What’s Up WID: Bruce Curtis Transcripts

Ashley Inkumsah:
Hello everyone, and welcome to season three of the What’s Up WID Podcast. My name is Ashley Inkumsah, and I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off our third season of our podcast, than by chatting with WIDs former director of international programs, Bruce Curtis. Bruce is an international disability rights activist who worked for WID for 22 years. And for many years Bruce also worked in Russia and other Post-Soviet countries, and he is currently the chairman of the board at Whirlwind Wheelchair. Bruce, it’s such a pleasure to have you. How are you doing today?

Bruce Curtis:
I’m doing fine. I’m looking forward to sharing some memories of the years here.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely. We are celebrating 40 years of WID and we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the incredible Judy Heumann. And I want to take a minute to reflect a little bit. I know you worked with her over the years, so I wanted to ask you, what are some of your most cherished memories of Judy as we all mourn her passing?

Bruce Curtis:
Yes. Well, it’s sad for everybody with Judy passing on, and I’m no exception. I’ve known Judy for most of my life, meaning since the middle 1970s. In the beginnings of the development of independent living centers in the United States, Judy had moved to Berkeley where I am currently living and was working at the Center for Independent Living. And I was living in Southern California in the city of Pasadena. I was finishing my college, courses is masters and was trying to figure out what I was going to do for a job. I saw a news article talking about this idea of an independent living center, and they were trying to set up 10 independent living centers with money that Ed Roberts had managed to put aside from his budget in the California State Department of Rehabilitation, where he was the new director.

And I thought, this sounds interesting. I really like this idea. I can see how I can do this, but I’m too late to join the group. And then I realized, well, let me go see if I can find local money. So I went to my city hall and talked to the city manager and they gave me a building for free and they gave me three positions paid for by the federal government. And $10,000 in cash. And they said, “go for it”. I started learning how to set up an independent living center basically by talking to other people and figuring it out as we went. I joined in with the other group that was set up with California State money, but I did it with local money. I’m always a little bit outside the group. But it was wonderful working with Judy, because she was actively promoting setting up centers in different states.
Right at that time, this is like 1976 and the 504 demonstrations were planned and started, and I got involved with that and I helped set up, well, it became an occupation. Everybody else didn’t start from the place of occupations, but they wanted to demonstrate in federal buildings. And I led a group in the Los Angeles area in the federal building there, and we ended up staying in the congressman’s office in the federal building. But we lasted three days. Everybody else in 10 other cities lasted basically a day, because nobody had planned food support. You’re in a building and the police shut it off, and you basically have no support. We had to leave after three days. The occupation in San Francisco managed to keep going for 28 days. I went up and eventually when we got shut down, Judy had organized a hearing led by a congressman that was very supportive in San Francisco.

And also had an HEW official participating. I got to participate in this event, representing what happened in Los Angeles. This is one of the famous moments where everybody sees the image of Judy talking to this congressman and getting very upset, because the guy just kept nodding in agreement and Judy’s basically telling him how horrible the situation is. And the guy just keeps nodding and nodding and she finally just calls him out on it. That was a very famous moment that’s been seen a lot on video. I was in the back of the room. This became a part of the Crip Camp film that Judy did.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Yes, I was just watching it over the weekend. And yes, that scene is fresh in my head. Definitely remember that.

Bruce Curtis:
And there’s a little moment which you have to be someone like me, is like, did they see me in the crowd? And I’m in the back of the room and you see me for about one second, but you have to be looking, know what you’re looking for. That was one example of Judy. From that occupation, what is not talked about as much is the group of disabled activists that left that building and went to Washington, D.C., and I was included in that group. Just 15, 20 people, all kinds of disabilities. We landed in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the night, one o’clock in the morning, and we’re all at the airport and a U-Haul truck shows up, and I’m looking at this U-Haul truck, it’s a van, it’s a U-Haul truck. And I’m thinking, all right, how’s this supposed to work? All these people in wheelchairs trying to get into a U-Haul van.

