more frequently from that point on?

Lacy

Not overtly. I don't think overtly. My thing was really just getting to class, which was difficult enough as it was, and learning how to manipulate myself on campus and developing a minimal kind of social atmosphere with other students. You have to understand that when I went to San Francisco State, it was an off-campus population. There were no dormitories, and so people commuted.

So most of my energy really was taken up in surviving this new situation where I was newly disabled, returning to class. And I really, at that point in time, even if I thought about being more political, it probably would have been in a whole different venue. I was not that acutely concerned about disability issues politically because there was a strong, growing kind of African-American movement, although this was well before the black student unions and all that student kind of thing. But I was more aware of generally being a student and reading newspaper articles, for example, on the campus. Talked about the student as nigger and how students were being treated and mistreated on the campus, without power.

Landes

So there were the beginnings of organization among African-American students?

Lacy

Oh, yes. There was a very strong--

Landes

And were you active in that?

Lacy

Not very much because, again, I was really limited, you know? I was a commuter student, just trying to keep up with transportation, keeping people who would be willing to drive me, to put my wheelchair in, take it out, to find someone to push me around the campus, to be able to get to my classes in a way that's going to accommodate me. There were just so many issues at that

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time that were personal issues centered around disability, but not disability rights per se.

Landes

And how do you think the other students treated you? Did they treat you as a disabled person or just another student or some combination?

Lacy

That's interesting. I think probably as some combination. There were some people that I made friends with who I saw on campus. There's one example that came to my mind. When I was a senior, some of the other people who were African-American leaders on the campus at that time were people like Ron Dellums and this guy whose name was Alfred Parham, who I later worked with in the anti-poverty program. A Big Man on Campus kind of thing. There was a large African-American fraternity group on campus. And so--

I think I mentioned before that I was kind of a shy person. I wasn't at that time very outstanding in terms of leadership. Plus I felt quite isolated as well on the campus because I didn't have the mobility to get around to social events or to meet all the people, but I was aware, very much aware, of these folks and the fact that there was a large black leadership movement on the campus. But I, as I had previously done in my earlier college era, was really on the periphery, as an observer.

Landes

Was there any effort to attempt to include you in in these political movements?

Lacy

No. Because I think everybody was, like, for themselves. That was what I was going to talk about. Everybody was trying to find a place on this campus, and there wasn't a core campus group that much because nobody lived on campus. So people tended to gather from previous experiences; like if they went to high school together, they would band together. On every campus there was a black student table where everybody gathered around and played with and talked the talk.

But in my senior year I met this young woman. Her name was Roscoe. By this time I had gotten to be pretty knowledgeable about the campus. There was one area that I used to hang out at, at the humanities building, I think, drama and stuff like that. So sitting out in the sun kind of talking with other students, this young woman who was a freshman just came up. Really, really friendly, and we got to talking. Apparently, she had classes around there, so we saw each other.

One day she asked me if I knew Ron Dellums. I said, "Well, yes, I know him." She says, "Do you know how I can meet him?" I said, "Well, not really, but I know they hang out playing cards

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over at the hut." So she eventually found a way to meet Ron Dellums and married him. So I can say that there were people that I still know that went to San Francisco State with. They were fairly friendly. Most people were friendly. It's just that they didn't--I don't think they had a lot of experience with people who were disabled.

Landes

What were your experiences like with your instructors? Did they accommodate you in ways that you needed?

Lacy

Some did and some didn't. Most of them didn't. I mean, I had people who I thought were racist; I had people who I thought were stupid; I had people who I thought--you know, they just ran the gamut. I can remember speaking to this one--my major was speech, public speaking, and I can remember talking to this one professor and calling to his attention--I don't know whether I was on the phone or something, but calling to his attention that I was in a wheelchair. And he swore that he hadn't noticed that before. And I thought that was just plain stupid, that he would say that he saw people as the same. And I still hear people saying that. And I still think it's a stupid thing to claim. I kind of challenged him on it, but I just laughed, mostly.

Landes

In other words, you think people should acknowledge differences.

Lacy

Of course they should! They should acknowledge their awareness of differences because you know they know the difference between somebody who's walking around and somebody who's in a wheelchair and somebody who's black and somebody who's another group, come from another group. I couldn't understand that. And he insisted that he couldn't see any differences in people.

##

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Landes

So we're talking about your two and a half years at San Francisco State. What were your classes like? You were in speech and drama. How do you feel--what expectations do you think your instructors had of you? Not only were you just disabled but you were an African-American. Did that have any impact on how you think they expected you to do?

Lacy

Yes, I definitely think so. At first it was subtle, I think mostly because I had the attitude that I would give people the benefit of the doubt. I'd prefer to believe that they believed in me as opposed to that they didn't believe in me. It became much clearer as I went through my classes that this was not always true. In many different forms, I--as part of my preparation for special ed, for example, I had this special ed teacher, and I learned later on that special ed people are the, probably the most

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prejudiced in terms of disabilities. She insisted on calling disabled people cripples because the Masonic Hospital for Crippled Children used the name and therefore it was a bona fide name.

Landes

And how did you feel about that term back then?

Lacy

I objected to it, and I did it loudly and in class. When she used the word "crippled," I would raise my hand and I'd say, "I don't want to be identified as crippled. I want to be as identified as handicapped," which was the word of choice at that time.

Landes

How did other students respond?

Lacy

They were very supportive. As a matter of fact, I can remember some of the students clapping when I confronted her at that time. When I approached--I did very well in all my special ed classes, and the director of special ed--I had taken a class from him and had done well in that class, and he knew that I wanted to major in speech therapy, and he started a campaign to discourage me.

Landes

Why?

Lacy

Because he said that the conditions for people in wheelchairs were not good, that a disabled person with my severe disability would not be able to drive--which I hadn't learned to drive at that time--they would be expected to go to the dark corners of schools and buildings that had stairs, there would be no accommodation, and he couldn't see any way in which I would be able to successfully become a speech therapist.

When I insisted, in order to convince me, he called together an urban panel of experts in the special education field--and they were a blue-ribbon panel--

Landes

From San Francisco State or outside the school?

Lacy

All over.

Landes

All over the country?

Lacy

All over the Bay Area. I can remember people who were heads of departments, of special ed department, professors in special ed, just a myriad of folks.

Landes

And what was the purpose of this group?

Lacy

Supposedly to examine my potential as a possible speech therapist. What it turned out to be was a panel who was not examining with me what my potential was but to discourage me from applying to the

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school. After I met with this panel, they all agreed that I could not do this. I insisted that I could. And the head of the department by this time said, "If you apply, I will not accept you. And the only other alternative you have is that you can take graduate courses on your own and work on your own, but you will not become a part of the department."

Landes

And this was the spring of your senior year?

Lacy

Yes. And my final and departing shot to him was that if I were just a woman, he could not do this to me; if I were only a person of color, he would not be able to do this to me; and my conclusion was that the only reason that--the only way that you would be able to take this unfair advantage is because I have a disability. And he got really upset and walked away. But that was my final shot with him.

Landes

Who was this?

Lacy

And I drew back from that. Oh, I would have remembered his name until a few years ago. I can't remember his name.

Landes

It was somebody in the speech therapy department?

Lacy

In the special ed department. A very distinguished and very respected professor.

Landes

What did that teach you, that incident?

Lacy

They told me that I had a number of alternatives and that I should think about other alternatives rather than putting all my eggs in one basket. That was my lesson.

Landes

What did it teach you about advocating for yourself? Was that a positive experience?

Lacy

A positive experience? I didn't learn very much from advocating for myself at that time, mainly because I was not that aware of the power structure, if you will, and how I could work through that, and I didn't have that kind of confidence in the administration that I could--I mean, this man was the top of his field, and if he said no, I believed that I would be butting my head against the wall if I went any further.

So it made me bitter in terms of the way I was treated and not given an opportunity to show that I could do it, in spite of the fact that I reminded them that I had spent two and a half years on this campus and that nobody expected me to succeed in that and that I had. I reminded him also that I had done well in

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all of the special ed classes that I had taken. And so if I could do that, I could certainly do other things. I said I could learn to drive, even. He doubted that very seriously.

Landes

But it sounds to me that you were certainly willing to do your best job of advocating for yourself.

Lacy

Yes, as best as I knew how to.

Landes

And that you certainly were not afraid to speak out.

Lacy

Oh, no. Not at all. No, I wasn't afraid to speak out. I think the main thing was I didn't know the various levels of power that I needed to understand--I didn't learn that until the early sixties. I mean the middle sixties, I should say.

Experiences with Other African-American Students

Landes

What were some of the best experiences that you had at San Francisco State?

Lacy

Hmm. I got to--hmm, how can I say that? Not meet--but I got to socialize with people who were different cultures. For example, my driver was Chinese and lived in Chinatown. He drove me for a number of years, and we developed a really close friendship. And I got to meet a lot of his friends, who were Chinese and Japanese, so I learned a lot about Asian people and the Asian culture.

Although I wasn't actively involved in the African-American social events, my brother James went to San Francisco State, and he started to drive me later on, and of course he was much more actively involved. And so that's when I became more actively involved in the social and political kinds of aspects of--

Landes

This is after you had graduated?

Lacy

Toward the end of my graduation. For example, he had a lot of friends, and he helped to formulate the Afro-American Association at that time. A few of his friends, Don Warden and Don Hopkins and, oh, Judge Ramsey, Henry Ramsey, and lots of articulate folks who were from various colleges and universities around the area. And so I used to hang out with them, and I got to know all of them.

But I basically was forming my own personal philosophy and political philosophy, and I never really felt completely a part of a movement, African-American movement, mainly because I was very much aware that I was not particularly acknowledged as an African-

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American with a disability who had ideas, who could contribute, and all of those things. That also was kind of a later development for me.

Landes

So it sounds like you felt as though people were seeing you as disabled first, rather than as being an able student?

Lacy

No, just the opposite. It has been problematic for blacks to identify with disability. My classmates would have had to accept my disability within the same intellectual framework as my blackness--that of an oppressed minority.

I believe that African Americans see disability in the same way that everybody else sees it--worthless, mindless--without realizing that this is the same attitude held by others toward African Americans. This belief in effect cancels out the black identity they share with a disabled black person, both socially and culturally, because the disability experience is not viewed in the same context as if one were only black, and not disabled. Because of this myopic view, I as a black disabled person could not share in the intellectual dialogue viewed as exclusive to black folk. In other words, I could be one or the other but not both.

Landes

How did that leave you feeling?

Lacy

I think it left me sort of feeling like I was kind of out there, hanging somewhere, not being a part of anything because there was no disability group at that time, and every other disabled person I had ever met was in the same situation, that they were trying to identify with something ethnic or some other thing. There wasn't a lot of disabled pride in those days because there weren't a lot of examples of disabled leaders and people who were really out there at the time, in the late fifties, early sixties, from a disability perspective.

The Graduation Ceremony, 1960 and 1982

Landes

You graduated from San Francisco State in 1960. What was the graduation like?

Lacy

That was an interesting situation. As I said earlier, anything that was centered around my disability I tend to organize myself. I still do. I trust myself because I think I understand what it is that I need and how I want to address the issues. So I decided that I wanted to graduate, and I had arranged for my cap and gown, I had arranged to have one of my really great classmates that I had taken a First Aid class and I think I had another class with him, George Stratogopolis. He was Greek. He had one of these

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really complicated Greek names with all the lyrical sounds. But at any rate, we went from class to class together, and if I ran into any barriers he would just pull me up the stairs because he was a really great physical kind of guy. So he said--I said I want to graduate, as we were talking, and he said, "Well, you need somebody to help you?" And I said, "Yeah. Why don't you meet me and you can push me down the hill and help me be seated." So I had it all arranged.

And at the last minute, I decided that I was going to notify the person who was coordinating the graduation that I was going to be there and that I had had this all set up. And he just went into hysteria. He says, "Oh, no, you can't do that." And I reiterated, "Well, why not? I've already made arrangements, got my cap and gown, got my pushers, got the whole thing." And he says, "Well, we have seats down there." And I says, "Well, can't you remove a seat?" And he says, "Oh, no. That will mess up my formation. You just can't do it." And so he agreed to give me tickets to the graduation, but I'd have to sit in the stands. I couldn't go down on the field.

So I graduated sitting at the top of the bleachers, about as far away from the graduating class as one could get. And, having picked up my cap and gown, I had those on my lap because by this time it was really clear that I wasn't going to be going on the field. My family--I had invited family and friends, and they were all just really upset and beside themselves.

I can remember one really compassionate teacher, my First Aid teacher, who seemed to be really withdrawn, to me--you know, she was just very stern--but who gave me an A in her class. She observed that I was upstairs, and she came over, and she wanted to know why [with her voice starting to crack], and I told her, and she was just outraged, you know, totally outraged. She turned out to be one of my friends. But that was my last experience.

Landes

Did you lodge any formal protest?

Lacy

No, I didn't. As a matter of fact, it only came to the attention of the university in 1982, during the Year of the Disabled. This was when I had gotten involved in the 504--disability rights movement, as a trainee, and they made the film "As We Are." And I told this story in this film. By this time, all of the student rights movements were in place, including the disability rights--

Landes

At San Francisco State.

Lacy

At San Francisco State. This was the International Year of the Disabled in 1982, and a lot of schools and organizations were doing

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disabled awareness kinds of things, and the disabled student union sponsored an International Year of the Disabled program, where they showed this film, "As We Are." It was a large auditorium of disabled students, faculty, and staff who saw this film and heard me tell this story for the first time, and they were so outraged--I was told that they were so outraged that they decided that they were going to correct this, you know. And so they decided to propose to the president that I be invited to the graduation and that I be allowed to be in the graduation proceedings on the field and, oh, that I receive (this was really cute)--that I was going to receive an honorary doctorate degree. [chuckling]

So this proposal went to the president, and the administra-tion were very embarrassed, of course. As a matter of fact, one dummy had the nerve to say that--from the faculty--said something to the effect that that was the first time that a film had ever been allowed to go unscreened, to be viewed by the campus.

Landes

In other words, that there had not been proper faculty oversight of this program before it aired?

Lacy

Yes, exactly. Or administrative oversight. And it just slipped through. And they were just so embarrassed.

Landes

What was the follow-up to this request?

Lacy

Well, they couldn't give me a doctorate degree, so the president negotiated with the disabled student's director at that time to give me a certificate of--you know, like one of these things--certificate of appreciation for my leadership in the disabled rights movement. And they were going to allow me to give a one-minute speech at the graduation. So I got to speak one minute. It was my first--no, I don't think it was my first, but it was certainly a major advocacy speech. There were 20,000 people there including Shelley Winters, as I found out. She was using this big crowd to make a film [chuckling] and was using the crowd for a background.

Well, at any rate, I can remember describing my experience at my last graduation twenty years ago, and I pointed to where I had to sit with my cap and gown, and it was all a really big emotional kind of thing because everybody had learned about this, including the TV news people, and I got interviewed and all of--you know, just all this recognition that I had sought [chuckling] twenty years earlier.

I can remember saying that it was my goal that as long as any person with a disability was denied a right to things that other people took for granted, that I would work to advance that goal. After my presentation--oh, I did the full regalia: cap and

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gown with the hood and all that kind of stuff. But when people were leaving, this one woman--I think she said she was a nurse--said to me that she was interested in my speech because she was marvelling at how far disabled people had come, and she was perplexed that I didn't have the same opinion, that I felt we had a long way to go. I didn't take this as a kind remark.

Landes

What was your response to her?

Lacy

I think my response was that this was only the beginning and that disabled people have a long, long way to go.

Landes

Do you have any other reflections of your time at San Francisco State that you would like to share?

Lacy

I'm sure that I had some good--and I think I've shared a lot of the good experiences with individuals. I didn't have a lot of love and respect for the university because I really didn't think that it even saw the need to accommodate people with disabilities; and it was only because of individuals who sympathized with me, that I could identify on my own, that I was able to even get through.

I can also remember, just kind of as an afterthought, getting a letter from someone else who was disabled and who wanted to go back to school and had heard about me at San Francisco State and wanted to know how my experience was and if there were some things that I could share with her about how she might be able to get through this. And by putting my thoughts down on paper, I for the first time realized the bitter experience that this was, and I can remember saying that if she decided to go on to college that she should not expect any help from anybody. She had to do it on her own, and I sort of related some of the experiences that I had. But having written it and then read it, I really became very aware for the first time of the anger and the emotion that had built up in me as a student at San Francisco State. I heard later on that she went to another college in northern California and that she did very, very well. She was--in spite of my warning--that she had done well and she had a good experience.

Landes

What did you do after you graduated?

Lacy

I think I started looking for work, but not really being able to define what kind of work it was that I did. This was when my rehab counselor really began to play an even more stronger role--

Landes

That's Catherine Butcher?

Lacy

Yes. Because I had kept the same rehab counselor almost from the beginning of my disability through my first job, actually. But I

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kind of looked around for work on my own, and I was rebuffed even by the Department of Rehab. I can remember going to be interviewed in San Francisco for a rehab counseling job. I think I had passed the test. And being turned down because they felt that my disability was too great, basically.

Landes

When was that?

Lacy

That was pretty early after I graduated from college. Let's see, probably in early '61 that I applied for that.

Landes

So in the remainder of 1960 and into '61 you were applying for jobs.

Lacy

Yes, right.

Landes

And Catherine Butcher was helping you at the Department of Rehabilitation.

Lacy

Yes. You know, I can remember [chuckling] calling up the--Rose Resnick's organization. She was like the one person in charge. She had kind of an answering machine. I remember her calling me back and I was telling her I was looking for a job, and she said, "What kind of job do you want?" And I said, "Oh, I can--I just need a job. I think I can do anything." And she says [imitating her curtness], "When you know what you want, call me back." And she hung up. [chuckling]

Landes

That was Rose Resnick?

Lacy

[chuckling] That was Rose Resnick. Every time I see her, I think about that. I don't know if I ever did mention it to her. But she wouldn't remember me.

Landes

Meanwhile, you're still living with your sister in West Oakland?

Lacy

Right.

Landes

In the Peralta Villa?

Lacy

Right.

Landes

What else were you doing besides looking for a job? Were you involved in any political or social organizations?

Lacy

No. My closest person--well, I'm trying to think if I was involved. I think I had some social and maybe political contacts. Yes, I did. With the Afro-American Association. I can remember the Mind of the Ghetto conference that was held at McClymonds High School. I guess I was, if not physically, I was certainly was

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intellectually involved in that movement. This year was probably around '61, '62. Mostly because of Jim.

Landes

Your brother, Jim?

Lacy

Yes, my brother, Jim. Going to this conference, which was a huge conference. It was organized by Don Warden and the Afro-American Association, and they had just all kinds of workshops. They had special--this was the first time I remember seeing Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali in the same room. That was when he was called Cassius Clay. Mohammed Ali was Cassius Clay. I can remember how thrilled I was that Malcolm X spoke to me. I can remember even today. He said, "Hello, sister." [chuckling] And I thought that was just so great.

Landes

And this was at the Mind of the Ghetto?

Lacy

Conference, yes, at McClymonds High School in West Oakland. West Oakland by then was very politically focused.

Landes

This is after the onset of the civil rights movement in the South, which had then spread to local issues.

Lacy

Yes, we had to--remember now--I don't know if you remember, but there were two movements going on at the same time. One of those was a black nationalist movement with people like Stokely Carmichael, Ron Karenga, Malcolm X,--"Burn, Baby, Burn"--Who was that? H. Rapp Brown.

And then there was a civil rights group. You know, Martin Luther King [Jr.], and SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. Remember, these were parallel organizations. And I tended more toward the black nationalists. I was a very avid kind of--not participant, but certainly a supporter of--and I went to every kind of black nationalist debate. There were some wonderful debates that went on among blacks during that time, who talked about all kinds of nationalist issues.

I can remember [chuckling] going to this one with Don Warden, who was on the black nationalist side, and Will Ussery, the guy who was on the BART board of directors for a number of years. And they were having a debate around civil rights versus nationalism. That's when I became totally fascinated by debate and political repartee, if you want to call it that, because all of this was at this point in time more intellectual than activist. I think that came along later.

But also I can remember going to a Martin Luther King speech. I think as most people, they were kind of involved in both, but had a preference for one.

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II Seeds of Disability as A Civil Right: Experiencing Tokenism, Condescension, Empowerment, and Pride

Early Jobs and Volunteer Work: Easter Seals, Alameda County Health Department

##

Landes

So anything else you'd like to say to speak to this period between the time you graduated from San Francisco State and the time that you got your first job a couple of years later?

