In June 1972 Barbara Andrews was one of a group of persons with disabilities who urged the Bill of Rights Committee of the Minnesota Constitutional Study Commission to include a provision in the state constitution prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability. Andrews, who had cerebral palsy and could not drive, described some of the ...
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Pioneering pastor struggled to find transportation
Then as now, award winner spoke out for our rights
2012 Charlie Smith Award winner Charles Van Heuveln has long been a champion of disability rights. The remarks below by Van Heuveln are excerpted from the record of his testimony of June 21, 1972 to the Minnesota Constitutional Study Commission Bill of Rights Committee. It's time for all physically impaired people to stick up for their ...
Travel arrangements would be unacceptable today
The Wright County Eagle for Friday, July 31, 1874 reported that Sheriff John Nugent had come through Delano the previous Tuesday while bringing seven-year-old Henry Buri to the Hospital for the Insane in St. Peter. Henry, who lived south of what is now Annandale, had been committed in Wright County Probate Court the day before. His ...
A leader with promise had life cut short by illness
Anna Johnson, her husband, and her six-month-old child left Norway in April 1868 bound for Fillmore County in Minnesota. The 22-year-old woman was fatigued and ill most of the time on the voyage. On the final leg of her trip, the train trip from Milwaukee to LaCrosse, she became incoherent and confused. After she arrived in ...
Forgotten lives can now be found
More than 2,500 patients lie buried in three St. Peter State Hospital cemeteries. In the earliest cemetery, established shortly after the institution opened in 1866, small wooden crosses with identification tags marked the graves of about 550 patients until a prairie fire destroyed the crosses and tags in 1895. From 1896 to 1913 more than ...
Dr. Mattocks: an early advocate for Minnesota children
There is a contemporary flavor to newspaper reports of the debate in the 1879 legislature about what to do about “idiot,” “imbecile,” or “feebleminded” children at the Hospital for the Insane in St. Peter. During the 1870s, about fifty children with those labels were committed there. The hospital administration and staff did not want them there, ...
In a word: Ballot’s outcome hinges on language
“Shall the Minnesota constitution be amended to require all voters to present valid photo identification to vote and to require the state to provide free identification to eligible voters, effective July 1, 2013?” As Minnesotans prepare to cast ballots in November on a constitutional amendment that would require voters to produce photo identification at the polling ...
Changes removed barrier to community integration
The Minnesota Department of Human Services agreed in 2011 to develop a comprehensive plan to provide services for persons with disabilities in the “most integrated setting.” This plan, called an “Olmstead plan” in reference to a United States Supreme Court case that supported moving persons with disabilities out of institutions, was part of the settlement ...
Babies benefitted greatly from one doctor’s research
In October the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the Minnesota Department of Health could not retain blood samples from the newborn baby screening program indefinitely or provide them to other researchers without consent from a baby’s parents. This ruling, however, did not affect the newborn screening requirement itself. This program was established in 1965 after ...
Court approves METO settlement agreement
After a two-hour hearing in federal district court on Thursday, Dec. 1, Judge Donovan Frank ordered final approval of the settlement of the class action lawsuit prompted by excessive use of restraint of residents of the Minnesota Extended Treatment Options (METO) in Cambridge. Parents of three METO residents brought this lawsuit in 2009 and sought ...
The little girl and the Great Communicator, years later
Thirty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1981, President Ronald Reagan told a story about an Iowa girl story at a press conference. “We just recently received word of a little girl who has spent most of her life in a hospital. The doctors are of the opinion that if she could be sent home and ...
Lives Worth Living airs in October Show explores disability movement history
While there are close to 50 million Americans living with disabilities, Lives Worth Living is the first television history of their decades-long struggle forequal rights. Produced and directed by Eric Neudel, Lives Worth Living is a window into a world inhabited by people with an unwavering determination to live their lives like everyone else, and ...