And they basically created a ramp and pushed us all up into this van and then closed the door. So we’re driving on the freeways with everybody in the van, with the door closed, not knowing and can’t see anything. It’s all dark. And they said, we’re going to go to Secretary Califano’s house. And this was a brand new tactic, hadn’t been done in any of the civil rights movements. The idea that you go to someone’s home, a government official’s home, and demonstrate in the middle of the night in suburban Washington, D.C. And one reason why this worked really well, we showed up, unloaded, two o’clock in the morning in front of his house, in a cul-de-sac, dead end street, unloaded our van seat. One of the reasons why the disability activists were very successful in the early years was we learned to bring along our own mainstream media, television cameras.
We would have a connection with a television studio, in this case, one in San Francisco, who had been following the occupation. And they basically said, you guys are going D.C. We want to come along. So they came along and they were with us. As soon as we arrived, as we’re coming out of the van, the floodlights of their TV cameras and lights show up, two o’clock in the morning, in the middle of the night, and we’re unloading, and we have our own TV cameras on. A couple police cars show up of course. What are you doing here? Well, we’re here here to see Secretary Califano and tell him about, he needs to sign the Section 504, and we are going to wait until he comes out and meets with us. And of course, the police look at each other and it’s like, but you can’t do this. This is in the middle of the street. No, this is public property. We are in the street. We are peacefully demonstrating, and we have a right to be on a public sidewalk.

They didn’t agree, but they couldn’t do anything about it. We ended up spending the night there and waiting for him in the morning to come out to go to work. And the guy didn’t come out of the front door. We later heard, because the news people started asking questions, and we later heard that he went out the back door and through the woods, because he did not want to be photographed seeing us and talking with us. That’s how much of a blackout there was about this issue in the East Coast press. They would not talk about this issue, which is why the decision was made to bring the demonstrators to Washington, D.C. in order to push the issue into the public.
Judy, of course, is the powerhouse through all this. She’s thinking, planning, and working with other people in the group. I’m along for the ride. I’m just a part of the group and I’m enjoying it. It was all cutting new territory. Demonstrators didn’t do this kind of thing. And especially in Washington, D.C. The next day or two, it was a Sunday. And we all knew that President Carter, who was new in office, he had only been in office for a few months when this started. We knew he was going to go to church, and we knew which church. And so we decided to go and sit in front of his church. Again, nobody does this in the civil rights and human rights meetings. You do not go and demonstrate in front of somebody while they go to church.

We talked internally about, are we going to try and go into the church as demonstrators? And the decision was made, no, that’s really not correct. You don’t interrupt people while they’re worshiping in a church. A couple of people wanted to go. And so we said, look, if you want to go in and be there and be quiet, fine. But no demonstrating in the church. I think two people went in, not too many, everybody else sat along on the side of the curb facing the church waiting for him to come out the front door, again and to see us with our signs, asking him to sign Section 504. Again, he did not come out the front door. He went out the back door, side door of the church and got in his cars and left. Again, the president had never gone out the side door to escape dealing with demonstrators.
We were making these small successes because it’s not like the newspapers were talking about it so much. They did cover it though. And the next thing we tried to do was meet again with Secretary Califano at his offices. That’s when I found out how big the D.C. cops are. The D.C. cops are huge. And we’re in wheelchairs. There are blind people, deaf people, people in wheelchairs. These D.C. all got to be over 6’5. They’re just huge. And they’re all lined up, blocking the doors, keeping us out, and not allowing us to enter. We did various kinds of demonstration tactics in front of them. They didn’t arrest us. In those days, in the 70s, they were not arresting disabled people who would demonstrate and do civil disobedience. In my mind and as we talked about it, the reasons were, we would say they were afraid to be seen arresting people in wheelchairs.

The truth of the matter was that was partially true, but the truth is they had no way to arrest us because they had no accessible police vehicles. They couldn’t take us anywhere. They couldn’t take us into jail. Jail wasn’t accessible. So they didn’t. Most people think there was some big moral thing going on, why they didn’t arrest us, maybe, but they had no accessible police vehicles. They had no way to put us somewhere. So they didn’t. This eventually changed a couple of years later in San Francisco, because I guarantee you, disabled people were very uppity, making demonstrations. In San Francisco, for example, again the bus transportation was inaccessible. People demonstrated and basically shut down one of the bridges going into the city. But by that time, a couple years had gone by and the San Francisco police had bought an accessible patty wagon, and so they were able to arrest a couple people.

I participated with Judy in various demonstrations, both the 504 one, other ones in San Francisco that happened. Judy and I, when you get a bunch of people in wheelchairs, one of the tactics we would do is, the people in wheelchairs, power wheelchairs, I was in a manual wheelchair, but we would lock our front wheels together and sometimes people would bring a chain and chain our chairs together. This was, again, nobody really did this back in the 70s so much. We innovated as best we could. But I always enjoyed hanging with Judy during these demonstrations because Judy was where the action was. She was always upfront, always pushing, always demanding, always confronting, always demanding the rights of persons with disabilities to be in the community, to have equal access. This was Judy.