Lacy

I think I can just sum it up by saying that what I called "hanging out" was more like becoming more politically aware and becoming more aware of the system and how it operated, which would come in handy later on in my life.

Landes

How did you get your first job?

Lacy

After--let me see. My rehab counselor, Ms. Butcher, had hired a private teacher to come and teach me clerical skills because I did not know how to type--well, I had one hand that's almost paralyzed and so I had only one good hand to use. So she suggested that I could learn clerical skills and that these could be a filler in moving me into a career. Although I objected to anything clerical, I agreed with her that I probably could use the skills. And so I learned how to type with my--that there was such a thing as one-hand typing and that there is a keyboard position, etc. And so I learned how to type with my one good hand, and I also took shorthand, so in preparation for a job.

There was an intern who also worked with Ms. Butcher at that time, and she was assigned by the Department of Rehab to work with me, strictly to find a job. So on her own, she asked around for job possibilities and told people about me. I'm trying to think--oh, yes, yes. She arranged for one of the best kind of work experiences and led me to something that--a lifelong kind of activity, and that was she introduced me to Sylvia Sullivan, who was the executive director of the Volunteer Bureau of Alameda County.

---

Sylvia just kind of adopted me as, you know, her mentoree, I guess you want to call it. She decided she would be my mentor. And so she found volunteer job opportunities for me, and she was my advocate when I talked to her about problems I was running into. For example, my first volunteer job was with the Easter Seals. I thought I was going there to practice my typing, and I practiced my typing, yes; but it was in a fishbowl, where they set me up right in the middle of the center of the rehab floor and brought my typewriter, and I typed envelopes for mailing all the time I was there, and the idea was that Tak Taketa, who was the physical therapist--they had physical therapists there--his idea was that I'd be a role model for other disabled people and that they could see me practicing this skill and they would be encouraged.

And I hated that. I didn't like being the center of attention, and I didn't really feel that that was appropriate. And so I eventually told Sylvia about it when I got more and more angry and it didn't look like this was going anywhere. And so she called them up and she said [chuckling] she wasn't going to send any more of her volunteers down there and that he should be ashamed of himself. So I got pulled out of that job.

And then I went to work in the Volunteer Bureau, just doing a little clerical work.

Landes

What did that experience teach you about the Easter Seals?

Lacy

I think it taught me that it was a traditional disabled organization made up of able-bodied people who made decisions for disabled people.

Landes

With a strong dose of paternalism?

Lacy

Extremely strong. And I can remember some of the--I can remember the physician who was in charge there and was one who became very popular with the disabled crowd in Berkeley. His name is Dr. [Chester] Wong. So I had no respect for that kind of paternalistic attitude from professionals. It was the first time, I think, that I was really exposed to professionals who worked in the disability community.

Landes

So it gave you a strong negative feeling about what some people refer to as the medical model?

Lacy

Oh, absolutely.

Landes

So then you went back to the volunteer center.

---

Lacy

Yes. And Sylvia decided that I was going to be on the board of directors. She used to cart me around to all of her contact meetings. Basically, I became her intern in terms of volunteer administration.

Landes

Was that a positive experience?

Lacy

Very positive, yes. Everything I did with Sylvia was positive. She became like a member of my family. She got to know my mother, and my mother just adored her and so did I. I thought she was just a real good, strong advocate.

Landes

What were some of the most important lessons you learned out of the experience with Sylvia at the volunteer center?

Lacy

I learned to be more accepting of myself in terms of the fact that I had abilities, and I think she really convinced me that I could be an administrator, that I could make decisions, and she relied on me. I was one of the founding members of the board of directors for the Volunteer Bureau. From that experience, though, I didn't gain very much respect [chuckling] for board members because, you know, I ran into people who were somewhat like myself, as I recall now, who were professional board sitters and who were on every board that they could get on, for name recognition. And then in a lot of ways board members were gatekeepers, but in the other way they were rubber stamps, and that they didn't have a lot to contribute, in my opinion, to the actual running and operating of an agency.

So I learned a lot. I learned a lot of political kinds of things, and I learned a lot of good things about what volunteers could do. I can remember going to a meeting of teenagers where Sylvia was organizing a group of teenagers in San Leandro to train in volunteer work. So it gave me a lot of respect for volunteerism, and it's something I've continued, as I said, throughout my lifetime.

Landes

So tell me about that first job that you got in 1962, is it?

Lacy

Oh, yes. That was really exciting. It was really all the efforts of the intern--whose name I can't remember. That's interesting. But she really was out there looking. She found a volunteer deal and then later on, I hadn't heard from her in a while, and she called me up and she said she knew these people. The wife was working for a drapery and upholstery manufacturing firm that was located in L.A., and she had been doing the ordering. She ran the ordering desk for northern California. And she found it was going to be too confining for her; she wanted to be more involved in

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social life, and so she wanted to give it up, and she convinced them to interview me for this job. That was out in Orinda.

So I went out. They were very skeptical. Again, I went through this trial period where part of the interview was that I had to show them that I could type and that I could handle the job. And even then, if it were not for the encouragement of my intern friend, they probably would not have accepted me just out of the blue. But they did, and the wife trained me for the job. She also taught me how to knit because she said there were a lot of times when I wouldn't be busy and so [chuckling] I could take up my time with knitting. I was a very skillful learner. I learned to knit, and I learned to operate a teletype, what they call a TWX, which was kind of a forerunner of the TDD [Telecommunication Device for the Deaf], I'd say, except that everything was done on rolls of paper. I would record all the orders of the day on these rolls of paper, and then I'd transmit them down to L.A. at three o'clock in the afternoon.

And I still say that was one of the best jobs I've ever had. It was interesting, I got a chance to have contact with people over the phone and people that relied on me. They really relied on me to get their orders in and to follow up on them. So I got to use a lot of my people skills. I even got fairly good at typing. The teletype was set up in my bedroom at home, while I was still living in the projects. I lived with my mother by this time, who had moved to another two-bedroom unit. But at any rate, I had that job, oh, about two years.

Landes

From 1962 to 1963, about?

Lacy

Yes, somewhere around there, yes. Of course, I can remember that was when Kennedy was assassinated. I had an answering service, and I can remember being on the phone, picking up my messages with the answering service and all of the turmoil and commotion, and they were the ones who informed me about Kennedy's assassination.

But at any rate, I had a lot of play with people over the phone, and so it was a social thing as well as a business thing. But my best memory is that with the answering service and with the freedom that I had--it was just me; I supervised myself--so it gave me the skills to plan my day and to--all of those things that really are kind of administrative skills, if you will.

But my fun part was that my best friend, who was a public health nurse, had our area. She was my neighbor, but she also had that area for her home visits. We kind of started developing this little social gathering, pinochle gathering, every day. Of course, she would rush through her home visits, and I would rush

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through all my orders, and then I'd put the phone on the answering machine, and during lunch hour, before she went back to the health department, she'd come over and we'd have lunch and then we played pinochle until three o'clock. So this was like a daily routine for us.

Oh, first, before we had lunch, though, I had to help her with her charting because I was a nursing major and so I had learned how to chart, and so she'd dictate to me all of her charts so we could get them done real fast. And then [chuckling] I would get my orders all typed up and ready to transmit, and so from like noon, after we had lunch, until three, when I had to transmit my orders and she had to go back to the health department, she'd teach me how--first she had to teach me how to play pinochle; then we played pinochle.

Landes

So you enjoyed the job.

Lacy

Oh, I loved it. It was great. Almost everything that I ever wanted in a job, except for the pay and perhaps--yes, except for the pay, really--because I had the inner play, although it was over the phone. But I had a really active social life. I wasn't feeling isolated or any of those things. Plus I had this large window for my bedroom that I could look out that was, like, right across the street from the school, so I observed all the school activities, the Halloween parades and all of the latest dances [...]. [chuckling]

Landes

So you spent most of your time at home?

Lacy

Yes, most of my time at home, although I was becoming a lot more social. I was dating, and I was going out to various places, events in the evening. But it was like--I had my work at home, and it was like being in an office.

Landes

How long did you work there?

Lacy

Like I said, it was a little over two years, not quite two and a half years. That was when they decided to move the operation to San Francisco in a showroom kind of thing.

Landes

So that's how you lost that job?

Lacy

Yes, yes.

Landes

So what was your next job?

Lacy

My next job was the one where my friend intervened with the Health Department to--

---

Landes

What health department?

Lacy

Alameda County Health Department. After I passed their exam, their clerical exam. They decided to do that kind of practical exam with me as part of the--

Landes

So you passed the written exam.

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And then they wanted--

Lacy

And I went through the interview. And so they weren't really sure that I could do the job. They were under the gun. This was kind of a political thing. They didn't want to just say no.

Landes

Why were they under the gun?

Lacy

Because my friend who had recommended me was an official in the Health Department. He was an administrator in the Health Department.

Landes

So a lower-level administrator was not particularly enthusiastic about hiring you but felt that they had to follow through?

Lacy

Yes. That was basically it.

Landes

Did you get the job?

Lacy

Only on a trial basis. I worked there for six weeks. It had no accessibility at all.

Landes

The Health Department had no accessibility.

Lacy

No accessibility. It had no accessible rest rooms; it had no ramps. And I can remember years later I had a chance to influence that when I just accidentally happened to be in a hearing in Sacramento on health, and they talked about the health department in terms of just their administration, and I decided to speak up and tell them that I knew this one health department in Alameda County that had no access for people with disability, and so they immediately [chuckling] dinged 'em for it.

I must say, this is one of the ways that I operate. Sometimes I'm very undercurrent with the way I get revenge, but I do. [chuckling]

Landes

But you're certain to have the payback.

---

Lacy

Yes. You can look for it!

Landes

So you were there for six weeks?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

Doing what?

Lacy

Typing envelopes. I was supposed to be a clerk typist. I was put in a unit that had no other African-Americans. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that I was referred there was because my friend was real concerned that the Health Department was almost pure white. The African-Americans who were there were stuck in one department, pretty much. So I was put in this unit that had no--

Landes

What unit?

Lacy

It was just another clerical unit. I think it was the immunization unit. I wasn't allowed to touch the files. I brought my own typewriter. The biggest job that the supervisor gave me was alphabetizing. The way I lost my job was she said that I was screwing up the files by misfiling behind a volunteer and that I wasn't competent to file because I was creating confusion in the files, and I cussed her out [laughs], so I got fired.

Landes

You were fired after you had cussed her out?

Lacy

Yes, and a few other mean things that I said. One of the other things, interesting, was that the Health Department had hierarchies or groups, and all of the units, while they weren't required, it was understood that they had to stay together. They ate lunch together. It was like--I can't even figure out what it was like. It was almost like a Nazi kind of situation.

One example I just remembered was I was asked to contribute to a baby shower on the first day that I came, and I said no. I was disregarded from that day on as being part of the group. I was probably already because I was the only black person there.

Landes

Did anybody reach out to you from that group in a friendly way?

Lacy

Yes, but it was the supervisor who was in control, and she was the one. It would have been fine were it not for this supervisor. But it also turns out that I had several people that I knew who were African-American at the Health Department who were either public health nurses, other people that I knew from a political kind of perspective, and they just took me under their wing.

---

There was this one woman--her name is Geneva Williams--who had been at the Health Department--she's black and she had been at the Health Department for a number of years. She was like one of the first African-Americans to be hired at the Health Department. So I sat with them, you know, who were mostly black, from this other department, and that just enraged this supervisor. I was just gathering black eyes from day one. By this time, I was feeling really resentful of this person.

Landes

So there was certainly the issue of race that was in evidence. What about the fact that you were disabled?

Lacy

You probably notice that it doesn't matter somehow that you're disabled when it comes to ethnic identity. I discovered that ethnic identity was something peculiar unto itself. I also discovered in later work that many African-Americans consider being black as having a disability, and so they didn't really identify with disability as a disability but just as one other kind of inequity that black people had to deal with.

After I was fired, I wrote my first advocacy letter to the personnel board of Alameda County. I probably still have it in my desk drawer somewhere.

Landes

Protesting your firing?

Lacy

Protesting the whole process, from the fact that I was put on trial, that I was ill-treated by the supervisory folks and was given an unfair evaluation, although my supervisor--my supervisor

--eventually they gave me another supervisor other than this woman--was very sympathetic towards me, and he did an evaluation which they rejected. His supervisor did another evaluation to fire me.

Landes

Your immediate supervisor.

Lacy

My immediate supervisor gave me--I mean, he noted that I didn't like this clerical supervisor and all that, but he didn't completely hold it against me in that he didn't think that it was worth my being fired. At least he didn't say that to me. But they called in someone that I barely saw, and he did my evaluation, and he said that I was overqualified for the job. And this was when I found out that this was like a test; it wasn't a job, although it was like a probationary period, and they had to get rid of me, of course, before my probation was over or else I would have been a permanent employee.

But at any rate, I wrote a letter to the personnel board. I just spelled out the process from day one throughout. I later got

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a response back from them, and they asked me to come back and reapply, and they assured me that I would not be discriminated against because of my disability. But the interesting piece for me was that all of the friends that I had made, who were black, came down to my house during lunchtime and we sort of celebrated my having been there. They were just really supportive, and I had a chance to read my letter to them. Almost all of them, to a person, were amazed that my letter was based upon the discrimination that I had experienced as a disabled person, as opposed to a person of color. These were all black people. They just were floored that I didn't mention race in my letter.

Landes

And how did you respond to that?

Lacy

What did I say? I don't know what I could have said to respond. But out of that group, Geneva came up to be the person who was determined that I was going to find a job. This is probably where I should end. She happened to be on one of the neighborhood councils in north Oakland for the anti-poverty program, the Community Action Program that was just starting in 1965. It started in '65, but they were organizing it starting in '64. And so she then started to inquire within this new anti-poverty administration of opportunities that would be coming up.

I can remember her bringing her close friend, Lillian Love, who was like a goddess in Oakland at that time. She was a community activist. She was also a social worker at the Alameda County Welfare Department, and so she knew a lot of people. She was in with a lot of groups in the area. I can remember first meeting Lillian. Geneva brought her down to my house, and we had these conversations into the middle of the night. That started the ball rolling for me. Lillian went back and started talking to people like Dr. Smith, Norvel Smith, who was the executive director of the Community Action Program at that time. Eventually Norvel sent his assistant, Dan--what's Dan's name? [Dan Daniels] It's interesting. These are people that I got to know--but they all came to my house and interviewed me and talked to me. We had wonderful discussions about this whole anti-poverty philosophy and how it should be administered, and that's where I designed the job that I was later turned down for and had to fight for.

Landes

What job was that?

Lacy

This was intake worker in the community service center in west Oakland.

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Anti-Poverty Work for Oakland Economic Development Council, 1965-1968

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Landes

So, Johnnie, after they released you at the health department after your probationary period, what did you then do?

Lacy

Well, I maintained some contacts with Geneva Williams, who still worked at the health department, and she introduced me to Lillian Love, who at that time was a member of the board of directors of the Oakland Economic Development Council.

Lillian was very influential in the community. She knew everybody; everybody knew her. She had been a social worker at the Alameda County Welfare Department. But her main community interest was that she broke down the whole process of redevelopment in her neighborhood, which was Oak Center neighborhood, by stopping all of the tearing down of the old Victorian buildings in west Oakland. And so she was pretty much famous by now because she had really institutionalized the change in the way the redevelopment throughout the United States was practiced. So I had a really strong ally in Lillian Love, and Geneva was the person who introduced me to her.

Lillian was on the OEDC [Oakland Economic Development Council] board of directors. There were people like Judge Lionel Wilson, who was on there at that time and who was not even anywhere near becoming mayor of Oakland. This was in the mid-sixties, 1965-1966. Norvel Smith was the executive director of OEDC and later on became the president of Merritt College and then the associate vice chancellor for student services at the University of California, Berkeley. So there's also some very influential people that Lillian introduced me to. She suggested that I write a letter, as a matter of fact, to Norvel Smith, saying that I felt qualified to work in the anti-poverty program and that I was looking for a job. In the meantime, Lillian intervened for me and told Norvel about my experience at the health department and the kind of discrimination that we both agreed had taken place there.

Norvel, in response, sent his special assistant down to my house. His name was Dan Daniels. I lived in a housing project at that time called Peralta Villa. I lived with my mother. And Dan made contact with me and he came down to visit me, kind of to interview me. And from then on--and told me about what would be happening with the new West Oakland Service Center and the anti-

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poverty program in Oakland. It had not started yet, but it was being planned.

After we talked together, we continued to talk over the phone. He started to become interested in my ideas about what should happen in an anti-poverty service center in west Oakland. One of the things that we talked about, which was key to the whole anti-poverty program, was called at that time "indigenous workers," who helped to serve their neighbors.

Landes

Describe what you mean by "indigenous workers."

Lacy

An indigenous worker was someone who lived in the community, who knew what some of the problems were that the community was facing, and basically who knew how to talk on the level of the community in terms of addressing some of the problems. But indigenous at that time basically meant living and being active in the community.

So, as a result of those discussions, which took, I'd say, about six months, over a period of six months, I helped Dan to design a position called the intake worker, which would be a person who, as I said before, being indigenous, being familiar with the community, familiar with the issues in the community, who knew people in the community and was pretty much active, who could then work with people who had problems and concerns around community organizing, around social services, around legal issues --that I would be the initial contact to make these people feel as though they were important and that their problems were important to us and could be addressed on some formal basis.

Landes

So you were in effect designing your own job.

Lacy

Yes. And at that time, it was not agreed that this would be my job, but most certainly, being one of the chief designers of the job meant that I would be qualified to at least apply for the job. And this is what Dan told me once the job announcement had gone out, was that I should go, that they had arranged with the EDD to screen applications for this job and then to pass them on to someone who then would set up interviews. That's where I ran into the problem with EDD, when I went around to apply.

Landes

So you applied for this job through EDD.

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And what happened?

---

Lacy

Basically, I was denied access to even an interview for the job. The counselor, I guess you would call her, the employment counselor had decided that I wasn't qualified because of--mainly because of my lack of mobility on the one hand, and on the other hand I was overqualified because I had a college degree, and so this whole idea of being overqualified again loomed up very early on in my application process.

When I found this out, I was talking on the phone with the counselor, and knowing that I had been involved in the designing of it and that I was qualified and there was no mobility requirement for the job, I demanded to speak to the person who was arranging for applicants to be further screened. What I found out was that all this woman was supposed to be doing was accepting the application and then referring them on internally to a man whose name was Ed Williams, who was in fact the person that was going to be choosing the applicants.

So when she told me that Ed Williams was the person that was going to be making the decisions about who was going to be interviewed, I demanded to speak to Ed Williams, and she refused to let me talk to him. I can remember practically yelling to her, "Well, I'm not getting off the phone until I talk to him, so you might as well go ahead and get him now." She didn't hang up on me. She did put me on hold because I threatened to go to Norvel Smith if she didn't allow me to talk.

When Ed Williams came to the phone--he happened to be a social worker who was going to be also working--he worked for Family Service Bureau, and Family Services was going to be a tenant in the anti-poverty centers.

Landes

So Ed Williams did not work for EDD. EDD was going to refer applicants to him.

Lacy

Exactly. And that was all they were supposed to do. So when I threatened--this was, I think, probably the first time I had used any kind of power play, but when I threatened to call to speak to the director of the anti-poverty program, she did put Ed on the phone. As it turned out, he said to me that this woman had no authority to make any decisions but only to receive the applications and then refer them to him. And so, as it turns out, Ed became a lifelong friend of mine, and he remains a friend even now.

Landes

So you got the job?

Lacy

I got the job. I went to the interview, and it wasn't as though it was just a matter of my going, being interviewed and being

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hired because it turned out that there was at least one other influential person in the community who had applied for the job, who had the inside track on this with community board members. And, as a matter of fact, one of the interviewers, who was a member of the community, doubted that I could do the job. One of the things that he was concerned about also was my mobility. He happened to be overruled, and I was hired for the job.

I still had the challenge, though, of being able to get to and from my job. At first I took taxis to work; then I became friends with another person, Bill Campbell, who was also newly hired, and so we hooked up together, for him to drive me to work so he picked me up and took me to work every day.

Landes

Let's go back to the process by which you got the job. What did you learn out of that whole process?

Lacy

Well, I learned, number one, that you couldn't take no for an answer. But also I learned that you had to have allies who could effectively run interference for you. You had to advocate for yourself, but mainly that you had to be able to demonstrate that you could do the job effectively and that the disability would not necessarily be a deterrent to work. Those were the things that I had faith in the past, in trying to find jobs, was trying to defend myself as a person with a disability and not being very successful at it.