Minnesota: Budget balancing or a lack of due process? -A historical perspective on past state impasses
During the government shutdown in July, Ramsey County District Court Judge Kathleen Gearin ruled that certain government functions must be provided and paid for even though the Minnesota Legislature and the governor had not agreed on an appropriation act. Years earlier, in a different context, U.S. District Judge Earl Larson issued a similar order in ...
Acting together is necessary
In 1995 Gov. Arne Carlson’s administration proposed to scale back the Tax Equity & Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) program and to decimate personal care attendant (PCA) services. Dozens of persons with disabilities and their friends and family members, including the newly formed Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, spoke out at the capitol and ...
Three women who did their part for children
Today, agencies provide most of the community-based services for persons with disabilities, generally supported by public funds. In the decades after the School for the Feebleminded opened at Faribault, however, three women, on their own and without public support, established the first group homes and day programs for persons with developmental disabilities.
In 1897, Laura Baker, ...
Educable children
Advocacy groups, supportive members of the Minnesota Legislature, and a University of Minnesota professor collaborated to achieve approval by the 1957 legislature of a law, which mandated that schools provide “special instruction and services for handicapped children” considered “educable” according to standards of the state Department of Education. They also obtained approval of a law ...
Southwest State welcomed students with a broad spectrum of disabilities
Southwest Minnesota State was touted as a college intended to accommodate students with disabilities when it opened in Marshall in 1967. Howard Bellows, the first president of the college, came from Emporia State College in Kansas, one of the few state colleges designed to be accessible to students with physical disabilities. He framed the specialized ...
Sound the Trumpets – Bringing those barriers down
The Minnesota Society for Crippled Children and Adults persuaded the 1963 Minnesota Legislature to pass, unanimously, a requirement that new buildings paid for by the state be accessible to persons with disabilities. This new law directed the state fire marshal to write rules for stated-funded construction that were consistent with the 1961 American Standard Association ...
Families created the Worthington Crippled Children’s School
In the early 1950s, many children with physical disabilities were denied education in the public schools. Parents also lacked in-home support services and, often, any way to pay for needed therapies. At that time there were “hospital-schools” for “crippled” children in Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Although there were special schools for these children in ...
Lindsay School offered therapy services, education for children
In 1929 the Ramsey County Committee of the recently organized Minnesota Association for Crippled Children urged the City of St. Paul to keep faith with children with disabilities by building a new school for them. In those days St. Paul Public Schools were under the direct control of city government. Members of the committee, in ...
Fight for Human Rights was lengthy
The Minnesota House, in 1973, had approved a bill supported by Handi-Registration, a self-advocacy group seeking to protect the civil rights of persons with disabilities. The bill expanded coverage for persons with disabilities in all areas covered by the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The Senate, however, refused to extend coverage in public services to persons ...
Before the ADA, activists fought for human rights
(First in a two-part series)
May 1973, 17 years before Congress passed the ADA, the Minnesota Legislature added persons with disabilities as a protected class under the state Human Rights Act. The vote was not close, 115-11 in the House and 53-1 in the Senate. Handi-Registration, a self-advocacy group which focused on the civil rights of ...
Treatment of men was unspeakably cruel, painful
Editor’s note: The topic of this month’s History Note, while important in the context of past treatment of people with disabilities in state institutions, may be offensive to some readers.
Dr. Samuel Shantz, the first superintendent of Minnesota’s Hospital for the Insane at St. Peter, thanked God in his report to the Board of Trustees ...
Conscientious objectors, media exposés, and institutional reform brought change for many
Editor’s note: Access Press uses its 20th anniversary issue history note to salute others who have used the news media to call for change.
During World War II, more than 3,000 conscientious objectors (COs) worked without pay in Civilian Public Service units established in 43 state mental hospitals and 15 state training schools, none of which ...
Bill Sackter’s story highlights need for apologies
In 1983 the Minnesota Department of Public Welfare filed a claim for almost $10,000 against the estate of Bill Sackter for care provided him in his years at Faribault State Hospital. In a Star Tribune article by Eric Black, Sackter’s guardian, Rabbi Jeffrey Portman, responded that Sackter’s estate had only $127. But even if there ...
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