One of the last thing I’ll say about Judy at the moment, when we were in Washington, D.C. during these demonstrations for 504, one of the things that eventually happened after about a week, was White House agreed to meet with us. So about three or four people were selected to go into the White House and meet with one of the advisors to President Carter. I was one of the people who went into the White House with Judy and a couple other people. And as we’re going down the halls of the White House. First time I’ve ever been in the White House and I’m looking around and Judy’s in a wheelchair, I’m in a wheelchair. Judy busts out singing we shall overcome. As she’s walking down the hallways of the White House. She just starts singing top of her voice, we shall overcome. And I’m joining in with her, but I’m embarrassed. I wouldn’t have done that, but she did.
We had our little meeting in the room with his advisors and we’re talking to him, and then Judy did another classic move. She said, I need to go to the bathroom. Where’s your bathroom? And they said, it’s down the hall around the corner. And I looked at Judy, and Judy looked at me, and we both, I said, yeah, I got to go to the bathroom too. We both went out the door going to the bathroom. And I’m going down the halls, I said, Judy, you check out the air bathroom, I’ll check out the men’s bathroom. And about accessibility, of course there wasn’t any. And we come back, we make our comments about it. You need to make an accessible bathroom here folks. That was another great memory with Judy. There’s been plenty through the years. Judy was everywhere.
And after, as she got older, I got older, she spent much more time in Washington, D.C. I spun off and started doing international work. And basically I started in the early 80s, like 1981 to 1985, I started in Latin America, Central America basically, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. I started working with disability organizations if they existed. Because in many of these countries, there were very rudimentary disability organizations. But I was interested in bringing the lessons and the vision that the independent living movement had developed in the United States. I was interested in bringing that to other people in other countries. Didn’t know how to do it, didn’t speak other languages, but I trusted in the ability to speak to other human beings about their problems and about what they wanted to do to make a better world.

And that message, there was always people, always young people somewhere who were interested in that. So that eventually led me, as Judy did her thing, she set up with Ed Roberts, the World Institute on Disability in the 80s. And I was doing a lot of traveling, but I was living in Washington, D.C. then when she wasn’t. Doing international work. Eventually we traded places again. I moved back to Berkeley. She moved to Washington, D.C. And she started her next several careers working on the rights of persons disability in the United States. And then slowly she started also moving into the international arena and got involved with the creation of the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act that was signed eventually. I was lucky to have met a couple of the leaders and gotten to know different people to some degree.

But I got involved with WID again back in 1991. 92, there was the fall of the Soviet Union. And my experiences had taught me that when countries change, when the government falls and a new government comes in and wants to redo the way things are done in the country, this is an opportunity to bring up the issues about disabled people becoming integrated in the society and supporting them. And so I wanted to go to Russia and didn’t speak the language, never been there. I went by myself in manual wheelchair in December. I’m a California boy. Unfortunately I didn’t understand winter in Russia. I went with my California clothes and a jacket.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Oh man.

Bruce Curtis:
And I thought, okay, that’ll be good enough. No, it wasn’t. I started working in Russia in 92, and eventually, it took several years, about three years. I was lucky that we were able to get some money from various sources, international sources, US government sources, to do work in Russia, to try to affect their main disability organization for the physically disabled. There are three main disability organizations in Russia. One for the physically disabled, for the blind, and for the deaf. Russia has a very different history around persons with disabilities. They went through their revolution in 1917, and the early 1920s, and this is before, the only disability organizations anywhere in the world were the blind and the deaf. And not for the physically disabled.
Then they had their war. And after big wars you get a lot of physically disabled people. And they created an organization for the physically disabled during World War II. But they took a direction where they wanted to segregate disabled people and have them supported separate, equal, supposedly equal, but separate but equal. No, it’s never equal. It just isn’t it. It just isn’t it. And they segregated disabled people in order to take care of them. Very classic arguments. And so when I arrived in Russia in the 1990s, and I’m in a wheelchair and I’m public, I’m going out and around and people saying they’d never see anybody in a wheelchair. They hadn’t seen anybody. The elevators in Russia were these tiny little things I could barely get into by myself. And they had steps going up to the elevator.