Landes

Did you feel that you were successful at it in this instance?

Lacy

Yes. As a matter of fact, the issue of disability never came up again in any job I ever applied for. As a matter of fact, my reputation usually preceded me, and I was invited to apply for jobs as they came along for the next twenty-five years.

Landes

Describe the job that you got at the Oakland Economic Development Council.

Lacy

Okay. I basically did what I just described that I would do. I was the initial contact for people coming in with service needs. The Service Center--I was mainly the information referral resource person. That meant that--if I didn't already know about services in the community--I had to inquire about those services, and so I learned a lot about what kinds of resources were available. As a matter of fact, I eventually made up a catalog file of all of the things that I had learned, and it became the basis for an information and referral resource guide that was used and adopted later on by the Welfare Department itself, in a much more sophisticated form.

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The other thing that I did that was very informal is that I taught people how to advocate for themselves by being knowledgeable about service systems themselves first in terms of what kinds of key contacts they needed to know about in order to get what they wanted, get the services that they wanted. I taught them what I had found out about doorkeepers and how to get past the doorkeeper and into the real qualitative person who could provide you with service.

I basically talked to people about the way they presented themselves when they needed service, looking for a job or whatever it was, in terms of presenting a positive image and being very positive about themselves. Those were some of the side things that I provided, in addition to collecting the statistical data that was required by the federal government to keep up with all of the applicants for services.

Landes

During this time, did you investigate about services for people with disabilities?

Lacy

I looked into it. It was one of the things I asked about, mainly about whether or not they had access, physical access. But this was a very, very kind of coincidental thing that I might inquire about because I personally was not being provided with accommodations for myself. I worked in that building for about a year without ever being able to use the bathroom. It was not accessible.

Landes

Did you raise this as an issue with the agency?

Lacy

Yes. And as a result, when we moved into our new building, the first accessible bathroom was designed. And the women's bathroom, for me, with wide doors and all that. And this was the first time that I became even aware that these kinds of things were available. This was a new, modular building that we moved into, and so they could just pull out an accessible bathroom. And yes, that was something that I specifically requested early on, when I knew we were moving.

Landes

Was disability a focus of your work?

Lacy

No, disability was not a focus of my work. Being poor and being a minority, being on welfare, being unemployed--these were things that were more of a focus. Being in legal trouble because of debts and things of that nature. As a matter of fact, there was only one other disabled person--in a wheelchair, I should say--that I came in contact with out of all the times that I worked in west Oakland.

---

Landes

This was one person as a client of the agency? Or a worker?

Lacy

He was a client at the time. I guess you could call him a client. He came into the office once or twice because the new building, I also had requested that a ramp be built, and so he was able to get into the service center. The old service center was on the ground level, but he never came there, but he did--and I think he mainly came to investigate this new accessible building in the community more than to get service.

Landes

Can you remember back to that time about what your attitudes were about disability and people with disabilities? Or the issue of disability. Did you perceive it as a civil rights issue at all at that time?

Lacy

I perceived it as a civil rights issue, yes--

Landes

In what sense?

Lacy

--but it was mostly in my mind that it was a civil rights issue. And it was very undefined, very undefined until the disability rights movement itself came along and I began to see the great similarities between the civil rights movement and the disability rights movement. Of course, the disability rights movement in many ways was designed after the civil rights movement, as were many other movements: the women's movement, the free speech movement, et cetera.

A Developing Identity: Race, Gender, and Disability

Landes

You got hired at the development council in 1965, and then you worked there for three years. During this period you certainly had a perception of the problems. It sounds to me that your attitudes regarding disability as a civil rights issue were still in very early stages.

Lacy

Yes. Oh, I would say that that's quite true. And I knew that there were services that people with disabilities could use. But in terms of activism, this was not organized in my mind other than my reactions to discrimination myself, as opposed to anything that had to do with anti-discrimination for people with disabilities.

Landes

It sounds like you identified primarily by your poverty and as an African-American woman.

Lacy

I think it's a little bit more than that, though. And that is, that's a dilemma that I faced over the years in terms of the way

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other people perceived me and the way I react to that perception and the fact that I've kind of gone back and forth in terms of my own identification. For example, now I identify much more with my disability than with my poverty or my race. It's mainly out of reaction to other people's perception of me.

One of the things that I've learned is that I cannot allow myself to fall into the trap of being identified by others, that I have to have a sense of my own personal identity. And that sense is very much tied into who I am as a woman of color and as a disabled person, and I try not to distinguish between the three identities anymore. It's almost like what's happening now with multi-racial youth who in the sixties were described as having an identity problem when they became frustrated and angry at other people's perception of who they were.

In the sixties, for example, if you were mixed with black, no matter what other race you were, you were identified and perceived as black. And I think that is pretty much the same kind of perceptions that I was dealing with in terms of my disability and my ability to identify--if other people didn't see it as a part of me, then I denied in some ways that it was also a part of me because it was very important that I relate to my peers. And so I over the years have become much more--I don't want to use the word "adept" because that's not really--self-identified and much more persistent about my own perceptions than I have been about what other people's perceptions are.

Landes

But back in the mid-sixties, these ideas were still being formed.

Lacy

Yes, absolutely. And much of it was because of a lack of awareness of myself as a woman and myself as a disabled person, all of those which came later.

Landes

But it was crystal clear in those days that you were an African-American and poor.

Lacy

Yes, absolutely.

Landes

What did you like about that job?

Lacy

I liked being out of the house, number one, going to a nine to five job. I liked the kind of work that I did because I worked with people and I've always been really good with people. I liked the idea of problem-solving, which is still my best suit. I liked learning, and I learned a lot about what we called "the system" in those days, meaning not just systems about community resources but about political systems. I became very astute around political systems.

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Much of that had to do with my starting to--well, with my becoming--my being introduced to Paul Cobb, who was a real--well, he wasn't really a community activist at that time, either, because he had just left college at Howard University and had come back home and so became very involved in kind of community organizing and the whole community political process. We were very strong companions. We were like constant companions. We attended three and four different meetings a night and became really vocal and interested. So a lot of that political process I learned as a result of my friendship with Paul Cobb and just kind of running around with him.

There were just so many things that I learned. These are just a few.

Landes

Were there any other key people that were very important in your political development that you want to speak about?

Lacy

There were, but I think my friendship with Paul was really the key, I think, to my becoming more politically involved. I was not an activist, but Paul was, and so he got me involved. We became involved in the Welfare Rights Organization; we became involved in the Corporation of the Poor; we became involved in the legal defense of young men who were being arrested on the street just because they were black and poor. There were just--oh, God. I can remember we did a march, and I'm trying to remember what the march was about.

We did some boycotting around Housewives Market, for example, which was like really in the middle of the ghetto and did not have any blacks working at Housewives. They didn't have any market stands there that were owned by blacks. I don't even believe they had even service workers in Housewives. It was an all-white market.

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##

Landes

What are other fond memories you have of that three-year period when you were working at the Development Council?

Lacy

I guess maybe one of the memories that I still take with me--I put it on my résumé--was being awarded the Urban Service Award by the Oakland Economic Development Council. This was an award that was presented by OEO, Office of Economic Opportunity, which was the national anti-poverty agency at the time. I received this award over and above so many other community activists. As a matter of fact, it created a little jealousy among others who thought that they should have gotten it.

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I think the other thing

Landes

What were the reasons that you were given this award?

Lacy

[chuckling] I have no idea! [laughs]

Landes

What did they tell you?

Lacy

It's the funniest thing because when I received the--I went in; the award was presented to me, and it said, "For services above and beyond the call of duty." So I guess maybe all of these things that kind of led up to my being hired in the first place. But also those little secondary things, you know. The way that I actually worked in the community, became involved in many of the community activities, but also helping poor people, my clients, learn how to advocate for themselves. It wound up coming to the attention of the powers that be, whoever they were. But at the time, I was very confused by this.

Landes

But in retrospect, perhaps, not only were you working as a bureaucrat within an agency, but as you say, you were also out in the community--

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And then, as you say, advocating, teaching people to advocate for themselves.

Lacy

Yes. And even today, when somebody compliments me by giving me an award or something, I never know why it is! I don't have the ability, I think, to measure my effect on other people. All I do is I do my thing, whatever that is and whatever I think is right at the time. How it affects other people doesn't really concern me so much other than to know that they've been successful as a result of any kind of intervention or advice that I might give.

Landes

Were there any negative aspects to the job? Things that you--experiences there that were negative?

Lacy

The one thing that comes to mind, which was more annoying than negative, was this whole business about professionalism. I was hired in the anti-poverty program as what they later came to call a "new careerist," somebody who was not a professional but who had the qualifications to move up as a professional. And because I worked in the service center, because I was looked on as one of these indigenous people, sometimes my bosses did not see my qualifications in terms of being a professional.

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That was always rather strange because I had a degree, and that's all that anybody else needed in order to be called a professional. I always thought, in the back of my mind, that it did have something to do more with my disability. However, I did have a sister who also came to work in the [anti-]poverty program as a result of my problems around disability.

Well, actually, she didn't have a college degree, either, so--I don't know. I was very confused by this.

Landes

Do you feel you were being held to a higher standard because of your disability?

Lacy

I think people looked at me in a bifurcated kind of way and that they saw I was capable but yet I was not capable.

Landes

Because of the disability.

Lacy

Because of the disability.

Landes

Because you couldn't move around or just because of some generic reason that because you were disabled, you certainly--

Lacy

I think because of some generic reason. And I still get that reaction. I really do. It's almost like people don't believe I'm as smart as I am, because I have a disability and disabled people aren't smart, in their eyes. Again, it's a whole perceptive kind of thing. I remember, for example, making a proposal to the local Anti-Poverty Advisory Committee that, if they were to somehow or other find a way to advance my graduate career--say, like, to give me a scholarship; something like that--that I would agree with them that I would work to help advance this organization for the next five years, almost without pay at that time. And I can remember the two leaders of the organization looking at each other and shaking their heads, in front of me, you know.

But there was a little sexism there, too, because I can remember while I was the intake worker, my friend Bill Campbell, who came in without a college degree, without--well, we were kind of equivalent. The only thing, I think, that I had more than he was an education. But later on he was chosen to be the office manager, and I was not considered qualified to be an office manager. Because he was a man, and I was a woman, and women were not managers.

Landes

There were no managers in the Development Council?

Lacy

Yes, there were. As a matter of fact, one of the most highly respected managers was the manager of EDD. Her name was Gertrude

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Williams, who also befriended me as a result of all of this other nonsense that I had gone through with the employment counselor. She was a highly respected person, but, as I recall, she was kind of allocated to a local managerial job. She never really--even though she was considered brilliant--was considered for anything that might take her to a higher level. So there were a lot of things going on.

Landes

Is there anything else that you'd like to say about your three-year job at the Development Council?

Lacy

Only that it helped to advance me to other kinds of positions. I moved from the intake worker to the information and resource specialist, for example, when we moved into planning for Model Cities. From there, I moved to Peralta Colleges.

Peralta Colleges Community Development Center, 1968-1969

Landes

When did you move to Peralta Colleges?

Lacy

1968.

Landes

And what job did you take there?

Lacy

Basically, I managed a community development center. My job title was coordinator of the West Oakland Community Development Center, which was part of a Ford Foundation grant to demonstrate the ability of community colleges to work more closely in the community, to reach out, really was what it was, to reach out to the community by, again, placing services in the community, as opposed to requiring people to come and enroll in colleges.

Landes

And specifically, what was your job?

Lacy

My job was to provide outreach in the community, to develop educational, cultural programs in the community that would allow people to increase their knowledge and their ability to provide for self-expression in terms of culture and the arts, as well as I supervised several other folks in the center. I also was responsible for--

Landes

So you were actually a supervisor there.

Lacy

I would say I was more like a director, but I was called a coordinator. My boss was Bob Dabney, who was called a manager. I don't think there was anything in that project that could have been described as a director per se, but we obviously were doing

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managerial work. I was doing managerial work, and Bob Dabney, who was my boss, was also over three or four other centers that were in east Oakland, Fruitvale, and north Oakland.

Landes

What did you like about that job?

Lacy

There were so many things. Again, I was really involved in the community. The thing that I loved the most was developing with my co-worker, co-partner, who was an artist--his name is David Bradford--discovering talent in the community that would not ever have been thought about. We did a lot of cultural things in the Spanish-speaking community as well as the African-American community. We put together mostly David's work in terms of locating artists of color. We had this really neat building that had a large just kind of a what do you call it? I don't want to call it a display--exhibit area. And we did a lot of Third World art shows back there.

The most fun--it was a lot of fun because we, you know, we did cultural expressions of just almost every kind. That was the most fun. I tell the story all the time about the big event that we did, that we put together, like a street fair with art and entertainment, all these kind of things. And it rained. And we had to pull it inside of the building, the exhibit hall, which was large enough to hold a lot of people.

I had gone out and hired a band, a local band, and he was going to play for people who wanted to dance, and so we wound up setting him up and just doing all of this activity in what we called the "back room." And this street--he wasn't a street person. This man who was like, you know, kind of community--just a community person who walked in because he heard the activity and he wanted to get involved. He was kind of a little bit tipsy, you know. He talked really loud.

We happened to be filming this also because a Laney student's film class came down, and so he decided he wanted to sing, so the band leader said, "Sure, come on up!" His name was Slim. He came up and he sat down and kind of started wording these blues, and everybody was just really impressed. It was just really a community event.

Later on, we decided that as part of our outreach, when the film was put together, we would invite all of the people who were involved in it to see it. Again, this was a really, really rainy night, and we sent postcards to everybody who had signed up. It was like storming outside, and the room was completely full to see this film. Who should show up first but old Slim and his pals. He said, "I brought my buddies down here because I told them that

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I was going to be on TV." He thought he was going to be on real TV. This was, like, an internal television connection.

And so everybody was sitting there, waiting, you know, for Slim to go on. He says, "I'm gonna be on! Here I come! Here I come, now!" Pretty soon, he appears, and there he is, singing the blues, and he says, "Look at ol' Slim! I tol' them niggers I was gonna be on television!" And everybody just kind of fell out in the aisles. Some of us were hiding our heads because we had all of these college administrators who were down there.

Landes

So clearly you were successful in reaching the grass roots.

Lacy

Yes. Slim proved it for us, that is.

Landes

Were you dealing with disabled people at all in this job?

Lacy

No, no.

Landes

Or the issue of disability?

Lacy

Never came up. The only thing that ever came up was trying to accommodate my own disability, and even this has kind of a twist to it. I chose a building that was accessible in terms of my ability to get into the first floor but that had an attic that I could not access and had bathrooms that I could not access. These were my choices. So the issues around even the simplest things were still not being addressed, not by me.

Landes

Was there anything else you'd like to say about this job at Peralta Colleges?

Lacy

No, I think that was one of the big examples. We did leave an historic impression by putting together the West Oakland--I'm trying to think what it was called. West Oakland Arts Festival. It was the first time that an arts festival had been put together in Oakland. Later on, it was reorganized, but ours was the first. The most noted example of participants at that West Oakland Arts Festival was a group that later became world-famous for their song, "Oh, Happy Day." That would be--

Landes

Edwin Hawkins.

Lacy

Edwin Hawkins, yes. We showcased them as part of that festival.

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Graduate Student at the University of California, Berkeley, 1969-1972

Landes

Why did you leave that job?

Lacy

When I look back on it, it was not a good decision, but at the time I felt that in order to advance myself further in terms of my chosen profession that I needed to get an advanced degree.

Landes

At that time, what did you see your chosen profession as? What did you consider your chosen profession?

Lacy

Something akin to the things I had done, like--and I don't even know what you would call it, but it basically is the things that I did before and did after, and that's work in the community.

Landes

Sort of a combination community organizer and administrator?

Lacy

Yes, I'd say yes.

Landes

So what did you decide to do?

Lacy

Well, all of these programs for minorities were starting to end. That was with the [Governor Ronald] Reagan administration. And I decided to--

Landes

When Ronald Reagan became governor?

Lacy

Yes, of California. And that I felt that I wasn't going to have an opportunity to go back to graduate school if I didn't go now because a lot of the programs were diminishing. What do they call the student programs, where minority students, people from the community, community backgrounds, who didn't necessarily excel in education but who had demonstrated the ability to perform work--I'm still fishing for the name of the programs that they were, but--

Landes

Did you decide to go back to school?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

What did you do?

Lacy

I applied at the University of California in the Sociology Department, as a graduate student. I was first turned down, too, and I convinced Dr. Blauner, who was the head of the department at that time, Robert Blauner, that I really and truly wanted to go.

---

But as it turned out, Dr. Blauner was right about a lot of things. I was much more valuable in the community than I was as a student.

Landes

Is that the reason he gave you?

Lacy

Yes, right, that I was doing good work in the community and that having a graduate education wasn't [chuckling], wasn't necessarily going to enhance that. And that was absolutely true.

A Difficult Shift from Organizer to Intellectual

Landes

When did you start your graduate studies at Berkeley?

Lacy

In the fall of 1969, October.

Landes

What was that like for you? You had been an active participant in the West Oakland community and now all of a sudden you're on the Berkeley campus.

Lacy

Right, trying to be an intellectual. [laughs]

Landes

What were your first impressions?

Lacy

Scary. It was a very scary situation for me.

Landes

Why is that?

Lacy

I never thought that I fit into an academic community. I can remember going around the campus, looking at everybody, mostly white students at the time, thinking, "Wow, look at all these smart people around here. Am I ever really going to fit in? Am I ever going to be successful?" And I don't think I ever was, and that was in spite of the fact that at the time that I entered the university, my sister entered as an undergraduate student, my brother entered as a graduate student--

Landes

Which brother and sister?

Lacy

My sister Mary transferred from Laney College into her third year as a political science major. My brother Jim entered the doctoral program in political science. One of my closest co-workers entered as a freshman and graduated in three years, magna cum laude, Alice Wright-Cottingham. Alice's husband, who also was part of the inner city project and worked as, oh, what was he? Associate chancellor in the district office. He entered as a doctoral candidate.

Landes

So despite the fact that you had a lot of--there were a lot of people there that you knew, you never felt at home?

Lacy

No, never.

---

Landes: You felt out of place?

Lacy

I felt totally out of place. And I can't really say why. I can't sum it up.

Landes

Can you try to weigh what impact your race and your disability and that fact that you're a woman played in this? Is there any way that you can go back and sort that out?

Lacy

I think, for me, it was the poverty, coming from a poverty background, that weighed the most in the sense that I knew my community; I could articulate issues around the community. One of the things that I became extremely frustrated with--and I guess it was a racial issue because there was a black graduate student's organization, kind of an informal organization--and I signed up for the course that was designed by Dr. Blauner for black graduate students to discuss issues around black graduate students. There were people there who claimed to have worked in the community that I lived in and that I worked in that I never saw before, never heard of before; and they were presenting themselves as experts on poverty and on community organizing.

Landes

Other black graduate students?

Lacy

Yes. And these were all the things that I had done. I had done community organizing; I had worked in the community. I never saw them there. Never heard of them or any effects that they had. And yet I was not considered a part of that group. I really think that that was because I did come from the community, as opposed to being identified as someone who was maybe black middle class who had maybe taken a class and had done an internship at a community organization that I was not aware of. And I just gave them credit for that. Sometimes I really think they were lying.

Landes

So you felt very strong class distinctions, not only in the student body at large but also within the community of African-American students?

Lacy

Absolutely. Yes, there were very strong class distinctions.

Landes

How did you feel about that?

Lacy

Betrayed? I think that might be the best word.

Landes

That your skills were not being recognized?

Lacy

No. I think that people were able to--and I found a lot of this at the university, not just among blacks--that people were able to invent identities that helped them to advance as a student but

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also did not provide a true portrayal of the issues around these black communities.

And I also met another person that I haven't seen in a long time but I have a lot of really good memories about, who worked in the Latino-Chicano community at the time, as an organizer, who I did feel very akin to because he had a legitimate claim on his activities. He later, after he graduated--

Landes

Who was that?

Lacy

I'm trying to think. His first name was David. But he organized --for example, one of the first things I remember getting organized was the health clinic in the Fruitvale district.

##

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Landes

You were talking about la Clinica de la Raza?

Lacy

Yes. Clinica de la Raza. That was one of the first people at the university that I really felt a bond with because he was able to describe from his community and from his work in the community very similar experiences that I described. But he was better at articulating those things. He eventually graduated magna cum laude. He became a professor in the health department and later on went to UC Davis as a professor, and I presume he's still in the university system.

Landes

So you felt like there was a lot of opportunism among the students at Berkeley.

Lacy

Absolutely.

Landes

Not to mention elitism.

Lacy

Yes. As my years went, I became, for example, a graduate assistant. Is that what they're called? And so therefore conducted several sessions in sociology, in women's sociology, by the way. I ran into students who took advantage of the system in all kinds of ways. I mean, in my community they were called hustlers, and that's what they were in the university. They were clearly people who found ways to get through the system by going around it.

Some of my students that I had were law students, and they were white; black students who identified as black activists who knew nothing about black activism; and it just went on and on and on. I found that this was the most common thing that I could

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identify with my community, was the ability of people to take advantage of the system by hustling.

While it was troubling (I saw it a lot), luckily I also saw people like Dave and Alice and Tom [Cottingham] and my sister Mary and my brother Willie, myself, the whole family of Labries at the university, who were bona fide community people, who were activists and who became major parts of the university system as well.

Relationships with Disabled Students and the Cowell Hospital Program

Landes

What was it like for you as a disabled person on campus? How did you get around? Did you have a power chair yet?

Lacy

[chuckling] My first power chair I got through the Department of Rehabilitation. It was one of those old motorettes. The wheels were driven by gears, and it stayed broken down more than it was up and operating. But all and all, I'd say those were good experiences because I met a lot of my classmates and became friends with them by running into problems and their having to push me around the campus from class to class.

Landes

So you got pushed around a lot?

Lacy

A lot, especially the spring quarters, when it was raining and this power chair was absolutely no good at all. The electrical system went out, and I found myself barreling down the road [chuckling] uncontrollably, having people rescue me. But it was also where I first became familiar with the disabled students' Cowell program.

Landes

How did you learn about them?

Lacy

I think my--yes, I think it was my rehab counselor who told me about them because she was also the rehab counselor assigned to the Cowell program.

Landes

Which counselor was that?

Lacy

Her name was the very infamous Lucille Withington [chuckling], who instigated the Cowell revolt by denying Ed Roberts a second van.

Landes

So her denying Ed Roberts is what provoked the revolt at Cowell?

Lacy

Yes, absolutely.

Landes

When was that? Was that before you came or during the time you were there?

---

Lacy

I was still there. It was, like, within my final year on the campus. My main involvement with the Cowell program was using the wheelchair services, so I wasn't intimately involved in the issues. As a matter of fact, Lucille was doing great for me. She was providing me with every service that the Department of Rehabilitation could legitimately offer at that time. So I was not familiar with the issues around independence that the students were really rallying around at the time.

Landes

How did you first--other than being told by Lucille--did you meet the students on campus? Or did you go up to the hospital?

Lacy

No, she urged me to go to Cowell and introduce myself to the students and the staff there.

Landes

And did you do that?

Lacy

Yes, I did do that.

Landes

What was that experience like for you?

Lacy

Oh, it was the first time that I met so many disabled people all together. I was appalled that they lived in a hospital situation.

Landes

You were living out in the community.

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And then here the students were living together in the hospital?

Lacy

Yes, and at that time it was being called independence. And they had to go to bed at ten o'clock. I mean, it was basically a hospital. They were being told what to do. It was very much like the Fairmont experience. And these were all adult students.

Landes

How did they perceive you?

Lacy

Well, I think they kind of saw me as being a kind of heroic person. Here I was, living on my own and being pretty independent, you know, in ways that they wanted to be. But it was far from the independent living movement that later grew out of this insurrection. [chuckling]

Landes

How often did you go up to Cowell?

Lacy

Oh, I was there quite often. Mostly because of my wheelchair breaking down.

Landes

The wheelchair service was at Cowell Hospital?

---

Lacy

Yes. They had a person who was on staff who took care of the students' wheelchairs, and so I was able to call on him. I'm trying to think who he is. Shelley Bergum's husband.

Landes

Marc Krizack?

Lacy

Marc, yes. Oftentimes I had to call Marc and have him push me up to Cowell and fix my battery or do whatever had gone wrong, help me in whatever had gone wrong. They were just so accommodating. And that's how the other students really got to become more familiar with me, was through Marc and through--who was the nurse there? Mrs. Brean came later. But what's her name? Was it Eleanor?

Landes

Eleanor Smith?

Lacy

Yes, Eleanor Smith. Interesting. All these people were still around. But Eleanor, you know, kept up with me. I was always calling her about something. She also was a friend of Lucille Withington's. Marc would tell about all my exploits on campus, where I almost ran down the stairs or whatever and he had to come rescue me.

Landes

When you arrived on campus in 1969, was Ed still a student there?

Lacy

Yes. As a matter of fact, the first time I went to Cowell, Ed was still at the Cowell program, but he was not at the hospital when I went there. He was off traveling somewhere, Europe or somewhere, so he did a lot of travel.

Landes

Who were some of the people that you became close with among the disabled students?

Lacy

I think--

Landes

Who do you remember most vividly?

Lacy

The person that I remember the most later helped start CIL. Was it Cliff? Bismark? Mark? There was someone whose name was Bismark.

Landes

Larry Biscamp?

Lacy

Biscamp. Larry. Thank you! What's the blonde guy who later just kind of moved up to Sonora or someplace? The only time I ever saw him were at things like funerals and anniversaries. But Larry and this one other person whose name I can't remember right now were two of the main leaders in the Cowell program and who I related to

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and who I learned a lot from about the program and about the university.

Landes

What impact did this group of disabled students have on you?

Lacy

I think at the time they impressed me a lot as students, that you had this group of very severely disabled people and they considered severely disabled, enough to be institutionalized, but who were overcoming all of those negative kinds of perceptions that I was also experiencing in my community, in a different kind of way, to be successful students.

Landes

Would you elaborate on that?

Lacy

I think they legitimately perceived of themselves as students at a university, like, a great university, and yet they were very much aware that--I guess maybe I relate this in the way that I relate the history of the independent living movement. These guys wanted to be out there in the community. Remember, there was a lot of civil strife going on at the campus at that time: the Free Speech Movement, the women's right movement, the black student union, the Third World movement. And these guys, while they were on the campus, were not a part of these movements because they had access to go to class but they didn't have access to be part of the activism that was very rampant on this campus at the time. And I think probably helped to formulate the independent living rights concept that these students came up with later on.

Landes

Do you remember talking to them about what we would now refer to as the concept of independent living?

Lacy

No, not in so many words. I think it was pretty much like--their experiences were pretty much like my earlier experiences. There were people who were standing in the gate, denying them, who were trying to avert them, who largely saw them as patients as opposed to students. They were working their way through some kind of an identity that would eventually help them to identify as part of the community, the whole community, as opposed to a part of this small cadre of severely disabled students who had to live in a hospital and who had to basically be taken care of and who had decisions made for them, instead of making decisions for themselves.

Landes

Among the students there, were there disabled students of color?

Lacy

I think they told me about one, but I never met him. [laughs] And I don't know who he was.

Landes

So not many, if any.

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Lacy

[laughs] How can I say it? [chuckling] There was a legendary black student, disabled student, that I never met!

Landes

Do you think that your discussions and your visits and your hanging out with these people had an impact on your own thinking and attitudes about disability?

Lacy

Yes, because I must say that I didn't identify with my disability at that time. I was already independent; I was living on my own; I had held at least three jobs that were in the community; and none of them were disability-related. My attitude was so much so that when I was contacted to become involved in the organization of CIL, and even some years later, my response was that, you know, I didn't need a CIL; I was already independent. Much later, I began to be identified with the issues around the way other people perceived disability and that there was a need for [an] independent living movement, just to try to dispel those issues that the able-bodied community had around disability, even though I felt that I was independent.

Leaving School to Work in the Model Cities Program

Landes

So you were there at Berkeley for three years? Three school years?

Lacy

From '69--Actually, from '69 to '72.

Landes

So the spring of '72?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

So three school years. And why did you decide to leave school?

Lacy

Well, I just never felt comfortable there, in spite of the fact that I was functioning. I was bored. I was really, really bored. I have a real good example of what my boredom [chuckling] eventually led me to. After my first year in graduate school, the Model Cities program in Oakland finally came about. My boredom led me to do some things that I kind of regretted later. But in my second year I became a graduate assistant in the Sociology Department. In addition, this opportunity came up to work in Model Cities. After they had staffed the community --there were two sections. There was, like, a community organizing section, and then there was the bureaucratic section. The people in the community organizing section were people that I had worked with and who were leaders. So I decided that, because of my boredom, I was going to try to see if I could get hired, and so I called up.

---

After everybody was hired, I called up and asked them if they had gotten my résumé, which I hadn't sent. They started looking furiously [chuckling] around to find this résumé, which I actually hadn't sent. So they called me back and said they had lost the résumé and would I send another one, and [chuckling] so I was hired to be a social planner.

Landes

When was this?

Lacy

This was the year after I went to graduate school, so it must have been '70, '71.

Landes

Was it a part-time job?

Lacy

It was a full-time job. So here I was, full-time graduate student being sponsored through the Graduate Minorities Program. I was a graduate assistant part-time, and I was a full-time social planner. All at the same time. The result was drastic in that I got pneumonia and had to almost be hospitalized. It was the beginning of bronchitis for me for a number of years. I got chronic bronchitis from working, what? two jobs and being [chuckling] a graduate student. And I felt like a fugitive because when I was picking up my check at the university, it was like I was hiding to keep from being discovered because I thought, "Wow, somebody is really going to check and figure this out." They didn't.

Then, later on, I quit my graduate student assistant job because that was ridiculous. It was, like, you were being paid $6 an hour to be a faculty member, with no benefits, and that issue is still being fought in the university. But I also left Model Cities because they refused to pay me the same salary that they were paying the other planners, so after eight months I left there, and I never really identified that as a real job for me.

Landes

Why do you think you were being paid differently?

Lacy

It was a policy decision that was made by the board. The Model Cities staff, the community staff, came to work really at a very, very low salary, and they worked really long, hard hours, and the Model Cities hadn't completely funded this section, and so they worked just really, really hard. And so the board increased their salary. I think it was like $1,000 a month at that time, to try to make up for some of the inadequacies of the job earlier.

Even though I had worked in the very initial planning of Model Cities, I had gone on to graduate school and I had gone on to other things, other work, and so I came back with the qualifications, but they weren't recognizing just qualifications.

---

They were also recognizing the fact that this regular staff had shown loyalty to the job.

I resented that. I thought that I was qualified, and I should have been paid the same amounts.

Landes

So you don't think it was an issue of disability?

Lacy

No. Oh, no. If it had been an issue of disability, they wouldn't have--because, as I said, my reputation had preceded me throughout my work in the community, and they were--I mean, they were dishonest in admitting that they didn't have a résumé that I hadn't sent, so in a way they wanted me very, very badly, so much so that they invented this story that they couldn't find my résumé.

Landes

But they didn't, like--I mean, they didn't want to pay you--

Lacy

They didn't want to pay me what I thought I was worth.

Landes

Are there other highlights of the three years that you were a student at UC Berkeley?

Lacy

I'm trying to think. I'm sure I had some--I think the kind of relationship that I developed with the students as time went on, the disabled students, became a real plus for me.

Landes

That that's something that was important to you later.

Lacy

Yes, yes. Because it was part of my awareness around the fact that there were some real issues around disability that I was not dealing with.

Landes

Did it make you feel uncomfortable at the time to begin to perceive these issues regarding disability?

Lacy

No, not at the time. I think it was later on, when I became a part of the 504 movement, that I really started to put these things together.

Landes

So that's several years later.

Lacy

Yes. And also seeing student activists sitting in, you know, seeing it on TV, people like Judy Heumann and other disabled activists articulating these disability issues as civil rights issues, and seeing the similarities that they had to other civil rights issues and human rights issues.

---

Working for the Office of the President: 1973

Landes

At some point, you went to work at the university, as an administrative analyst?

Lacy

Yes. I was--

Landes

Where was that?

Lacy

I was working at Model Cities, and I learned about--well, my brother Willie by this time, who worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, somehow was asked to contact me about this job.

Landes

And what was the job?

Lacy

It was the administrative analyst position.

Landes

Where?

Lacy

At the president's office. Jim Goodwin was the assistant to the president at that time for affirmative action.

Landes

When did you take that job?

Lacy

Let's see. I think it was around February '72 because I was there about eighteen months. I was at Model Cities eight months, and then I went to work for the university after that.

Landes

What was that job like? What did you do?

Lacy

It was very bureaucratic, but it was also highly politicized in terms of our department. I learned that the university was probably one of the most politicized structures of any other structure that I--because there were bureaucratic departments, like--

Landes

Describe what you mean by "politicized."

Lacy

Well, as I was saying, there were departments that were vying for power under the office, within the office of the president. The way that the structure was organized was that there were the president and then there were a number of vice presidents and then also there was the legal office, which probably was the most politicized. Each one of them vying for power in terms of how policy was made at the university. These vice presidents also had

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little fiefdoms because they also had little sub-departments on each campus.

For example, the department of academic affairs was probably the most powerful department under the president. They were responsible for generating university policy that affected all of the academic programs at all of the campuses throughout the state.

---

---

---

---

Landes

Johnnie, we were talking about your job at the president's office at the University of California. You were saying that it was a highly politicized atmosphere. Is there more that you want to say about that and how you felt about working in that environment?

Lacy

It was probably one of the hardest jobs I ever had because it was not something that I enjoyed--the work was not something I enjoyed doing--although I did it and I think I did it pretty well; but it was the atmosphere of the competition between the various offices of vice president that kind of took its toll because it was like getting something done and seeing it in progress could take forever, in my opinion, coming from mostly a community activist kind of background, where you saw things change, literally right in front of your eyes.

Landes

Describe how it took a toll on you.

Lacy

Well, I have one example, I think, that to me sort of illustrates what can happen. I worked in the office for affirmative action, which was initially under the office of the president and then it was moved to office of vice president for communication. My job was to contribute articles to the newsletter that went out to all of the universities, basically communicating the policies of the university or the policies that were being considered.

My supervisor, who was Becky Mills, requested that I write an article about a new policy that had been adopted by the president on maternity leave for employees, both male and female. Maternity leave and paternity leave for the university. It was about ready to be put into action. I wrote the article, went through several steps of approval and editing, which everything had to be done, and then the article was printed.

Well! [chuckling]--as it turned out, the legal department--what do they call it? There's a fancy word, general counsel. But at any rate, they had not reviewed the policy, and they just flipped, and the ripples went all the way down throughout University Hall.

---

Landes

And somehow you were held responsible?

Lacy

I was blamed for it by my boss, my boss, who was the person who was over the affirmative action, who knew that this was happening, who had requested my supervisor to get this article written. And so a huge guilt trip, you know, kind of fell on me because somehow or other I felt that it was my fault, but I didn't know how or why I was to blame for it.

And what I found out later was that several of the vice presidents had now started feuding over this little article, and it wasn't until I approached one woman who was like the big secretary for one of the vice presidents, one of the important vice presidents, and I started to tell her how really sorry I was that I created this stink in the Hall. And she just became really livid, and she says, "Don't even talk about it! You had nothing to do with it. It's these son-of-a-bitches that I have to work with." [chuckles] So I found out that I was basically kind of taking the fall for somebody else who had screwed up, and I just wrote the article.

These were the kinds of--you know, just seemed like nit-picky kinds of things.

Landes

So those were the types of pressures you were under.

Lacy

Yes. And that everybody was under.

Landes

And did you feel a sense of betrayal?

Lacy

Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, I had by that time started to feel a grave sense of betrayal by my boss, who was head of the department. We talked about it among the staff. There was this whole pecking order, for example, where you got your office based upon your status, and since we only had two offices, my boss' office and then one other office on the sixth floor, where the President's Office was--which gave us status, but there were ten of us who shared this one little box--and as a result, one of the vice presidents for academic affairs, who was extremely important, had a huge office across the hallway. His secretary was a chain smoker. Her smoke drifted over into this windowless office on the inside of the hall, and eventually I got bronchitis and broke both of my ribs.

So in spite of the fact that it was a very prestige kind of office, it was like working in the coal mines. So when the opportunity came for me to get a permanent job there, I declined and left.

---

Landes

So what were the circumstances of your leaving?

Lacy

I had been working on a special project. Most everything I did was special projects in those days. This was coming to an end, and the university was committed to hiring me on a permanent basis. But in the meantime I became extremely disenchanted with the work with the office, with my office in particular. I made really great friends in some of the other offices, but my particular office had really been downgraded and lost a lot of the respect that was accorded it in the early years. And, frankly, I just didn't think I wanted to stay there under those conditions.

Project Coordinator at Antioch College West, 1973-1977

Landes

So what did you do next?

Lacy

I went home to kind of recuperate, and three weeks later I was called by Bob Solodow, who had also deserted the office and had gone to Antioch West as a special assistant, and he recommended that I be hired for this high school project.

Landes

For Antioch West in San Francisco?

Lacy

Antioch West.

Landes

Did you take that job?

Lacy

Yes. I was interviewed by the president, Joe--what's Joe's last name? I'll remember it at some point in time. Who had been assigned to that project from the Yellow Springs campus. So I was interviewed by him, and he hired me, and he liked me a lot. I think this was the first time that my disability played a positive role in my work. I mean, it was pretty obvious that he hired me because of my disability, and he basically laid out some special kinds of concerns around the kind of support that I would receive on this job.

Landes

So he was concerned that Antioch West would provide you with the type of support that you needed?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

How did that make you feel that somebody was taking a proactive stance like that?

---

Lacy

Well, kind of startled, surprised, pleased--all of those. Because in almost every other job that I had been hired at, I wasn't just exactly sure what the motivation was for hiring me, whether it was an affirmative action motivation or whether it was--well, I just didn't know. I never was really sure. I always questioned why people hired me.

Landes

And in this case, why do you think your disability--what role do you think your disability played in his hiring you?

Lacy

I think he felt that it would have a special kind of effect on the university because it was an alternative situation that was unique. Also, I think at some point he did expect to increase the enrollment of disabled students there, as Pat Wright was kind of--helped to initiate--and I think all of this probably was in the works.

Landes

Describe the Antioch West school. Was there something unique about it?

Lacy

I think it was quite unique. Number one, it was in a warehouse in the South of Market in San Francisco, on the third floor, and in order for me to get to it, I had to take a freight elevator and go up with the freight to the third floor.

But the other thing that was unique about it was it really was a university without walls. You didn't expect to spend eight hours a day at this campus. You were expected to spend most of your time in the community, working in the community, doing community classes, community projects. Much of the learning was based upon the Antiochian principle of work, learn, and applying that work to your academic experience, documenting it in terms of what you had learned through the work experience.

Landes

Did they actually have classes there in the building?

Lacy

They had classes, yes. And these classes were taught by what you call adjunct faculty, and so most of them didn't give college credit just because you took the class but that you had to document the learning that took place in the class, so they were mostly informal kinds of classes. Many of them that were not necessarily academic--I can remember some of the more popular classes being parapsychology and body work, for example--human sexuality. They had a farm on the roof where they raised chickens and vegetables and rabbits, which was really exciting to my students. Photography was a big one.

One of the unique things that my class did, for example--they taught classes that students were interested in and sort of

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took surveys of what students were interested in and developed the class or found someone who could teach that particular class my students were interested in. First they were interested in tap dance. And I refused to believe that they were going to take tap dance seriously, so I didn't really pursue that.

Landes

You weren't going to teach them tap dancing.

Lacy

Well, I would go out and find a tap dancer--you know, a tap dancing teacher. This was, like, in the seventies, when tapping really wasn't all that big a deal.

Landes

You actually taught classes there.

Lacy

I did more of the counseling classes, just to survey the interests of the students, to get them involved in field work and to supervise them. These students had their regular classes in the alternative high school. There were three high schools that I worked with: Opportunity High--and these were all alternative high schools--Opportunity High in San Francisco, Emiliano Zapata High School, which is in Fruitvale and still is around, by the way. It was run by the Urban League, the Bay Area Urban League. And then there was the East Oakland Alternative High School, which became very troubled and kind of went by the wayside.

But I took students--I went out and I reached out and recruited these students through the counseling staff at each of these schools. And so I had about an equal number of students from each of those schools, which totalled, at the most, fifteen students.

Landes

What were other aspects of your job? You counseled?