I’m being hauled up steps in order to get in an elevator. I’m looking at this, I’m thinking, how can we change this? It’s horrible. I started off and I made a big mistake. I started by working with the National Disability Organization with their leadership. Because you bring the leadership a new vision, you give them training and you want to help them implement that vision.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Of course.

Bruce Curtis:
But after two, three years of doing trainings and giving people practice homework, go back home and do this in your community, I didn’t see them doing anything. I became very unhappy and depressed thinking years and lots of money and it hasn’t led to a single change. And all of the leadership were people in their 50s and 60s and even 70s. There were no young people in their leaderships, none. All had grown up in the Soviet Union, all had grown up in a segregated society. All of them, their organization was funded by the government and you don’t rock the boat, you don’t make demands, you don’t criticize the government, you don’t make public demonstrations. And everything we were talking about was we want you to change your society. And they’re just looking at me and being quiet.

And I thought they were getting it. No they didn’t. I asked Ed Roberts, he said he wanted to come and visit Russia. And so I arranged for him to come and visit Moscow, and he came. For those who of you who know Judy, the things I’ve said about Judy doesn’t surprise you, but maybe you don’t know about Ed Roberts. And Ed Roberts was breaking ground the same time Judy was, and they were very close and very, very, very good leaders together. But Ed Roberts was his own force of nature as a leader, as an example, as a public speaker. Ed Roberts was amazing, and Ed came over. Ed Roberts is in this huge power wheelchair with a respirator attached to the back, and he is always got a respirator in his mouth, and he basically could move one finger and he would have to go home at night and be in his iron lung and get out of it the next day.

That was his normal routine. Go home, go to an iron lung. When he was in Moscow, he had a respirator, so he wasn’t going to his iron lung, but he came with his own entourage. Ed had about three or four people traveling with him. Some of them are attendants. He brought along his karate instructor.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Oh my God.

Bruce Curtis:
That surprised me. Ed was out there, breaking new ground, setting examples of what was possible. The guy can move one finger and he’s got a karate instructor. He told me he was bringing his karate instructor, and I didn’t know what to do with this. What am I going to do? I’m talking to these disability leaders from all over Russia in a training course. And here I’ve got Ed Roberts who I thought was going to talk about the disability rights movement, and he wants to do a karate demonstration for all these disability leaders. Okay, fine. And so it was a big room, and he got out there with his karate instructor and he did a few moves with him and did his thing and so forth. Everybody applauded him. Great. It was fascinating to watch.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I bet.

Bruce Curtis:
I took Ed to, during the weekend I took him to, I don’t know what to call it. It’s a flea market basically in Moscow, a huge flea market. Covers several football fields. Everybody brings their stuff. I would go there for my weekend activity. I took him there. And he’s out in public. This guy you can’t miss him. And nobody sees people in wheelchairs and Ed in a power wheelchair with a respirator, you’d never seen anything like this. He had Russian women, older women and whatnot. They would come up to him and they’d offer him money.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Oh my.

Bruce Curtis:
They reach out with some coins, they want to give Ed money. And he would laugh and say, oh no, no thanks. And they would say, you poor person, your poor child. This was what I was dealing with in Russia. That’s the beginning of it. Luckily we couldn’t stay. We didn’t have money to stay forever. And there needed to be a local disability organization. This is at a time when we want disability organizations to be led by disabled people. And I was really strong. I was a young militant, yeah, right. If you want disabled people in charge, you got to have disabled people in charge. I could not find a Russian person with a disability who had the skills to manage a disability organization that was doing what we wanted to do. There just wasn’t anybody. There just wasn’t anyone. I ended up hiring a young woman who had basically fell in love with Russia and had gone to school to learn the Russian language.

And she was basically planning to stay in Russia. She applied. I was really torn, conflicted, an able-bodied young woman as a leader of a disability organization in Moscow. And I thought, no, this isn’t right. But I didn’t have a choice. So I went with it. And of course, it didn’t go down real well at the World Institute. But I told people there really wasn’t anybody else. It has turned out, one of the famous sayings by Ed Roberts was when he is talked to people in public, he would say, we are disabled. There are other persons who are disabled in our society. And for you that are able-bodied, eventually you will also become disabled in your life sometime, and you will be a part of our community as well. And in this case, for this woman, for many years she was able-bodied, but then she became disabled.