Lacy

I did counseling, I did the teaching, I was the driver for some students who needed a ride across the Bay, I organized field trips, I worked with the various counselors and faculty at the various schools, and I did additional recruitment to other schools, like the Berkeley West campus. And I had one assistant, who helped me with this as well, Bob.

Landes

While you were doing this, did you happen to recruit disabled students as well?

Lacy

I had one dyslexic student that I know of who couldn't read but was a math whiz. I did not consciously recruit disabled students in the sense that I went out and identified students who had disabilities and brought them into the program. What I did do was to work very closely with the counselors, as I said, at each of

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these schools, who identified these students and referred them to me.

I have to say that I didn't, in any of the schools, observe students who had profound disabilities that were recognizable, although I knew that I had students who had disabilities in my classes, mostly learning disabilities, which actually, probably had caused them to move into an alternative high school setting, as opposed to a regular school setting. I know that I had at least one in my project. But it was not a disability focus per se.

Landes

You were in that job for approximately four years, from 1973 to 1977?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

During that time did you maintain contact with the disabled students at Berkeley?

Lacy

Yes and no. I ran into them because by this time CIL was up and running. Some of the folks who were in the disabled students program were now either on the board or working at CIL. I went mostly to get wheelchair services--you know, to get my wheelchair fixed--or to get my hand controls taken care of in some way or other.

Landes

At CIL?

Lacy

Yes, at CIL. And I ran into these guys. And of course I remembered them, and they remembered me, and we always talked. But it wasn't anything that was arranged or--you know, we weren't friends with each other. We were just casual acquaintances.

Landes

So you used the services at the Center for Independent Living.

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

What were some of the highlights of the Antioch West job? What did you like best about that job?

Lacy

I liked working with the students the best. I was responsible for taking them on several conferences with other university without walls high school students throughout the country. I guess maybe the best things that I remember--I remember taking them to a conference at Yellow Springs, where we stayed several days in this--it's not a monastery but religious house. And I can't even remember where it was. It wasn't in Yellow Springs, but it was somewhere in Ohio. No, it wasn't! It was in Minnesota

---

[chuckling]. I remember it was in Minnesota because I almost got the plane and went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, instead of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Landes

So you took them on a field trip to--

Lacy

It was a conference.

Landes

To a conference in Minnesota?

Lacy

Yes, in Minnesota. This was the first time that I had taken all of my students. I basically had to figure out how to budget and get all of these students there.

Landes

So you had budgeting responsibility as well as figuring out all the logistics?

Lacy

Yes, oh yes. I did all that.

Landes

How did that trip go?

Lacy

Well, I thought it went very well. It was one of the times that we really got to know the students a lot better because it was in kind of a retreat setting. I got a chance to really learn what each individual student--we had these two girls that I just loved. They dressed like street walkers. That's all I can say about them. They wore the bangles all the way up their elbow, to their elbow, and they wore the long gypsy dresses and the earrings down to their shoulders, and the high heels--what kind of high heels were they wearing in those days? Were they called stacked heels?

Landes

Platforms?

Lacy

Platforms. Thank you! I mean, they were a couple of characters. And on the trip they tricked my assistant into going into the gift shop and buying sloe gin on our way back. I wasn't really all that cool about young people at the time, so this was really a learning thing for me. But they were drinking the sloe gin and 7-Up. At one point in time, the airline stewardess came and wanted to know who was in charge, and my assistant was either [a]sleep or pretending to be [a]sleep. I said, "Well--"--I usually don't want to take responsibility for being the boss of anything, so I says, "Well, I guess I must be in charge," as I looked over at Bob, who was [a]sleep. And she says, "These kids are drinkin' sloe gin and 7-Up, and somebody better tell them to stop it or they're gonna be put off the plane on the next stop." And I can remember my heart jumping in my throat because I checked them out, and I thought they were drinking cherry Cokes. [chuckling]

---

Landes

So it was a learning experience for you.

Lacy

Whoa! Was it ever! [chuckling] As it turns out, these girls had tricked Bob into buying the sloe gin. But also we had--really, it was just a lot of camaraderie. As a matter of fact, I still have students that have contacted me over the years for one reason or another, and I found out that they really got a real positive experience being at Antioch.

One of the troublesome girls went back and graduated from Berkeley, UC Berkeley. She was one of the more brilliant students. Her parents were both artists. She had had a really rough time as a youngster, but--her father works down at the Oakland Museum, and so I kind of kept--at least I know where she is and what she's doing now.

Landes

So that was by and large a positive experience for you, working at Antioch West?

Lacy

Yes, working with the kids. But the politics was really rough and tough. I just couldn't deal with that.

Landes

So the internal political issues were frustrating to you?

Lacy

Very. Very frustrating, yes.

Landes

Is that why you eventually left?

Lacy

Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, once that project was over, I was asked to come back and do the project for another eighteen months. By that time, I just had enough. It was interesting because I had a real close relationship with one of the counselors from Emiliano Zapata. I talked to him a lot, even after I left the project. One day, as he talked to me and kind of listened to my complaints and anger and bitterness, he says, "You're burned out, aren't you?" [chuckling] And I said, "What?! What's burned out?" [chuckling] So that was the first time I identified having been burned out, you know, with all of this anger and frustration and, you know, anxiety that the political aspects really created for me.

Landes

Is there anything else you'd like to say about your time in Antioch?

Lacy

No. I think overall it was just a really pleasant time. I felt really rewarded. I learned a lot, and I think my students learned a lot.

---

Disability Rights Articulated at 504 Demonstration: An Empowering Experience

Landes

Shortly before you left your job at Antioch, there was the month-long sit-in at the HEW building in San Francisco, the so-called 504 demonstration?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

How did you find out about that? How did you hear about it?

Lacy

Mainly by television and the newspapers, and I followed that very closely.

Landes

Describe how you felt when you found out that a hundred some-odd people were sitting in at the federal building.

Lacy

Well, I had a really strong sense of, you know, like, pride, like Wow, these people really have it together. They're really organized. But at the same time, I think I felt some sense of detachment. It was the first time that I had heard the issue around disability rights articulated in a way that really made sense to me, and that was because of Judy Heumann, I think, as the spokesperson.

Landes

So you remember specifically hearing Judy on radio and/or TV?

Lacy

Oh, yes, absolutely. She just fascinated me.

Landes

Say more about what it is that she said that registered with you.

Lacy

Well, I think more than what she said was, I think, the dignity with which she delivered the message. All of the other disabled people who were lucky enough to get sound bites--because, you know, the media concentrates mostly on the spectacle and kind of the spokesperson as opposed to really, really, getting a clear picture of the participants, themselves. So it was more like the dignity that I saw in these folks. You know, I saw them as individuals, somewhat like me, and started to identify with the same kinds of issues that I was dealing with on a daily basis by myself, that there were others who felt the same way and were dealing with the same issues.

I think when I went over to the 504 training, this was brought home to me even more because all of the things that I thought were unique to me as a disabled person, others felt the same way. And that here it was, a group of isolated, prior isolated individuals were finally having a chance to come together and bring their issues to the table as a group, as an organized

---

group. I think Judy basically spoke to those issues. I think she was an excellent spokesperson in terms of laying out those issues.

Landes

Had you met Judy prior to that time?

Lacy

No. In fact, it was--one of the reasons I knew who she was when I met her at the Hallmark shop or the bookstore--I don't know--[chuckling].

##

---

Landes

Talk a little bit about the impact that the 504 sit-in had on your own thinking about your own issues regarding your disability and about disability rights in general.

Lacy

Well, it was the first time, I think, that I started to recognize that having a disability was not just my problem to solve, that issues like acceptance, issues like isolation because of access, attitudinal issues were things that made disabled people look like losers in the community, and that was no longer acceptable. When I say disabled people were made to look like losers, the portrayal of disabled people over the years had been very, very negative in terms of the media coverage of disabled people. It was always the poor, pitiful pearl, is what [chuckling] one of my counselors use to call them.

Landes

Your counselor called disabled people pearl?

Lacy

No, this was a role that she suggested that I play when I wanted to get something out of the power structure, let's call it.

Landes

This is your Department of Rehab counselor?

Lacy

No, this was--actually, this was a social worker at Herrick, where I was doing rehab. When I wanted a car, she decided she was going to help me get a car, and she called one of the major Chevrolet dealers in Berkeley, and then she counseled me on how I was to approach this dealer. She said that I had to pretend that I was a poor, pitiful pearl, to make him feel sorry for me so he'd give me the car. And we giggled and laughed about it, but I thought it was just kind of a cute portrayal of how disabled people had to act in order to get, to achieve things in our society.

Landes

Did it feel demeaning to you?

Lacy

Of course it was demeaning, but I didn't feel demeaned as an individual. It was a joke for us, you know. And I understood the joke because I understood that disabled people had to play that disability card, if you will, using the O.J. Simpson phraseology.

---

Landes

So you would play the disability card in the sense that--

Lacy

To my advantage.

Landes

--you were using this image of being a feeble, helpless cripple to get something that you wanted.

Lacy

Exactly, because people were expected to respond to you.

Landes

So how did the 504 demonstration change that for you?

Lacy

I saw disabled people demanding things that I never--that I thought you had to earn before. Things that should have been theirs. I'd come up--and I immediately made the connection--this was the most important thing about my enlightenment, that I had worked in the anti-poverty program before, and poor people were given the same kinds of lack of respect and the same kinds of treatment: the pull yourselves up by your bootstraps kind of thing--that immediately connected with the way the disabled people were also treated.

Landes

What about the way that black people were expected to act in order to--when they were asking a white person for a favor?

Lacy

Yes. Well, when I say poor people, I think I'm talking about blacks and other minorities.

Landes

So you're talking about your own experience as an African American.

Lacy

Yes. And it certainly became even clearer as time went on in terms of how the economics and the politics played a very strong role in the denial of rights of people who had no money and no power, and the disempowerment of blacks and poor people was the same kind of disempowerment that was happening to people with disabilities. So that was the connection I saw at that time.

Landes

So for you the 504 demonstration was a very important message.

Lacy

It empowered--it made me feel empowered, and I think it also made, you know, the whole country of disabled people and people who--have-nots--feel stronger. I was just totally amazed. For example, the head of the HEW [Health, Education and Welfare] in the San Francisco office was someone that I had dealt with in the anti-poverty program, Joseph Maldonado. Because before he became the head of HEW, he was the regional head of OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity], and so I had some experience with him. It was just an incredible kind of unique experience that I saw this man as a fighter for the rights of poor people, minority people,

---

Hispanic people--because he was Hispanic--not being able to transfer those concerns or at least seemingly not--I don't know what his real issues were--to people with disabilities.

Landes

Instead, treating them in a very condescending manner?

Lacy

Exactly.

Landes

Say more about just your gut reaction as the month of April 1977 unfolded and you were listening to the radio and watching the TV news, what were your feelings as that was taking place?

Lacy

I was fascinated by the process. I felt that here a bunch of disabled people were defying a whole, entire system, and it was fascinating; it was scary in a way because they were putting themselves out on a limb to demand something that they thought was their right. They were confronting people who heretofore were considered powerful people, like when they went to Washington, D.C., and surrounded the secretary of HEW's house. I think that was the first time that that had ever been done by anybody, you know? Let alone disabled people. And being put at risk of being thrown down the capitol steps. You know, I thought this was just really something to see and to experience.

Landes

Did you ever go over to the demonstrations outside the HEW building?

Lacy

No, no because at that time I was scared to even go to San Francisco [chuckling] by myself. I never rode BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit]. It was just a totally--it was a world far away for me--and it was just amazing that all these folks could get there. I just often wondered where'd they come from? How did they get there?

Landes

Is there anything else you'd like to say just to sum up your feelings about that demonstration?

Lacy

No, I just think that--just to summarize, that it was a definite eye opener to me and that I was really impressed that people were demanding what they thought should rightfully be theirs, for the first time.

Landes

Now, later that year you became involved in the 504 trainings that developed out of the 504 victory.

Lacy

Right.

Landes

How did you become involved in those trainings?

---

Lacy

Well, that's an interesting story I like to tell because it was just a chance meeting, where I happened to be shopping. It must have been around the holiday time because it seemed like I was shopping for potential Christmas gifts or something. I was just kind of looking around in this shop--

Landes

Where?

Lacy

At the Hilltop Mall in Richmond. I think I saw Judy Heumann in the hallway at first. And of course I recognized her because I had seen her in the news and on the news practically every day for several months. I was heading--as it turned out, we were both heading into the same shop, and so I was trying not to be, you know--I was trying to be cool and pretend, like, she was just another person [chuckling], browsing around. And then I realized that she was really focusing on me for some reason or another, and I thought, She doesn't know me, does she? [chuckling]

At some point in time, she approached me, and she introduced herself and I introduced myself, not ever really saying, you know, like, "I know you!" [chuckling] "You're the one that's been on TV all these years." And being the very abrupt and straight-to-the-point kind of person, she asked me if I was interested in being in the 504 training. She explained that they had been basically ordered to get more people of color involved and that they were really having a hard time recruiting people of color. And this was always a problem at CIL anyway.

And she asked me if I was interested, and I told her, "Well, yeah, I might be." So she asked me for my phone number, and she said, "Well, somebody will get in touch with you and send you an application." I didn't think this was politically incorrect. Obviously, it was not. But it's one of the things that I've often admired about Judy, that she takes risks.

Landes

What was politically incorrect?

Lacy

Basically identifying a person of color and wanting to include them not necessarily because anybody really wanted them but because they were being required to do it.

Landes

And what was your response? Did she send an application?

Lacy

Yes. She sent an application, and I think I was looking for a job at that time, too. So all of these things came together like at once because I was also being interviewed for some jobs that were disability-centered, as I recall.

Landes

What other jobs were you being interviewed for?

---

Lacy

I remember one being in the Berkeley schools. I also, as I recall, applied for a social worker job at [U.S. Representative] Pete Stark's office, which, you know, I wasn't interviewed for.

Landes

Pete Stark is the U.S. Representative?

Lacy

Yes. And I developed a friendly relationship with his special assistant, Jo Cazanave at that time. So it was kind of an interesting coming together of several contacts that I had made at the time, when I met Judy, but Judy sort of pulled them all together for me.

Landes

So you did a 504 training as a trainee?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

When was that?

Lacy

It seems to me like it started in February. It was at the Claremont Hotel.

Landes

So February--

Lacy

It was a week's training.

Landes

A week's training in February of 1978?

Lacy

Yes, yes.

Landes

What was your first impression of that training when you arrived at the Claremont?

Lacy

I was just overwhelmed by--well, number one, I was overwhelmed that this luxurious kind of place was being occupied by a bunch of disabled people. That was the first thing. And this comment was one that I heard throughout the place. It was the first time I had seen so many disabled people in one place in my life. I met some people who were, for the first time, life-long friends with disabilities: Vernon Cox, who stands out in my mind, as being--

Landes

These are people who have remained friends that you met for the first time at that training?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

Did you know anybody prior to the training?

Lacy

Other than Judy, I met Cazanave for the first time in person. I had been talking to her on the phone for several months, and I met

---

her for the first time. I don't remember--oh, yes! This is strange. Alan Kalmanoff, the person who wrote the training materials, was an attorney that I had worked with in the anti-poverty program. Al Kalmanoff was a graduate student intern in West Oakland when I worked in the anti-poverty program. And so I got a lot of surprises from the connections. But none of them had disabilities that I knew about. These are people I had worked with from a civil rights kind of perspective.

Landes

So what do you remember most about that week-long training?

Lacy

Over and above the cameraderie, I think--and finally the connection between the issues around people with disabilities--you know, the isolation and all of those things--I learned about 504, which I never knew about per se. I mean, I had heard the term 504, but I didn't know that it was legislation that had been enacted that gave certain rights to disabled people. I learned a lot more about the organizational strategies. We did role-playing and identifying problems.

Landes

So the 504 regulations were landmark legislation and regulations that established civil rights for people with disabilities.

Lacy

Exactly.

Landes

And you were learning how to apply that law?

Lacy

Yes. What those laws were and then how to apply--how to basically demand those rights through employment and other kinds of things.

Landes

What impact did that training have on your life?

Lacy

Well, I think it changed my life. It gave me a sense of pride as a disabled person, not as a black person and not as a woman. But it added--what's the word? It brought the three together for the first time to me. And sort of made me feel like a whole person in terms of these issues that I hadn't dealt with--hadn't had the opportunity to deal with. So I think it really shifted my life, and it brought into play something that I had not been able to think about very much.

Landes

Are there other people there that were at that training that you remember vividly?

Lacy

Well, I remember the trainers. I remember Mary Lou Breslin, and I remember Ken Stein and Kitty Cone.

Landes

Mary Lou, Ken, and Kitty were trainers?

---

Lacy

Ken was, like, one of the staff people. He always played a real strong support staff role, and we just kind of clicked. Sign language interpreting was something that I don't remember seeing before in large groups.

Landes

So you were around people with a wide variety of disabilities for the first time?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

What was that like for you? You were with people who were deaf, had hearing impairments, blind people, people with mobility problems. What was it like to have so many different types of disabilities represented under one tent?

Lacy

The whole experience was just a fascinating experience more than anything. It was like feeling like the first time that a door had opened up to me, that I could identify myself with a whole group of people that I never identified and that I didn't really know existed. It was like sharing my experiences as a disabled person for the first time, sharing my insights and all of the various humor, senses of humor. It was like being with a group of people who saw themselves as people, not as objects of pity or all of those things that losers, that, you know, were part of my thinking--except me--in the past, that people, like I say, were being empowered and they were not blaming themselves. They were placing the blame where it correctly belonged, and that was a societal misfortune or attitude toward disabled people. It was just really a very proud moment for me.

Landes

When you left the training after the one week, how did that change your life when you went back home?

Lacy

Well, I felt fired up with a new attitude. I'm trying to think who coined the phrase "Righteous indignation." That was the word that somebody coined. I don't remember. Mary Lou or whomever. But I left with that sense of righteous indignation that, How dare people look at me in a way that made me feel as though I was less than they as a result of my, now, my disability because I think I had mastered that righteous indignation of a black person, a poor person, and now I saw that applying again.

Landes

Now, soon thereafter you got a job as a trainer, a 504 trainer?

Lacy

I was asked to be a part of the trainers.

Landes

Who approached you to do that?

---

Lacy

I think probably Mary Lou Breslin called me and asked me because she was in charge of that project at the time.

Landes

And the name of the project was what? The 504--

Lacy

The 504 trainer training.

Landes

And so did you do that training?

Lacy

Yes, yes.

Landes

So that was a training to teach you how to train other people about their rights under 504?

Lacy

Rights, exactly. And that was a project that was also funded through the office of civil rights and was a really huge--I guess it was the hugest project that CIL had ever encountered.

Landes

So these trainings were under the umbrella of CIL?

Lacy

Yes, right.

Landes

When and where did you do the training of trainers?

Lacy

It was also held at the Claremont Hotel. I think it was, like, five or six weeks that these trainings were held.

Landes

So that training was five or six weeks?

Lacy

I believe so.

Landes

So for five or six weeks straight you were at the Claremont?

Lacy

I wasn't at the Claremont, living; but that's where the trainings were held.

Landes

So you would go there every day or several days a week?

Lacy

Yes, I think it was several days a week. That's when my transportation situation became a problem. I remember Mary Lou helping me to work that out by getting van transportation.

Landes

Was this a job?

Lacy

This training of trainers?

Landes

Yes.

---

Lacy

No, it wasn't a job. We were expected to do training in various areas of the country once we were trained. Actually, I never did any training in 504--well, actually, I went to a Seattle, Washington, training, but the style of training just never fit with me. I never really felt real comfortable with it because I had done training before, and it was completely different. This was more of a--oh, I don't know what it was. It just was not something that I felt comfortable with, and I don't think I ever really mastered the training. I mastered the material, but I didn't master the style of training.

Landes

So there was something about the technique of training that didn't feel comfortable to you?

Lacy

Right, right. It never did.

Landes

Can you put your finger on that? What was it?

Lacy

I think it was didactic.

Landes

In what sense?

Lacy

In the sense that we had these large audiences of people that sat out in the audience, and then this group of teachers who sat up on the stage and lectured. I've never been too comfortable with the lecture style of training. It didn't seem to go with an activist style of learning that was hands-on. We did role-playing and some exercises which I felt a lot more comfortable with, you know, as a workshop leader, role-playing leader. But the lecturing aspect just was not my cup of tea at all. I didn't feel comfortable with it. I didn't feel comfortable with standing in front of a large audience and--what could you say?

Landes

So you only did one training of trainers?

Lacy

Right. And then I was hired--was I hired before? Somewhere in there I was hired to be the coordinator for the Community Services Administration [CSA] training for anti-poverty administrators.

As I said, I think it was after I had been hired that I did the Washington training. As a result, my boss, who was Bob Funk at that time, decided that I couldn't go on any more trainings, that I was needed to develop the training programs for the CSA project.

---

---

Center for Independent Living: Problems with Outreach to Minority People with Disabilities

##

Landes

Soon after you did these trainings, you were hired at the Disability Law Resource Center at CIL?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

How were you approached for that job? Who approached you and how did you find out about it?

Lacy

I don't remember. I know it was through the trainer trainings that--while I was doing the training, someone in the group told me about the job and asked me if I was interested, and then I was called up for an interview.

Landes

Who was the interview with?

Lacy

As I recall, Bob Funk was the major interviewer, and it seemed there was one other person who was involved. It just seems like it might have been Lloyd [Burton]. Lloyd was in charge of the project up to that point and had helped to--

Landes

In charge of what?

Lacy

The CSA project.

Landes

That's the Community--

Lacy

Community Services Administration. The DLRC was the Disability Law Center that had been funded through--it seems to me the Ford Foundation--but it had several different funding sources and was part of CIL. It was a project that was run by CIL, but it was located across the street from the CIL campus and was pretty independent. The 504 training office was there. All of the training and the legal work was done in this building.

Landes

And what specifically was the job for which you applied?

Lacy

I was hired as the training coordinator for the CSA project, and that was--for the first time, that was the term, Disability Rights Project, was used as opposed to 504. The reason that I had been invited to interview for that job was because they were aware that I had worked in the anti-poverty program before and that, by this time, CSA had taken the place of OEO in the administration of anti-poverty programs in the country. Community Services Administration, whereas it used to be called OEO, I think.

---

Landes

And what was the purpose of that particular project?

Lacy

The purpose was to train administrative staff and disabled consumers in Region 9 around the rights of people with disabilities, with the idea in mind that these anti-poverty agencies would begin to service people with disabilities who also were poor and, you know, make them aware of the needs of this segment of the community that had been neglected. Region 9 included several states: California, Arizona, Hawaii--it seems like it was--some of the other islands. So we were responsible for setting up training programs in these states.

Landes

Do you remember much about the interview with Bob Funk?

Lacy

The one thing I remember the most was that he didn't seem to be all that happy to hire me. But the CSA liaison had insisted that he hire someone of color because at this time the DLRC had either no people of color or they weren't that familiar with the issues around the CSA programs. As a matter of fact, I heard a rumor that Lloyd, who was an able-bodied white male, had been identified as the coordinator of that program and that there was a lot of resentment because I--

Landes

Resentment on the part of whom?

Lacy

On the staff and on Bob's part because--what was his name? Bob--CSA Bob. I'll think of it in a minute. And CSA insisted that that person be a person of color, and I was the most logical person. I mean, I was right there in their backyard.

Landes

Did you feel that Bob felt that you were not qualified for the job?

Lacy

I felt that everybody thought I was not qualified for the job. As a matter of fact--

Landes

Everybody at DLRC?

Lacy

At the DLRC, right. And it presented some problems for me as time drew on.

Landes

Do you think they continued to believe that?

Lacy

Oh, absolutely not. I was absolutely qualified. It was just initially, in the interview. I can remember not being asked about my qualifications, just being asked some empty kinds of questions that really had nothing to do with anything because it was understood that I was going to be hired.

---

Landes

Did you feel that you were being treated in a condescending way?

Lacy

Oh, absolutely. And I felt that throughout my tenure at CIL, that African Americans were definitely being condescended to, most of them with their permission, but there were just some really weird kinds of things that went on at CIL that everybody talked about and noticed. For example, CIL did not have the ability to go out and do outreach to real disabled minorities, and so they hired able-bodied minorities to make up for those things. And those were issues that were pretty well known and talked about at CIL.

Landes

When you say they were talked about, were they talked about among the African Americans at CIL or--

Lacy

Among everybody.

Landes

--the entire staff?

Lacy

The entire staff. And administrators.

Landes

Do you feel that CIL attempted to make a good-faith effort to change that?

Lacy

Yes, but they didn't know how, and the mistake they made was they never learned how. They didn't make a good effort to learn until way later, I think probably when Michael--as a matter of fact, I used to use Michael Winter as my resource for finding minority disabled people. He was very good at it, whereas the originators of the CIL were not.

Landes

So Michael Winter comes in the late seventies?

Lacy

Yes. He was an intern student. Came there as a rehab intern.

Landes

So he came there about the same time you did?

Lacy

A little after, a little after.

Landes

Okay. Why did you take the job at DLRC if you had these feelings about the interview and the institution?

Lacy

Well, I was excited about the training. It was a chance for me to reconnect with my previous background. See, the people at CSA knew me well. They knew my reputation, from the anti-poverty program. And since I was going to be in charge of this program, I would be able to set the tone and the direction because that's what I was hired to do, and it didn't really matter to me that people like Bob, who didn't know me, didn't know what my

---

background was, had this attitude because I had experienced this before, you know, on many occasions.

I knew that I was qualified. I knew that I had administrative experience. I knew that I had organizing experience. I knew that I had training experience. And for me, I think he recognized what I thought were the lesser qualifications. I can remember him saying, sarcastically, "Well, you have community organizing experience, and that's what we need, so we'll hire you." Well, I had that, but I had a great deal more, and I think I was able to show it in many ways at CIL.

Landes

Did you talk about these feelings with people on the staff there at DLRC?

Lacy

No, no, I did not.

Landes

Did you feel you had any allies there?

Lacy

Oh, yes. I had many allies, as well as some enemies, I thought. Guy Guber and what's the other person's name? I'm drawing a blank today. Gary Gill. Guy Guber's secretary, Melba [last name?], who was I think at that time the only black in the office. Were all people that, you know, I became friends with, and I eventually became very close to the staff, the CSA staff that I worked with.

Landes

Where was the CSA staff located?

Lacy

It was in the DLRC building. We had an office there.

Landes

Were you able to talk about these issues with Bob Funk or Mary Lou or any of the other leaders?

Lacy

No, because I didn't really see why we were all in the same building. There wasn't all that much, that I can remember, kind of cross-pollinization, for lack of a better word, you know. The 504 project pretty much was the 504 project, and the people who worked there. There was the CSA project; there was a training project for the parents; and then Corbett--what was Corbett's project?

Landes

Disabled women?

Lacy

No, it was about kids. The KIDS Project! She was in charge of the KIDS Project.

So I made friends with a lot of people as individuals. Oh, yes, Hale Zukas and Kitty Cone were doing a lot of the 504 community organizing at that time there. Ken Stein was the

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administrative assistant. Debby Kaplan I met for the first time. And we were all involved in either legal issues or training issues. But we basically--I didn't see any attempts to kind of unify the staffs at that time. You know, Bob was the director and I was the coordinator for my project; Mary Lou was the coordinator for her project, you know, etc., etc.

So what I'm saying is that I don't think I developed any kinds of relationships that I felt comfortable in, at least in the DLRC office, in sharing my sense of discomfort, other than that I was very outspoken in terms of my being identified as a token for the project and not necessarily being identified as someone who was fully qualified.

Landes

When you say you were outspoken, in staff meetings or in individual meetings with people?

Lacy

Yes, in any conversation that this came up.

Landes

What was the response that you would get?

Lacy

Most people would say, "Yeah, you're a token, but we need you," so there was kind of an agreement, unspoken agreement, that okay, I'll be a token and you can call on me to do certain things, but I want you to recognize that it's tokenism because you won't go out and find other people of color that you can rely on, that you can bring into the organization. I'm the resident Negro here, and I recognize that. I don't feel bitter about it; I just know that it's a reality of the time, and I'll try to change that--which I went ahead and tried to do on many levels.

Landes

And how did you go about trying to change things?

Lacy

Well, one of the things that I did was that I set up--what is it called? Internship program in my project. I went out and recruited folks to learn about disability rights. I trained them personally. I identified three trainers who were minorities. One of them was Norma Joe, who worked at CIL for several years. There was a young Mexican-American woman and--I'm trying to think who the third person was. But I started off with three people.

That's one of the things that I did work with DLRC with, was recruiting and training disabled minorities. I worked kind of as a consultant with Mary Lou's project to put together a 504 training, just for people of color, which turned out--well, it was a good thing and a bad thing because the training for people of color, while it was successful in getting all of these people with disabilities, disabled minority people, together, there were some

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internal problems around the training that really was left--that left some questions in a lot of disabled minorities' minds about what the intent, future intent of these were.

But the big--the big, big, big tragedy that I don't think very many people were aware of was while we were doing training for both disabled minority individuals and Community Service Administration administration and staff--it was a joint training. And my project was responsible for training the CSA administrators and staff. The 504 trainings always had a huge binder that was given out to the trainees, with all the disability rights information, etc. And we were responsible for developing the same kind of binder for the CSA project, and that never came about because the person who was responsible for doing that just didn't do it, and I didn't find it out until--

Landes

Was that somebody at the 504 project?

Lacy

No, they were one of my staff people. I didn't find out about it until the day before. That's when Lloyd told me that it hadn't been done. Had I known that it wasn't being done, you know, earlier, we could have easily put it together, but this person was very devious around whenever you asked them about the material, they would always say, "Well, I'm workin' on it." You know, "You'll have it."

But what happened was one of the administrators complained to CSA about this, the fact that the disabled minority 504 training got their binders, and the CSA training folks did not get their binders.

Landes

Who complained?

Lacy

The director from Las Vegas, who later on incorporated--did a beautiful job of incorporating services to people with disabilities in his anti-poverty program. He provided jobs, job training, transportation. As a matter of fact, I utilized his transportation project, a para-transit project that he had already had that he was able to recruit more disabled into. So he was the one who was really, really angry because he saw a missed opportunity there. And we were defunded almost immediately as a result of that.

Landes

Because the binders had not been produced?

Lacy

Right, exactly. And we were the subject of an investigation. People came over and asked a lot of questions.

Landes

Your specific unit.

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Lacy

Yes.

Landes

How did that--

Lacy

How did it make me feel?

Landes

Yes.

Lacy

It was the angriest that I've ever been. [chuckling] As a matter of fact, I wrote a letter to the person who had been responsible for putting together the binder that was very angry and very articulate in terms of what should have been done, what wasn't done, what kind of deceit had taken place.

Landes

Who had been responsible?

Lacy

Well, do I need to name the person?

Landes

No, not if you don't want to.

Lacy

I don't want to. And I sent a copy of the letter to Bob Funk, which was the first time that he had acknowledged that he was aware of what had taken place there. He swore that this person would not ever be involved in a DLRC-sponsored project again, and I guess that did happen. But it was--it ended what I thought was an excellent project that had made a lot of inroads--

Landes

So that was the end of the CSA project?

Lacy

Yes, that was it.

Landes

That was the end of your job at DLRC?

Lacy

Yes, at CIL. The whole staff was laid off.

Landes

That's in 1981?

Lacy

Yes, the end of 1980, when the DLRC had already been in the process of changing over to DREDF [Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund] anyway. So basically DLRC closed. Everyone was laid off. Some folks were recruited to work in DREDF, which I was not interested in because it was mainly research and training.

Landes

Did the fact that you felt that you had been a token play any role in your decision?

Lacy

Not by this time. I was used to--you know, being a token was something that I did voluntarily because I knew that I could

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articulate what it was that was happening there, and it was an advantage to me to a great extent.

Landes

You had spoken of internal problems in the training in the minority disabled people. Are you speaking of the problem around the binders or other--

Lacy

No, there were a bunch of--there were personality--and I wasn't privy to all of them, but one of them I witnessed was a problem with a couple of the trainers who had not been a part of the training of trainers project that I was a part of, and so these people were brought in almost at the last minute and tried to be brought up to snuff on how to do training, and they just could not do it, and so there was a lot of controversy among the training group and the 504 staff about how to pull this off, the unqualified trainers.

Landes

Who were some of the people involved in this controversy?

Lacy

The one person I remember who was the most outspoken was Joyce Jackson.

Landes

What was her position, and what was her argument or what was her position on this issue?

Lacy

That she hadn't been trained properly. The other was basically that nobody in the project really had a full understanding and knowledge around the issues of disability in minority communities, and the training was basically a training for white disabled activists that could not--there just wasn't the ability to incorporate minority disabled issues in this training outline.

Landes

What are some of the specific issues that are specific to, for example, the African-American community that you felt were not being addressed?

Lacy

I wasn't a part of the discussion to any extent. I remember sitting down with Mary Lou and talking over how this project could be changed--she was really, really willing to make any changes that were necessary. It's just that nobody really knew how or what the issues were. I'm trying to think.

Landes

In your view, what were the issues that were not being addressed?

Lacy

Well, I think the--one of the most important issues was around the fact that everybody in charge was white and that somehow or other this again came over, came across as a kind of condescending thing, that there was no empowerment being provided in terms of

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taking charge of minority individuals' lives when that's what the training was supposed to be all about.

Some of it was logistical. I don't really know what that was about. I think, though, that the various minority groups brought their own senses of bitterness towards CIL and the disability rights movement, about--that this was--

Landes

Specifically what groups?

Lacy

The groups of minorities. Oh, God. They just spanned--I mean, we did a good job in doing the outreach. We had Hispanic, we had Filipino, we had Asian, we had African Americans, Hawaiian, Korean. The mix was just astounding for that group of folks. I think it was about a hundred and fifty.

Landes

So you're talking about in training.

Lacy

Yes, at the training.

Landes

And during this training a lot of resentment came out about CIL and the disability rights movement?

Lacy

Right, right.

Landes

What were some of the issues that came out?

Lacy

I think the lack of sincerity that they felt was taking place, the question of whether or not minorities were really, really welcomed into the CIL world or whether this was just something that was foisted upon them because they were getting paid, getting funded to do it.

Landes

Because of funding requirements?

Lacy

Yes. And I really--I don't think that this was true with most of the people. It's just that they came from backgrounds where [chuckling] they just didn't have that much exposure to people of color, and they truly did not know how to outreach with these folks. They just felt that if you're disabled, that's the only thing, you know, that's important.

Landes

So you're saying there was no recognition on the part of CIL and the disability rights movement, or very little, if any, that each minority community had its own specific issues.

Lacy

Yes, around their own cultures. For example, I remember this discussion going on for years and years and years about how you served different races from different cultures and the fact that

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most minority cultures regarded the disabled person as part of a whole unit and that independence from the family was not recognized. I mean, wherever you go, your family goes, as a disabled person. And so, in order to get to the disabled consumer--we'll call them consumers by this time--you had to get to the family. This was like the first time that this became a real understanding, the first time this knowledge was brought to the disability rights movement per se. So in a lot of ways, the issues that came up taught the 504 group, as opposed to the 504 group having any real understanding of various cultural differences.

Landes

And do you feel that the 504 group was responsive to this?

Lacy

Oh, yes. I'm absolutely sure. As a matter of fact, I think I started to see a lot more recruitment and outreach identified around people with disabilities who were minorities. I'm trying to think. Ticia [Casanova], who had just come in as a trainee. A lot of these people were drawn out of the 504 training.

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III Community Resources For Independent Living And Thoughts on The Independent Living Movement

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The Disability Law Resource Center

Landes

We've been talking about your work at the Disability Law Resource Center at Center for Independent Living in the late seventies and early eighties. Do you feel you succeeded in bringing the issue of disability rights to the Community Service Administration and its agencies?

Lacy

Yes, I think that was an overwhelming success, even though it was a much shorter term than it was intended. I definitely can say the agencies that we did training with and maintained some outreach with were positively affected and made a lot of changes as a result of our training.

Landes

Can you think of some concrete examples?

Lacy

The most concrete, I think, probably is the Las Vegas program.

Landes

Which we talked about last time.

Lacy

Where they started to hire more disabled people, especially in their transportation program that they already had available, their para-transit program for seniors and disabled. But I think the economic development aspects took a turn that really got more disabled people, especially disabled people of color, involved. The first training that we did, also San Bernardino, where there was a lot of outreach done to the disabled community. I think one of the first times that an independent living center was set up under a community action program was in San Bernardino. And so we had a lot of contact with those folks.

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Landes

So you were pushing the CSA to not only hire more people with disabilities but also that, in all of their agencies, to begin to serve more fully the needs of disabled people?

Lacy

Yes, because my philosophy was that if you really wanted to effectively serve people, you had to have employees, administrators, people involved who came from that community, and that's always been my approach to community involvement, is that if you want to bring people in, then they have to know that when they get there, there's someone there they can identify with.

Landes

Looking at the work of the Disability Law Resource Center as a whole, what's your assessment of the overall impact of the Disability Law Resource Center? Not only with the CSA project that you worked with but also the trainings, the legal arm, the KIDS project. What's your assessment of its work as a whole?

Lacy

I think DLRC made one of the most lasting impacts around disability rights, both locally and nationally, because DREDF being a direct descendent, if you will, of DLRC, that has now become a national advocate for disability rights in policy-making and, of course, pushing ADA effectively as it did with Pat Wright. It had one of the most effective organizations coming out of the disability rights movement. The thing about it, though--I think the biggest thing is that it affected so many different aspects of disability, from children, to minorities, to parents, and all of it having a long-lasting effect because it focused in on policy as--

For example, the activity that I was involved in early on was the development of advisory committees to the mayors of various cities. As a result of DLRC action, for example, in Oakland, the mayor's committee on disability still exists and is still a very active force in the Oakland community.

Landes

That was founded as an initiative of DLRC?

Lacy

DLRC, yes.

Landes

Were you involved in that overture to the city of Oakland?

Lacy

Yes. At that time I was key because I lived in Oakland. I had worked in Oakland, so I was very, very familiar with most of the city council members on the Oakland city council, as well as a number of other city officials in Oakland.

Landes

Who did you work most closely with in the establishment of that commission?

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Lacy

I think it was--the resolution was put together by Arlene Mayerson, who was a staff attorney at that time. Kitty Cone worked on it. I don't know who else, but they asked me to come in because I was so familiar with Oakland.

Landes

Who did you approach within the city of Oakland's government?

Lacy

All of the legwork was done by Kitty and Arlene. I think my main role in that was to help them to identify key people in Oakland to talk to, to get support: people like Dick Spees, who later on became a member of the CIL board. I'm trying to think of other people who were on the city council at that time. But I basically stood in the background and was an advisor for much of this kind of policy activity because, as you recall, I was not hired to do that kind of work but just called upon to help--

Landes

Because of your connections with the community?

Lacy

My connections to the community. But I do remember speaking at the city council meeting that night.

Landes

Did you work with Mayor Lionel Wilson?

Lacy

Not as mayor. Lionel Wilson was the chairman of the OEDC, Oakland Economic Development Council, which I worked for. We talked about that very early on.

Landes

That was much earlier.

Lacy

Much earlier. And so I knew Mayor Wilson from that. I had been involved with him in a couple of economic development schemes that Paul Cobb put together. Mayor Wilson also was the person who presented me with the OEO Urban Service Award in 1967, I believe it was, in his role as the chairman of the OEDC. So those are the kind of connections I had that were old connections from the anti-poverty days, as opposed to the disability rights days. Those days, I wasn't that connected with disability.

Landes

But then, once you're working at DLRC and working so hard on the issue of disability rights, you were then a bridge to that other social service work?

Lacy

Yes. And remember you asked me why did I take the job, even though I knew that people didn't feel that I was qualified? I think one of the reasons was because I knew that those connections still existed and could be useful.

Landes

What's your assessment of your own work while you were at DLRC? Do you feel that you succeeded in your own mission?

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Lacy

Inasmuch as--I have this strange philosophy that I don't--I can't ever seem to identify what my mission and my philosophy is, other than to jump in and see what happens. And I think that's probably [chuckling] how I assess things. If something happens good, then my role is good; if something happens bad, my role is not as effective and needs to be changed in some way.

Landes

Do you feel positive about that period of time that you worked there?

Lacy

Yes. It's one of the most positive experiences--well, I don't know if I want to identify my attitude as being a Polyanna attitude, but I think the whole attitude of let's see what happens, that I jump into things and I expect--I always expect good results, and that I very seldom am disappointed. A lot of it is because I do have a positive attitude about things I do. But out of that positive attitude, I think I work a little harder. I make things happen. I have a way of making things happen. When you can't see the results, I can see--when others can't see the results, I seem to be able to see a positive result that comes out of that.

Landes

And what do you feel most positive about? What accomplishments are you proudest of during your tenure there at DLRC?