She had replaced her hips twice. She had knee problems. She became disabled as she became older. She took that organization with other disabled Russians who were a part of it. They have been working in regions all over Russia for the last 25 or more years, and she now has over 70 employees in her organization. More than half are all disabled Russians. And they have been training and working with people all over Russia to promote inclusion and equity for disabled people, bring disabled children into normal schools, hire disabled people in normal jobs in the city. She has promoted all kinds of these issues and been very successful in doing it. I can’t take credit for it because she did the work. She’s the ones who slaved away every day, making that and going through the pain of doing that. She started working with young Russians.

That choice where I saw the possibilities of success working with young people, not working with the old leadership who grew up in a different world and who intellectually could hear what I was saying, but had no interest in working at changing their world. The young people, absolutely. The young people said we want something different. We want a better world for ourselves. We want opportunities for ourselves. And the young people went out and would demonstrate for it. The last thing I want to say about the Russia time is, I learned a very interesting lesson. I had grown up in America doing public demonstrations. We have a history in America of doing public demonstrations and that being fine, freedom of speech, the right to ask for our grievances to be addressed and to be dealt with and to be changed and to stop discrimination.

I grew up with that kind of experience. I only thought in public demonstrations that way. I saw when Denise, this American woman, when she started working with young disabled people, they created a public demonstration, but it wasn’t people criticizing and demanding their rights. Instead it became a celebration activity. For dealing with schools they would have an integration of disabled people in schools. They would have parents, they would have children, they would have teachers. They had balloons. They had signs saying, this is what we’re doing. And they would get out in the street, but it wasn’t to criticize the government, it was to celebrate their successes locally in the community. And the people, I watched buses full of people glued to the side windows, staring at all these people in the street with balloons and placards and basically it wasn’t a party, but it was very positive.

That taught me a very interesting lesson. Not to think that there’s only one way to get success, that you have to be angry, you have to protest. That has its place that needs to be done, but the celebration also needs to be a part of our toolkit. My time in Russia was over many years, is probably almost 14 years of going back and forth to Russia and different parts of Russia. I also went to some other Post-Soviet countries in order to see what was similar, what was different. I learned quickly, yes, there’s always differences in other countries and cultures, but the Soviet model was pretty well established in all of these countries. And there is lots of similarities. One of the countries I visited was the Republic of Georgia. Most people are not familiar with where the Republic of Georgia is located.

It’s on the other side, the east side of Turkey. It has the Black Sea to the north. It has Russia to the far, also is by the Black Sea there. And below to the south, it has Iran and also Azerbaijan and Armenian. These are what border the country of Georgia. Georgia is a crossroads country, meaning it is part of the East, it’s part of the West and everybody who wants to go either direction goes through Georgia. It’s a very old country where people have traveled through it and various other old ancient empires have conquered it at various times. There are old Roman ruins there. The Persians were interested and tried to occupy them to the Turkish. The Turks also, they’ve been through it all, through the centuries. Georgia was a very interesting place because the food is great.

I’m sorry, but you got to work hard and you really want to enjoy food when you get around to eating. And Georgia’s food is really great. And the Georgians have a great culture of music and dance and they’re just very lovely people. I got involved in the Republic of Georgia and decided I wanted to work with the disability organization there. The reason was, because there was a coalition of disability organizations in Georgia, which almost didn’t exist at all in other Soviet countries. The blind, the deaf, the physically disabled, and even people with mental retardation, and their parent organizations, they all were collaborating together in a national coalition. Unheard of. I hadn’t seen that in these other Soviet countries before. I was very interested in seeing what could be done when you have that level of cooperation and collaboration happening within a country.

Instead, in most other countries then, even today, disability organizations still fight among ourselves for resources, for power, for opportunities. Unfortunately, we struggle against each other too often, and that’s really not helpful. You don’t see progress made in society when everybody is struggling to get their own, get something for themselves. I started working in the Republic of Georgia. I had an old connection with Whirlwind Wheelchair International, which by that time had created a wheelchair over several years of working internationally with wheelchair users in other countries. They had developed a really excellent manual wheelchair that was really safe and could work well in very rough outdoor conditions, which is how the rest of the world is folks. There isn’t accessibility out there.

And even in our cities, unfortunately they’ve got holes and cracks in the street. Accessibility is not smooth and easy everywhere, just isn’t. And so this wheelchair is really practical and was made with bicycle technology so you could get repair parts from bicycle stores. And so I decided, all right, let’s try and set up a factory in Georgia, making this chair. And I was lucky enough to get money from the US government in order to make this happen. Over a period of five years, we had a big project. Half the project was setting up this wheelchair factory. The other half of the project was doing the usual disability education in the communities, developing disability advocates in the community who would work locally and nationally to make changes in how disabled people were living in their society and having access to schools and jobs and doing what they wanted to do.
So for a five-year period, we worked on this, created this factory. The factory still exists. It’s still making chairs. The government buys chairs from them, distributes it to people. And I learned another interesting lesson, which was, the RoughRider wheelchair is an excellent wheelchair. And we’re giving it out free to people. And I’m thinking, this is such a wonderful thing. We’re giving this great wheelchair, they all got lousy wheelchairs and everybody’s going to be really more mobile, more active, more excited, whatever. No, that’s not the way it worked. Because people in Georgia are exposed to western media and western television, and they see the western wheelchairs, which are very pretty, very shiny, very sleek looking, very sexy looking kind of wheelchairs. And everybody, people wanted these sexy-looking wheelchairs.

And the RoughRider chair is a good-looking chair, but it isn’t being advertised and it isn’t being seen the way everybody else was looking at it. They wanted these Western wheelchairs. And I’m talking to people and saying, well, how do you feel about your chair? And they go, it’s really good, but it’s heavy. It’s heavy. It’s a little heavy to use and so forth. I was shocked. It was like, oh my God, they’re criticizing this chair. They got it for free and it’s a great chair and they were not happy about it. They wanted the sexy Western model of chairs. And so over the years, what’s happened is as people got money or friends in the Western world, they started getting their hands on these Western wheelchairs and using them. But there are always disabled people who don’t have these resources, and they at least had access to a very good, very practical wheelchair that they could get around and have a life with.

So that factory is still working, still happening. The disability coalition had some very good successes. The government started paying attention and supporting what was happening in Georgia. When you go back and look over time, you don’t see changes in a month, you don’t see changes in a year, you see changes over five years, 10 years, 15 years. I’ve told people many, many times, you need to look at the problem of changing society from a generational viewpoint. It’s what you do in your life and you hand it off to the next group that comes next, the young people that are motivated to keep on working, keep on struggling.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I want to talk about those young people. How do you think that young people of today can mobilize together for disability rights and disability justice, in the same way that you did and that Judy did and that Ed did? How can the current young generations do the same kinds of work in 2023?

Bruce Curtis:
I think there needs to be more dialogue between old leadership and young leadership. Judy always promoted this, always, always, always. Every time I see Judy, she’s always got young people around her, young disabled people, talking to them, supporting them, encouraging them. Role models really help. They really do. It says, yes, it was possible for them, it could be possible for me. The dialogue is part of the handoff that you share, the experiences you give people. You show them it wasn’t by magic, it was by hard work, it was suffering, pain, you just go through it. But you have to have this commitment.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely.

Bruce Curtis:
Not everybody has it. And I see, and I’m not hanging around young disabled people in America right now, but I also recognize that young disabled people have a different environment than I had. In some ways they look at these old times when there was no accessibility in buildings, zero, none. In a wheelchair, when I went to college, I was hauled. I had to find people in the stairwell, ask them, when I’m 18, 19, 20 years old, will you haul me up these steps in order for me to get to my classroom? Every day that’s what it was.

Ashley Inkumsah:
With young people of today, for someone like me, I was born into post ADA, so we don’t realize what it used to be like for you and generations before you. It’s interesting.

Bruce Curtis:
And so they think it was really hard then. No. I think it’s harder now for the young people. I think it’s harder now for the young people because they didn’t have it so in your face, blatant, where it was the easy to see the barriers, easy to see the obstacles, to point at them and say, these are wrong. That was easy to do, even if it was difficult to live that way. Now you’ve got all these accessibilities, you have the Americans with Disabilities Act, you have the UN rights for the disabled people. You have all of these successes and much more money and resources that young disabled people are growing up in.

Does that mean they’re not being discriminated? Absolutely not. They’re still dealing with discrimination. They’re still dealing with lack of opportunity. They’re still dealing with not being able to see possibilities for success in their lives. Even with all of the accessibility and all of this money, I think that’s a pretty hard problem. How do you demand change when most people in societies think you have it pretty good? That’s more difficult than I had. It was easy to point to the problems for me and Judy and Ed and others. It was obvious, not today.