Lacy

Hmm. I have to think about that because I think my participation was so fluid, it wasn't fully defined. I think, again, my orientation was I felt that when I came there, it was more like a token than it was with any kind of concrete purpose in mind, that somehow or other I was not expected to accomplish anything, and I accomplished even more than I expected or anyone else did.

In looking back on that, I think the relationships that I developed, personal relationships, were my biggest accomplishment. As I think about it, it's the thing that I work on the hardest because I feel that I can be most effective in getting to know people as individuals and getting people to know me as an individual. As I look back on my life, I think those individual relationships have been my greatest help and my greatest asset because I take them with me, and they wind up as being empowerment, personal empowerment, that nobody else can identify with other than me. And I've had a lot of experiences to show me that this has been a really phenomenal accomplishment, that ability to get to know a person of any stature or any status and to maintain a personal relationship with those kinds of individuals.

Landes

What are the most important personal relationships that have come out of that period?

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Lacy

I think my connections. For example, let's talk about Sharon Mistler. When we put together the 504 conferences for minority disabled people, Sharon Mistler was just a name to me. She was someone who worked in CSA in Washington, D.C., and was invited by Bob Funk to come and be a speaker at our CSA minority disabled conference. I can remember getting her on the phone, answering the phone, somehow or other, in preparing for this conference, and we struck up a friendship over the phone. We still have maintained that friendship over the years. I was vaguely aware that she had some good political connections, you know, in Washington. I can remember how our conversation went. "Oh, you're one of the high muckety-mucks that are coming from Washington." She really liked that because, you know, I kind of addressed her as a person, a personality, as opposed to a position.

This is what I do with people. You know, they are people. That's just one example. But I just happen to have that kind of air. Sometimes it's resented by people who are of lower--what they think are lower or higher stature. But it's the way I break out the real people from the people who have images of themselves.

Landes

Any other important relationships that you developed during that period?

Lacy

Well, I think, I, interestingly, developed a particularly close relationship with Bob Funk over those years. There was a bench in front of our office that was on Telegraph Avenue, and we used to find ourselves gathering there and just talking for hours and hours and hours about just things that concerned us, you know? As I think about it, I think Bob's--I wasn't the only person, but Bob used those kinds of conversations as a way of helping to formulate the whole DREDF idea, just sitting around and talking with people and getting ideas and things like that.

Landes

You said that you felt that he felt you weren't qualified for the job. Do you feel that his assessment changed over the years you were there?

Lacy

Oh, absolutely. And I became--I believe that I became very much respected by Bob over a period of time, not just because of my knowledge but that ability to relate personally to people.

Landes

Any other lasting friendships and relationships out of that period?

Lacy

Well, I don't know whether you want to call it lasting, but my best relationship was with Ann Jennifer [A.J.] Smaldone, who

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passed away and whom I think about a lot still because I think she probably had more of an influence on my thinking about disability rights and the role of people with disabilities in the movement and how we changed. We became really, really close. After she died, her parents moved back to New Jersey. We still kept in touch. Arlene Mayerson and I were really, really both close to Ann Jennifer. I think mainly it was because of the kind of warmth and personableness that she displayed towards everybody. Everybody just loved A.J. I can't quite define what it is that I find important, but I think it was her ability to cut across, you know, lines and just get straight to the heart of people and to the quality of people.

Landes

Any other observations about your time at DLRC?

Lacy

Other than, you know, the people that I got to know at DLRC are people that I still feel the most warm about of any other time in my life around the disability movement, some of whom I still consider close friends that I still see, but others that I only see once in a while.

Landes

Such as?

Lacy

Well, Guy Guber is one of the people that I remember very warmly. And Melba. What is Melba's--Guy's secretary? You know, all of these people, you're supposed to notice who Melba is. I can't think [of her last name]. Susan--not Susan O'Hara. Shapiro. Gary Gill. Ken Stein. Pat Wright. They're all people that I still see around town and still remember very fondly.

Community Resources for Independent Living, Inc.: Outreach to Communities of Color

Landes

After the funding ended for your job at DLRC, you took a job in Hayward at an independent living project called Community Resources for Independent Living [CRIL]. How were you approached for that job?

Lacy

I just got a call from Pat Hull, I think it was. No, Pat Hull's secretary called. They wanted me to apply for the position of executive director at CRIL. The reason I'm kind of laughing is because I thought it was one of the funniest and most ridiculous ideas that I'd ever heard of. It just had not even occurred to me that number one, anybody was aware that I might be executive director material, but certainly not in Hayward. I still saw Hayward as being kind of the redneck-y, suburban town. And so I

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just thought, "This is crazy. What is this? Another affirmative action guise? They don't have enough minorities applying for this job [chuckling], so they're looking for more minorities?" That was my--the whole attitude around minorities and disability had become very cynical by this time. I just really didn't think that people were all that serious about involving minorities in the movement.

Landes

So when you were approached, what led you to actually apply for the job?

Lacy

My curiosity. My curiosity gets me involved in almost everything. So I thought, "Well, I'll just send my application and see what happens," because my intent was to just kind of take some time off and not really think about pursuing another job in the independent living movement right away.

Landes

What attracted you to the job during your discussions with the people at CRIL?

Lacy

Well, to be honest, I think it was the fact that there was a very strong minority representation at CRIL.

Landes

On the staff or on the board?

Lacy

On both the staff and the board. And that CRIL was extremely successful in integrating its staff and board.

Landes

Did that relieve your cynicism on this issue?

Lacy

Somewhat.

Landes

As it related to CRIL?

Lacy

Yes, somewhat. I can remember being called by one of the African-American staff to tell me that I had been picked to fill this job. Again, it was just so [chuckling] really like a big joke.

Landes

Why was it a joke?

Lacy

Because it was just so unexpected. It was totally out of my past experience with the independent living movement, that a person of color could be chosen based upon their qualifications for the job.

Landes

In Hayward.

Lacy

In Hayward, yes!

Landes

Of all places.

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Lacy

Of all places. That's right.

Landes

So when did you take the job?

Lacy

Let's see. I think I started in March of '81, March of '81.

Landes

And other than the fact that the organization seemed to be integrated, both in staff and board, what was the state of the organization when you took over as the director?

Lacy

Well, I could just say I was the third executive director to fill that position in one year. One executive director having filled the position twice.

Landes

Did that lead you to believe that it was an unstable organization?

Lacy

No, not at all. It had an excellent foundation. It was just a new organization. My conclusion was that this is what happens with new organizations, that as part of the stabilizing of the organization, things change rapidly and that that's a good thing; that's not a bad thing. It's like trying on clothes. You know, you keep trying on until the style fits, the size fits, and you start to feel comfortable in that position. And this is how I perceived CRIL, and this is the premise that I worked on in helping to continue to stabilize the organization.

Landes

What changes did you institute when you became director?

Lacy

I made it possible for every staff person who was not being effective to find a way to get out of a bad situation. I fired one person, and the rest of them left. I hired more disabled people than were presently on the staff because, although the staff was integrated--

Landes

By race.

Lacy

--by race, it was not fully integrated by disability. I started doing crazy things, like working with the local community to really start identifying CRIL as an empowering agency, as opposed to a service agency.

Landes

When you say an empowering agency, are you talking about advocacy?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

That CRIL would have a presence at city meetings and in city government to advocate for needs of people with disability?

Lacy

Right.

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Landes

Was this effort at becoming more active in advocacy within the city of Hayward new for CRIL, or an extension of what it had already been doing?

Lacy

CRIL's position was one of being protected by certain government people. This was a time when there was a struggle between CRIL and an old independent living organization that had previously existed in Hayward, with Alice. Gee, you would think that I would always remember Alice's name. [Alice Johnston] But CRIL was a completely different kind of independent living organization to the old one.

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Landes

What was different about CRIL?

Lacy

There were a lot of similarities, and there were a lot of differences, so let me just think about this. The old organization, interestingly enough, was politically vocal and very politically active. I think the difference there was that the old organization was an organization that was identified with one person, Alice Johnston, who was like the driving force, you know, the whole kit and caboodle of the organization, if you will, and did a lot of advocacy with regards to access, physical access. And she is to be given a lot of credit for her effectiveness in this way.

I think the big problem with Alice's organization was that she didn't have the management wherewithal. She had the leadership; she had the advocacy; but she ran into trouble when she wasn't able to fiscally manage the organization and because she had made so many political enemies. That was her downfall, when they discovered that something was wrong with the money angle. She really got almost like crucified in the community by a lot of the political officials of Hayward.

Landes

Other than stepping up CRIL's efforts at advocacy, what other changes did you institute?

Lacy

I think the other major change and probably the one that I'm known for is getting CRIL out of the little protected environment that everybody saw as being the haven for people with disabilities. I have to kind of describe the setting there. CRIL, when I came there, was located on the edge of a community park situation in an old school building that had been turned into a recreation center for the handicapped. CRIL had three rooms in this old school building. The only way that anyone could get to CRIL was they either had to be driven there or they had to walk there. There was no bus service; there was no transportation. I believe we

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had--oh, yes, when I got there, we had a bus service. CRIL owned a van, and if we wanted to bring clients into CRIL, which was not very often, actually, we had to pick them up. And so most of the services were being provided over the telephone.

To me, this was not satisfactory because my sense of independent living was that disabled people had to be a part of the community, and that meant that it had to start with the agency that was advocating for this kind of integration into the community.

Landes

So you moved into a more central location?

Lacy

Well, it took me five years, but I carried on the philosophy of the board of directors, which was to have a building that disabled people could identify with in southern Alameda County. It turned out to be a fund raising building project that took five years to complete. It resulted in CRIL's moving to a building that we own, that I had raised the funds for, and that I had overseen the construction of on A Street, which was right down in the heart of the city, close--three blocks to BART, close to transportation, etc., that people could walk to.

I want to add that in the early days, when most people with physical disabilities couldn't get to the CRIL location, I wound up hiring staff mostly who were visually impaired and blind who could catch the bus and who could walk. And so in the early days of my tenure at CRIL, I'd say two-thirds of my staff, both paid and volunteer, were blind.

Landes

For that reason.

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

Was the new building one of your major accomplishments?

Lacy

Yes. For me, it overshadows what I like to feel the most proud of, and that is my ability number one, to affect a lot of policy that, or to influence a lot of policy, that affected people with disabilities throughout the county, especially by my housing efforts, where we fought to get housing for disabled people in the county. We did three projects. And while the only funds available were for segregated housing, meaning housing just for people with disabilities, the result was that they were located right in the middle of the cities, pretty much. They weren't set back off a little alcove, as was the intent of most of the political leaders in the early days of protectionism around disability.

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I really like the kind of activism that I was able to put together, you know, as a leader of CRIL. One of the things I recall was setting up buses and advocacy trips to Sacramento, where we pulled in anywhere from ten to twenty-five people with disabilities to go up and do lobbying at the capital. Those were things that I feel the proudest about, at my tenure at CRIL.

The actual building left me feeling politically spent and tired and bitter because it really was such a struggle around everything to get that building built.

Landes

Why bitter?

Lacy

I think because I had to fight so hard to get it. Not just to get it, but to get control of it. The question of control had become, like, the major, major issue around the disability community and the larger community in that almost everything that was done by disabled people seemed to need to be controlled by non-disabled people.

Landes

Was that a struggle that took place within the board or between you and the board and other portions of the Hayward community?

Lacy

Me, the board and the other portions of the Hayward community at that time. The one thing that I really, really, really felt very, very lucky was we had an excellent board of very committed and very knowledgeable people with disabilities and people who were non-disabled but who were very sensitive and aware of the issues. As we grew, that became less, but that's another story.

One of the things that--and this doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with people of minority disabled status as much as it does in the empowerment that you can get by working together with a board and an executive director. As I spoke earlier about this trouble with Alice Johnston and CRIL over this building, the city of Hayward wanted somehow or other to pull the old CRIL and the new CRIL together, and it all centered around this building. Although I had raised most of the funds for this building, they kind of wanted to use the money that they were committing to it as a way of forcing our hand, so to speak. This was the first time that I think CRIL really felt powerful. You know, proved that they could be powerful. And that was with their successful struggle with the city to have control over this building.

Basically, without going into too much detail, what we did was we very quietly and without a lot of fanfare decided that if our hand was forced, that we had to give up control, that we would refuse the money and we'd let the project go down.

---

Landes

So it sounds like your effort was successful in gaining control of the building.

Lacy

Yes. It was the first time that we had felt powerful in our ability to outmaneuver the city, basically.

Landes

Let's turn to this issue of inclusion of or outreach to the communities of color. What is it that was different about the effort at CRIL, compared to, say, the frustrations you felt at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley?

Lacy

The difference was that there was a strong commitment to maintaining an integrated board and staff and to outreach very strongly to minorities in the area. The only problem around outreach to minorities is that I found that Hayward was much more integrated, and that led to a problem of identifying a community where outreach could be tried. At that time, we didn't--although we had an obligation to serve East Oakland--we didn't have a lot of participation from residents of East Oakland, who were predominantly black and Spanish-speaking Latino, so that that community was not immediately available to us.

Landes

Why was there not the participation of people from East Oakland?

Lacy

Well, I think there was the Hayward image of being a redneck kind of community. Also, the fact that CRIL was just not accessible, you know, to Hayward--Oakland--the communities are so different, Hayward being kind of a suburban-urban community, East Oakland being inner-city, much more concentration of minorities and poor people in large communities. Plus I really think the idea of having a centrally located independent living center, this was the first time it had come back to me from my previous years in community organizations, that having a central location was not the most effective way to serve communities.

Landes

Why is that?

Lacy

I think that people have to have a stake in the programs, and that means you have to go directly to the community, where you can get direct community participation and leadership.

Landes

But you felt that you were getting that within the city of Hayward.

Lacy

Yes. But other areas--

Landes

But not beyond the borders of Hayward?

Lacy

Right.

---

And so my plan for outreach was to set up sub-centers in the various communities that we served. We weren't really successful with that, mainly because of funding but also because we weren't large enough where we could get real large representation of all those communities on the staff and board. I always felt that the board had to first identify those communities.

Landes

The board was composed primarily of people from Hayward?

Lacy

Yes, yes. Until later, a later time. But we were able to successfully get board members from suburban communities, as opposed to inner-city type communities as well.

Landes

What lessons for other independent living projects do you think you learned that would be applicable in other projects that come out of your experience at CRIL?

Lacy

I think the main lesson is that you have to have people--preferably board members but certainly your directors have to have direct links with the communities that they work with. And I think I worked the hardest on that, serving on various committees and boards.

Landes

So you individually went out and participated in other organizations and boards as well.

Lacy

Absolutely.

Landes

As a way of developing those connections?

Lacy

Yes, of outreach, developing those connections.

Landes

In retrospect, do you think that perhaps the size of the city was an advantage, in the sense that it was more cohesive and that it was easier to reach out to other communities, other parts of the community?

Lacy

The size? Yes, because Hayward has a very small-town kind of atmosphere. It's really easy to get involved, to get recognized in the city of Hayward. The one thing that was the most surprising to me was how friendly and outgoing people were and how anxious they were to get me involved in the community.

Landes

So you became a vital part of the Hayward community in addition to your role as director at CRIL.

Lacy

Yes, or as a result of my role at CRIL because I saw this participation as being vital to the outreach that CRIL made. For example, I was never an organizational person. For me personally,

---

that's just not something that I enjoy, being a member of this board and this organization. But I deliberately set out, for example, to become involved in a number of organizations that were especially predominantly minority. I even joined a sorority because it was a sorority made up of African-American women. I joined the NWPC [National Women's Political Caucus]. I joined BWOPA [Black Women Organized for Political Action]. I never joined the NAACP. My father would have rolled over in his grave if I had.

But as part of my outreach, I became involved in numerous community organizations. I worked on political campaigns to help people become elected to city council and later to the legislature. I still have lots of connections there. I joined the Democratic party organization, so much of my life, in addition to raising money and building a building, was spent in organizations with significant membership of people of color.

Landes

On the issue of outreach to minority communities, what's your assessment now, as we speak in 1998, of the ability of the independent living movement to reach out to communities of color?

Lacy

Well, I know they can. There have been several independent living centers in the state which have been very successful in getting minorities, people of color involved in their centers. I never developed a formula other than that personal identification and doing a lot of outreach, you know, talking to people over the phone, getting leads. I think early on I mentioned how Michael Winter was my best resource for recruiting minorities. I think even though we have mailing lists and all those kinds of things that can be helpful, having some personal contacts with people in the community or who are familiar with the community is probably the most effective way of outreaching to anybody, but especially minorities. This is how I was recruited by Judy Heumann.

View of the State of the Independent Living Movement Today

Landes

What's your view of the state of the independent living movement today? Are you pessimistic or optimistic?

Lacy

I'm not either pessimistic or optimistic. I think the independent living movement, like any movement, is in a state of flux. The one disappointment I think that I have is that the movement, like many other movements, becomes less politicized, more organized in the terms of becoming more like a traditional bureaucratic

---

structure. Its boards become less effective mainly because of the desire to become more traditional-looking.

Landes

In the sense of a traditional social--

Lacy

Social service agency, as opposed to an activist organization. Mainly--and I see it all being tied into money and being able to get support. It's a very frustrating kind of problem, I think, for all nonprofit organizations, to effectively advocate for the community that they serve, yet at the same time depend upon government for support because with every dime that you get, there's a tie-in of control, and you lose control.

Landes

So is that a major concern of yours about the shape of the movement as it presently exists?

Lacy

Yes, I think so, because on the one hand, the services can be much more effective, but on the other hand, the changes that have to take place from a political perspective are weakened.

Landes

So it makes it more difficult to be a strong advocacy organization?

Lacy

Absolutely.

Landes

Are there any other concerns that you have about the movement in its present state?

Lacy

Well, I think that I have a lot of positive--a lot of hope for the movement, mainly around the whole integration concept, that you see more disabled people becoming more involved both from a policy standpoint to a service standpoint. The visibility of disabled people really can never relegate us to a back seat kind of situation ever again, and I think that's true of all movements, is that that ability to pull together power helps everybody.

Landes

So how do you see the relationship of the disability rights movement to other movements for social justice, for example, the struggle against racism and sexism?

Lacy

Movements are pretty much the same.

Landes

What connections to do you see among the three?

Lacy

That's the problem, I think, is that most movements don't take the time to recognize their similarities. As a matter of fact, they see their life blood as emphasizing the differences. I've been looking at some interesting kinds of features about Martin Luther King in the last few weeks, and I heard one person say that the

---

reason that Martin Luther King was killed was because he recognized the similarities, and his efforts to pull together the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement created a kind of fear in government that made them feel the need to eradicate Martin Luther King.

The quote that I think about a lot in regards to this is his comment that "injustice anywhere means injustice everywhere." When you think about that, the realization of what impact that might have if it were pulled together as a concrete movement, where all of the have-nots come together to try to create a difference in their lives.

Landes

Are you hopeful about the possibilities of a more united movement for social justice that would include disability rights on the agenda, along with the rights of people of color and women?

Lacy

Yes, I'm hopeful. I guess maybe the reason I can be hopeful is out of my own experience, not recognizing the commonalities between civil rights and disability rights, although I think early leaders certainly espoused these commonalities. It was always seen by me and a bunch of other blacks as a way of "dissing" these groups, you know, saying they're copying off of our civil rights movement. They're not really interested in civil rights as much as they are in drawing the comparison that will allow them to make their movements stronger.

And I've heard these comments many, many, many times. I heard it around the women's movement; I heard it around the Raza movement; and then the disability movement. That somehow or other, African Americans see civil rights as being the personal property of African Americans and have yet to really, really stop and think about the similarities. But I think if Martin Luther King could see it and--not placing myself in the same vein as Martin Luther King--but if I can see it, that gives me hope that at some point others will.

Identifying as a Person with a Disability

##

Landes

Early on, you were very clear, coming out of the 1950s and early sixties, that you identified primarily as an African American and as a poor person. Talk a little bit about what changes you went through in terms of how you identified?

Lacy

There's a little story that I told at a community action conference once, where I was asked to be a speaker. This was

---

pretty much a predominantly African-American group of people who all worked in the community action agencies that I was hired to help train. On this panel, as I started to speak, I think it was the first time that I acknowledged the fact that over a period of years I had come to identify myself more with the disability in me as opposed to the color in me.