Ashley Inkumsah:
There’s so many more problems that have been created, so it’s like how do you even begin to tackle all of the different problems that all of our collective oppression is wrapped up in? It’s just like, where do you even start? Especially living in this era of instant gratification and the 24-hour news cycle. It’s easy to get caught up, and it’s hard to figure out where to start, I think.

Bruce Curtis:
So saying that, my first reaction is pick something. Just pick something and don’t think you’ve got to be the person who solves it all. It won’t happen. It just doesn’t happen that way. But you pick something to work on and you find some people to work with you. Doing it alone is no fun. Just no fun. You want help. You want to work with other people. Unfortunately the disability organizations and groups of disabled people, it’s becoming hard to find that, find other groups of disabled people other than who you happen to hang with.

Ashley Inkumsah:
I’m grateful for social media in that aspect that it’s been able to bring together a lot of global communities that I otherwise not have access to. People are able to have conversations with a disabled person in London or disabled person in Kenya or wherever. It’s allowed us to connect more globally. At least we have that to start.

Bruce Curtis:
And so what I would say as an older person is, somebody is got to figure out how to use your tools today in a new way, in a new way that I can’t think of because I didn’t grow up with them that way. I didn’t grow up with the tools you have today, the social media, the instant access, the communication, even though it isolates people to some degree, it also facilitates to a degree. So somebody’s got to come up with some original thinking about how to work with these tools in a productive way. It isn’t doing what we did, though some of our tools are very useful. Demonstrations will never go out of fashion. People need to speak up and demand changes. I hope no one ever stops doing that. No one should ever see that as impolite. I’m sorry. Discrimination is impolite.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Exactly.

Bruce Curtis:
Oppression is impolite. I’m sorry, I’m not going to be quiet about it.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely. We got to make some noise and just be-

Bruce Curtis:
You got to make noise. But one of the things that I appreciate is creative thinking about how to make noise, new ways of making noise, new ways of being in your face. Doing it the way we did it still is available and people do choose that. But I’m waiting to see people come up with some new thinking and new ways of getting out and making these demands, because it’s never going to end. We got to constantly improve our lives and improve society. I used to think, well, eventually I could stop. No, doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t. And the world’s big. Too many people, lots of people, lots of problems. So pick one, pick a place. Sports, art, employment, schools. Pick a place and start working on a problem because that’s how you gain your skills. That’s how you gain your confidence.

One of the things that I came to understand about training disability advocates, they need to see success very quickly. It’s small successes, not big success, just success. Something. Just somebody that says, you’re right, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that. How can I do this better? Whether it’s a school, whether it’s a restaurant, whatever. It’s those small successes which tell you it is possible.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely.

Bruce Curtis:
And you build with the small successes and eventually you go, all right, let me try something big now. Let me try something a little bit bigger. Takes a little bit longer to make that success happen. Many people look at electoral politics like voting, got to get people out to vote. Yes, that’s important. How do disabled people get out and vote? Well, there’s lots of disabled people who don’t vote. And will that make a difference? It always makes a difference to go out and vote in hand and get recognized for your vote. Is it the most important? I don’t think it’s the most important because it’s an occasional thing.

Ashley Inkumsah:
And there’s also disabled people who can’t vote due to a lack of accessibility as well. So we can’t rely on just voting.

Bruce Curtis:
So pushing activism only into voting, it’s important, but it’s not the only game in town. There are other problems also very important need to be addressed. And unfortunately as our economy gets bad, resources get tight, programs get cut. People who have disabilities now, what they had gotten used to, they start seeing threatened. They start seeing cutbacks. They start seeing conversations about, we have other problems we need to deal with first. Sorry, this is why it’s a generational struggle. I’d like to say at some point we cross the river and we declare success. No. It is an ongoing battle I’m sorry to say. Does that mean I get tired as I get older? Yes, I do. Did Judy get tired? She would never admit it. She just wouldn’t admit it. You never saw her saying, I’m too tired to do this. Her energy was just endless.

I try to follow that. I try to keep going and I continue my work. I’ve gotten old enough now where I don’t want, I was traveling all over the world and I’ve gotten to a place now where traveling is much more physically difficult. I’m just older. I’m 72. It’s like I shouldn’t be having to travel all over the world. But the problems continue. I don’t see myself traveling now, but now I’m here in Berkeley. There are problems here in Berkeley for disabled people, and I’m working on problems here in Berkeley. I didn’t used to do that while I was working internationally. Now I am. Because here’s where I live. Here is where I can do something useful. And so I’m doing that and that’s my contribution. I’m doing something. It’s small, it’s local, but it’s not just us, it’s everyone else doing their bit, doing their part.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely. And on the subject of building forward and just creating a better future, what do you think should be a priority for WID, as someone who served as our director of international programs for 22 years, what do you feel like we should be prioritizing over the next decade and beyond?

Bruce Curtis:
Well, I’m very biased, I’m sorry, about international work. But as I’ve tried to explain, there’s plenty of work to do locally. It isn’t that you have to go work in other countries. It would be nice. But I think one lessons I’ve learned working internationally, trying to create disability advocates to make, how do you take people who desire but don’t know how to be a disability advocate? How do you train them? We had training courses. It’s like going to school, for eight hours a day, for one week or even two weeks, eight hours a day we would have classes where our advocates would sit through a series of trainings and orientations on different issues to understand them and to learn about different techniques and abilities. They didn’t know how to work with newspapers. They didn’t know how to work with television.
They did not know how to stand up in front of their government people. They didn’t know how you do these things in their local city. So we give them an intensive training course and expose them to lots of these ideas and tools and how you do things. And then we send them back to their cities, not alone, in teams. You don’t want to send someone alone. They need support from other people doing the same thing. The team could be two people, team could be three or five depending on how much money we had. But we support them while they go back home and practice what they were taught. This kind of approach, I don’t know if it needs to happen, but I encourage it to happen. And here in America for young people, the idea somehow that people are just you’re young, you want to work? Fine, go do something.

I’m sorry. That’s a failure. People need training. They need support while they practice their training. That’s how you get somebody, because they don’t all succeed, but you get some success. Some of them will be successful. That is what I would want to see happen in America right now and other countries, that there was some training courses, how to be a disability advocate.

Ashley Inkumsah:
That would be pretty cool.

Bruce Curtis:
You get some old people, you get some young people as trainers. It’s not just the old people doing this. Got to be new ideas, new thinking.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Definitely. I want to close off our conversation in the way that we started, which was us reflecting on Judy. How do you think that we can all collectively channel Judy’s fighting spirit, her just bold and brazen spirit in order to create a more equitable world for people with disabilities?

Bruce Curtis:
Don’t ask for permission. Do it. Don’t ask for permission. Do it. You fight discrimination. You fight oppression by going out and struggling with it. And you don’t ask for permission and somebody else to say, all right, you’re now the official disability advocate, go do it. No, you decide it on your own or with your friends and you decide to go do it. No one gave us permission. We all just did it. That’s part of my encouragement. If you want want to be bold and sassy and get in other people’s spaces about discrimination and oppression, please go do it. Just do it. You’ll get pushback.

Ashley Inkumsah:
For sure.

Bruce Curtis:
You’ll get pushback. That’s how you learn your skills. That’s how you learn to do it in a way that doesn’t cause people to be pissed at you.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Sometimes it’s okay for people to be pissed at you sometimes.

Bruce Curtis:
Sometimes. I’m sorry, some people will not change how they are.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Exactly.

Bruce Curtis:
I’m sorry. You move on. You just move on. There are plenty of people who are receptive. Work with the people who are receptive. Get in the face of the people who are not receptive. Judy, there wasn’t a no for Judy. It was, how do I do it? Or I’m just going to go do it. And she did. That’s my encouragement to everybody else, go do it.

Ashley Inkumsah:
Absolutely.

Bruce Curtis:
Don’t wait for permission. And look for help, look for support from others, because doing it alone is not generally successful. You need more than one person.

Ashley Inkumsah:
We all need to organize together so that we can achieve collective liberation. That’s what the disability justice framework teaches us that, and I really live by that framework and I think we all should embrace that spirit. Well, Bruce, this conversation has been amazing. I’ve really enjoyed hearing all of your stories, some of which I’ve never heard about Ed and Judy, and just like the time spent internationally and at WID. This was such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest on our season three premiere of our podcast.

Bruce Curtis:
Good. Well thank you for inviting me and I’m still here. People want encouragement and ideas, I got a few, but I’m really encouraging others, find your own. We had to find our own.

Ashley Inkumsah:
That’s right. So you can find transcripts and American sign language interpretations for today’s episode and all of our past episodes at www.wid.org/whats-up-wid, and I can’t wait to talk to you all next time.