Thinking back, when I graduated from San Francisco State in 1960 and wanted to apply for graduate school as a speech therapist, as I recall, and I was forced to give up those ideas by the head of the special ed department, I can remember feeling for the first time that I was a victim because of my disability. And I can remember, like, my final, farewell speech to this idea, I said to the head of the department that the thing that I saw in all of this was for the first time, I realized--and I'm speaking to him now--that if it was just because I was a woman or even if it was just because I was black, he would not be able to deny me the ability to even apply for the graduate school in speech therapy, but it was because of my disability that he was able to deny this to me.

And over the years, that became even more and more and more true because it was the disability in me that had no protections around civil rights or any rights at all. And I could not demand, make any demands upon any institution. And this was the lesson I learned at San Francisco State. I could not demand access, and I couldn't demand acceptance. And all of it was because of my disability.

Landes

What was the response, when you told that story to a predominantly African-American audience, what was their response?

Lacy

I think it was chilling. I was sent several weeks later a copy of the agency newsletter that went out throughout the region, all of the community action agencies. I was quoted verbatim around that particular aspect of that conference, was how I had come to identify myself as a person with a disability. You know, I think it was shocking to people. But it was very enlightening also because I think it helped to make the connection around the discrimination as a result of disability much stronger than around the question of a minority status.

Landes

So you think that had a significant impact.

Lacy

Absolutely.

Landes

This incident at San Francisco State happened in roughly 1960?

Lacy

In 1960.

---

Landes

You also referred in an earlier interview to the impact that the 504 sit-in had on you in 1977. In the intervening time, were there other incidents, other experiences that had a significant impact in bringing you to this realization?

Lacy

Oh, I think that probably, as I think about it, there were a lot of personal experiences that I had around my acceptance as a disabled person that made me realize the complexity of my own situation, but also to other people who were disabled, that somehow or other, to have a disability was not to be accepted by anybody, any more than being of a minority status was all that acceptable by people with disabilities. So a minority with a disability kind of got left out somewhere, and that you had to struggle to identify with somebody.

For me, it was the situation, personal situation, I guess, that I was affected the most by it. I seem to be talking around in circles now. But what I'm saying was each time I was rejected or treated differently as a result of my disability, I saw that identifying with one group became much more a concern around the disability, as opposed to around the sex or the race or even the class.

Landes

In what ways do you continue to experience prejudice and discrimination as a disabled person?

Lacy

I think the main way that probably makes me the angriest is this attitude around disability that discredits every aspect of one's existence, meaning you don't have intelligence, you can't make decisions for yourself.

Landes

Do you experience this in concrete ways at the present time?

Lacy

Yes. I experience this constantly.

Landes

Can you give some examples?

Lacy

I'm trying to think of a recent example.

Landes

Or in the past couple of years.

Lacy

I can't think of anything concrete at this time. You know, there's another piece to it though that you start to--you know, after a certain time you start to wonder if it's you, if your reaction to certain things is because of your disability or if it's just because of the way people are. In some ways, the effects of these attitudes is becoming softened by my recognition that in a lot of ways, that's the way people are. We like to protect each other, we like to feel needed, and that those needs

---

for protection and needs for feeling needed can sometimes result in victimization of each other. Does that make sense to you?

Landes

Or that somebody wants to be helpful but--

Lacy

They don't know how.

Landes

--the way in which they do it strikes you as paternalistic?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

And offensive?

Lacy

Yes. An example that comes to my mind is really kind of silly in a way, and it happened between my brother and me when my oldest brother was visiting. I'm the youngest in the family. I have a disability. And [chuckling] it all kind of came out in this strange way. I got up one morning, decided I was going to prepare breakfast, and one of the things that I feel the most proud of is making pancakes from scratch, right? So I get up, I prepare this breakfast, pancakes from scratch, I get the pancakes all prepared and ready, and then I go into wash up and get ready to eat, and my brother serves the plates, and when I came back [chuckling]--this is so stupid and weird but it's just really funny--he had cut my pancakes up in little bitty pieces. And I just exploded! [laughs]

Landes

Well, it's often the little things that really are most telling.

Lacy

Yes, but it's also the most--yes, definitely it's telling, you know, because the first--you know, it was just--I couldn't even understand. I says, "Why in the world would you do this?" Here I am, I've made these pancakes, I've made the whole breakfast, and somehow or other he assumes that I can't cut my own pancakes. [laughs] It was just so ludicrous!

Landes

And this was within the bosom of the family.

Lacy

Yes, right! Which I think is really probably one of the biggest problems. If we could ever get the family moved out of that protective kind of arena, disabled people would be a lot better off.

Landes

Do you feel that your family has been overprotective?

Lacy

No, but what I feel is that my family has been least understanding and least sensitive because they see me as being a part of the family and being me, and I don't know if other people have this experience, but I think family members identify you, get a handle

---

on you from childhood, and that image never changes. You know, whatever you were as a kid, you're still that.

Landes

You're still the baby.

Lacy

Yes, right. And it's the hardest thing to separate out all of these different attitudes. And that was one of the reasons why I said that sometimes you have to, after a while, start to question what the motivations of people are. Are they because of your disability, because you're family, because you're a friend, etc. And after a while, it just doesn't matter that much.

Onset of Post-Polio Syndrome

Landes

Have you experienced post-polio syndrome?

Lacy

Yes. I think I'm probably right now involved in--while it wasn't --I don't think my retirement was motivated by post-polio syndrome as much as being just totally worn out from all of the activity and work that I had done throughout my life, not just CRIL but certainly concentrated at CRIL. I did a lot of stuff. But I think it certainly helped to bring on to--well, I can't say that. It just helped with the symptoms becoming more--

Landes

How do you feel about it? Is it progressive at this point, or stabilized?

Lacy

No, I think it's just beginning, actually. I'm really having to change my life and the way that my lifestyle has been. I'm not as actively involved in a lot of stuff. But the way I feel about it, strangely enough, is that I feel really, really good and proud that I've been able to reach a point of retirement and accomplish a lot of stuff, knowing that eventually I would poop out, that I would start to experience a post-polio syndrome.

One of the things that, again, in a lot of the presentations that I've made over the years was to talk about when I first got polio at the age of nineteen and being told that the life expectancy of a person having polio back in the--when did I get polio? Late fifties?--was thirty-nine years old, and that I had planned my whole life around not being around past thirty-nine. And it wasn't until I was forty-two that I started to realize that I was here and that I probably was going to be here.

But what I had done was concentrated a lot of my life in that expectation that I was going to be gone and that if I were

---

going to--it was like, oh, being told that you have six months to live and you're going to raise hell in those six months, that that was your whole goal in life was to accomplish everything that you could accomplish in that short period of time. And I think that's what happened to me. And rather than dying, I got post-polio syndrome. [laughs]

Landes

So how do you feel about your retirement?

Lacy

Oh, I feel wonderful about retiring.

Landes

What's best about being retired?

Lacy

I think it's a part of my life that I can concentrate on. It's almost like retrospect, going back to a more carefree kind of life that allows me for the first time to really be in control of my environment, my choices about life, that they're not based upon any political situations and not very many social considerations, some family considerations; but I really feel free for the first time in a long, long time.

Feelings about the Independent Living Movement and the Changes It Has Brought

Landes

Looking back at your involvement in the independent living movement, what's been the most positive aspect of it for you?

Lacy

Always the people. I don't see my--it's very hard, often, for me to see my accomplishments in terms of concrete work that I've done. You know, other people recognize that and that's fine. But the things that I see as my greatest successes have been in the people that I've met and the people that I maintain friendships with.

Landes

So that's been what's been most important to you as a person?

Lacy

Always.

Landes

Do you feel that your involvement in the independent living movement has come at any personal cost to you?

Lacy

No, not significantly, because I very seldom think about the costs. That's something that maybe I'll think about in my memoirs if I ever get around to writing them. But what price? I think that the price of involvement is great. There are lots of costs.

---

Landes

Do some come to mind?

Lacy

I think my health, probably, is the thing that I think I gave up the most. It's the first thing that any activist seems to let go of, is their own personal interest: their health, their families, their friendships. They're just friendships for friendship's sake.

Landes

Because you were too busy, you had meetings?

Lacy

Exactly.

Landes

Looking back at the forty years, a little over forty years, that you've been disabled, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in the lives of disabled people in this period from the mid-fifties to the late nineties?

Lacy

I think it probably would have to be the whole sense of empowerment for people with disabilities. When I started off, I very seldom saw a disabled person. It was like being black and living in a white neighborhood, meaning that whenever you saw another black person, both of you stared at each other. Or living in a foreign country probably is even a better--you know, where you are a black American in China [laughs] or Hong Kong. And I experienced that, so I know what that's like.

Landes

When did you travel, and where?

Lacy

I went to Singapore in 1982 during the Year of the Disabled. That was when Ed Roberts took a contingency of disabled people or at least he led a contingency to go to Singapore for the International Disabled--what was it called?

Landes

Disabled People International.

Lacy

Disabled People International Congress. We thought we were following Ed from Singapore to Hong Kong, but he changed his mind and went to Malaysia instead, and we wound up, this big group of people, in Hong Kong. One of my best friends, who went with me as my traveling companion, we--

Landes

Who was that?

Lacy

Her name was Issy, [Isabel Dishroom]. I call her Issy. We were walking down the street in Hong Kong, and this black woman saw us and we saw her at the same time, and we just kind of quickened our step because we thought "Whoa! Another one!" And when we got up to her and we started talking animatedly, she was speaking another language! And [laughs] we were so startled; she was startled; and

---

we were startled. But that's how the identification is around disability in the late fifties was when you saw another one, you were excited and curious and everything. But that's how it was then.

Now, you know, I find myself often in the same environment with another disabled person, maybe in a restaurant or movie theater or on BART, and it's like "We're everywhere!" The other great thing, I think, is that I can find myself on a street corner where I all of a sudden turn around and I have a bunch of disabled friends that I know. It's like a community has been formed that's very visible and very accepted.

Landes

Any other major changes?

Lacy

Oh, I think the access has to be--I sometimes resent it when people talk about access as being the major accomplishment around independence for people with disabilities because I would prefer to see the attitudes changed around people with disabilities. But I have to say that physical access--simple things like curb ramps and bathrooms and the ability to fly untroubled, unfettered--have to be the major, major changes.

Landes

What about attitudes? Do you feel that they've changed?

Lacy

Yes, I do. I do feel that people are much more sensitive around disability, but that that process is going to take a much longer time, just because I think that disabled people have not been accepted as much in the social circles and the political circles that it takes to change attitudes.

Landes

Let's go back to your trip in 1982, when you went to the congress. What was the most compelling element of that trip? What was most exciting about it?

Lacy

Just being there, number one. But once being there, meeting people from all over the world was exciting. But then realizing the commonality, you know, around the whole issue of disability was just a mind blower, that there were people from every country in the world who were experiencing the same kind of things that you were experiencing.

One of the things that I recall was just so compelling, I guess, was when young people from mostly underdeveloped countries talked about the parental attitudes toward disability and about how many of them saw it as a--what's the word?--curse. I remember one young woman standing up to talk about what had happened in her country with a young child who was disabled and who couldn't walk, and the family just not accepting that disability and would

---

repeatedly try to lift the child up to make them stand and eventually causing the child to be injured because their persistence in wanting to make the child walk.

This is something, by the way, that I saw in the travels, you know, Third World countries especially, in that you didn't see many disabled people, if any. In the early days of my involvement in the disability movement, people talked about the fact that you didn't see a lot of Third World people with disabilities in the community because there was a strong protectiveness. My hit on this is not--there may be a strong protectiveness, but there's another element that's taking place in that, and it has to do with a denial of disability.

For example, when I went to Haiti, I asked them where were the disabled people, that I didn't see very many. And they said number one, they didn't have the resources to get in the community. There were no things like wheelchairs and accessibility. Those things were unheard of. I asked then what happens to those people, and they said, "They die." I asked," Is the reason that they die because they can't function in their community?" And they said, "Yes. If you can't work, you don't live."

##

---

Landes

So you've traveled internationally to Singapore, to the disabled congress, and also on your own to Haiti?

Lacy

Yes.

Landes

Have you taken other international trips?

Lacy

Those were the most significant. I remember going to Mexico on a cruise [chuckling], but that was for pleasure, although I must say that similar kinds of observations took place.

Just to talk about this business about protectiveness: Just one other example of this, right here in this country, is that I learned that the practice of abandoning and allowing disabled and elderly people to starve still goes on in Indian cultures. This was something that I learned just by accident in another program that I was involved in around alcoholism.

But anyway, that's just as an aside. I don't remember too many other international trips that I took. I might have made one or two. I really find that I enjoy traveling around in the United States more. I find enough interesting similarities to be significant between attitudes around disability in the United

---

States and attitudes around disability in other parts of the world.

Landes

Thank you very much for this interview. Before we close, is there anything else that you'd like to say?

Lacy

Well, you're very welcome. It has been a pleasure remembering a lot of these things. I guess my final comment is that it's nice to know that some of these memories might be memories that will be shared with other people but that I don't have to remember any more, many of them being somewhat painful but all part of my experiences. I appreciate knowing this is being jotted down and stowed away somewhere. [chuckling]

Landes

Well, thank you very much, Johnnie.

Transcriber: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

Final Typist: Amelia Archer

Appendix

Tape Guide

Interview 1: February 11, 1998

Interview 1: February 11, 1998
• Tape 1, Side A
• Tape 1, Side B
• Tape 2, Side A
• Tape 2, Side B

Interview 2: February 16, 1998

Interview 2: February 16, 1998
• Tape 3, Side A
• Tape 3, Side B
• Tape 4, Side A
• Tape 4, Side B not recorded

Interview 3: February 25, 1998

Interview 3: February 25, 1998
• Tape 5, Side A
• Tape 5, Side B
• Tape 6, Side A
• Tape 6, Side B not recorded

Interview 4: March 16, 1998

Interview 4: March 16, 1998
• Tape 7, Side A
• Tape 7, Side B
• Tape 8, Side A
• Tape 8, Side B not recorded

Interview 5: March 30, 1998

Interview 5: March 30, 1998
• Tape 9, Side A
• Tape 9, Side B
• Tape 10, Side A
• Tape 10, Side B

Index

• African-American politics
  • at San Francisco State, 43
  • attitudes towards people with disabilities, 43-44
  • Black nationalist movement, 49
  • civil rights movement, 49
  • students at UC Berkeley, 75
• Antioch College West, 86-91
• As We Are [film], 45-46
• Biscamp, Larry, 78
• Black Women Organized for Political Action, 125
• Blauner, Dr. Robert, 72-73
• Brean, Edna, 78
• Breslin, Mary Lou, 98, 100, 105, 109
• Burton, Lloyd, 102
• Butcher, Catherine B., 29, 47-48, 50
• California State Department of Rehabilitation
  • client of, 28-31, 47-48, 76
• Casanova, Ticia, 111
• Center for Independent Living
  • race issues at CIL, 104
  • outreach to minority communities, 104, 106, 109-113
  • using wheelchair services, 89
• Chico State University nursing program, 22
  • discrimination after onset of disability, 30
• Cobb, Paul, 66, 114
• Community Action Program, Oakland [CAP], 58
• Community Resources for Independent Living, 117
  • minority representation and outreach, 118, 123
  • serves as director, 118, 120-121, 124
• Cone, Kitty, 98, 105, 114
• Cowell Hospital resident program, 76-78
  • influence of, 77, 79
  • use of wheelchair repair, 77
• Cox, Vernon, 97
• Daniels, Dan, 58-60
• disability and race, gender, and poverty, 44-45, 64-65, 74, 79, 93-94, 126-129
• disability rights, as a civil rights issue, 64-65, 92-93
  • learning to advocate, 63-64
  • relationship to other movements and issues.
    • See disability and race, gender, and poverty
• disability rights movement, early attitudes, 63
• disability, attitudes towards, 51, 134
  • impact of 504 demonstration, 92
  • paternalism, 51, 130-131
  • prior to onset of polio, 15-18
• disability, experiences with discrimination, 30, 36-37, 41, 51, 55, 63, 68
• Disability Law Resource Center [DLRC], 102-117
  • assessment, 113
  • thoughts on job, 115-116
• Disability Rights Education Defense Fund [DREDF], 108
• Disability Rights Project, 102-104
  • Community Services Administration [CSA] 504 training, 100, 102-104
• Disabled People International, 133-134
• Easter Seals (Oakland), 51
• Fairmont Hospital (San Leandro), 27-33, 77
• 504. See Rehabilitation Act of 1973
• Funk, Bob, 102, 105, 108, 116
• Gill, Gary, 105, 117
• Goodwin, Jim, 83
• Guber, Guy, 105, 117
• Heumann, Judith E., 82, 92, 96-97, 125
• identity. See disability and race, gender, and poverty
• independent living movement
  • personal costs, 132-133
  • views on, 125-126, 132-133
• institutionalization, 33
• Jackson, Joyce, 109
• Japanese-American relocation, childhood memories of, 4
• Joe, Norma, 106-107
• Johnston, Alice, 120, 122
• Kaplan, Debby, 106
• Kalmanoff, Alan, 98
• King, Martin Luther, Jr., 49, 126-127
• Krizack, Marc, 78
• Lacy, Mary, 4, 73
• Lacy, Willie, 76
• Lacy, James, 43
• leadership skills, development of, 18, 38, 42, 57
• Love, Lillian, 59. See also Oakland Economic Development Council
• Mayerson, Arlene B., 114, 117
• Mistler, Sharon, 116
• Model Cities Program, 80-81
• National Women's Political Caucus, 125
• Oakland Economic Development Council [OEDC], 59-69
• Oakland Mayor's Commission on Disability, 113
• polio
  • family reaction and support, 26, 36, 130-131
  • onset, 23-26
  • post-polio syndrome, 131
• race issues, segregation and prejudice, experiences with, 5, 8-9, 12-14, 29
• Rehabilitation Act of 1973 demonstrations, S.F. sit-in (1977)
  • 504 Conference for Minority Disabled People, 116
  • job as trainer of trainers, 100-101
  • personal impact, 82, 92
  • trainings, 95-100
• Resnick, Rose, 48
• retirement, 132
• Roberts, Edward V., 28, 31, 76, 133
• Roberts, Zona, 31
• San Francisco State University, 30, 34-41
  • access issues, 36-37, 40, 44-47
  • and African-American politics, 38, 43
• Shapiro, Susan, 117
• Smaldone, Ann Jennifer [A.J.], 116-117
• Smith, Eleanor, 78
• Smith, Dr. Norvel, 58-59
• Stark, Pete, 97
• Stein, Ken, 98-99, 105-106, 117
• Sullivan, Sylvia, 50-52
• Tainter, William, 28, 31
• travels
  • Haiti, 135
  • Hong Kong, 133
  • Singapore, 133-134
• University of California Office of the President, 83-86
• University of California, Berkeley, graduate student, sociology department, 72-73.
  • See also Cowell Hospital resident program;
  • Physically Disabled Students' Program, UC Berkeley
• Volunteer Bureau, Board of Directors, 52
• Welfare Rights Organization, 66
• West Oakland Community Development Center, 69-71
• West Oakland Service Center. See Oakland Economic Development Council
• wheelchair, power, 76
• Williams, Ed, 61
• Williams, Geneva, 57-58
• Wilson, Lionel, 114
• Winter, Michael, 104, 125
• Withington, Lucile, 76-77
• Wong, Chester, 51
• work experience, 52-54, 55, 59-67, 69-71, 80-81, 83-91
  • Community Resources for Independent Living, 117-125
  • Disability Law Resource Center [DLRC], 102-109
  • first job, 52-54
  • 504 trainer of trainers, 100-101
• World War II, childhood memories of, 4
• Wright, Patrisha, 117
• Zukas, Hale, 105

CV: David Landes

Received a B.A. in Economics from Antioch College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University. He has taught economics in Bay Area state universities and community colleges since 1970. He currently teaches economics as adjunct faculty at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills and City College of San Francisco.

As a result of an auto accident, Dr. Landes has been a quadriplegic since 1962. He became active in the disability rights movement in San Jose, California, in 1977. He subsequently worked in the Counseling Department at Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, 1979-81. He was active in the Disabled International Support Effort (DISE) 1980-89. With DISE he worked with disabled organizations in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba as part of the effort to provide technical and material support.

Dr. Landes became interested in oral history while working with his mother on her memoirs. He has been an interviewer/editor with the Regional Oral History Office since 1996, conducting oral histories for the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement oral history series.

About this text
Courtesy of Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley,
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt0p30012x&brand=oac4
Title: Johnnie Lacy
By:  David Landes
Date: 1998
Contributing Institution: Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley,
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