CBH Talk | Building Access: The History and Future of Disability Rights

The disability rights movement has transformed American life and expanded access, opportunity, and civil rights for millions of people. These hard-won gains are the result of decades of organizing, advocacy, and political struggle. And the fight for equality continues.

As we celebrate July’s Disability Pride Month, join us for an illuminating panel on the history and ongoing efforts to bring equal access to schools, workplaces, transportation systems, public spaces, and reshape the very meaning of civil rights.

CBH Chief Historian Dominique Jean-Louis leads this discussion with the former Commissioner of the New York City Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities Victor Calise, disability historian and activist Warren Shaw, and New York State Assemblymember and disability rights attorney Jo Anne Simon.

Together, they will explore the movement's landmark victories, the leaders who helped secure them, and the challenges that remain as advocates continue to push for a more accessible and inclusive society.

This program is offered in conjunction with the Center for Brooklyn History's exhibition “People Making Power,” which highlights Congressman Major Owens's role in the passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

^{Above Images, clockwise from top left: Warren Shaw, Jo Anne Simon, Dominique Jean-Louis, Victor Calise}

Participants

Victor Calise is a global disability advocate who spent more than two decades in public service, his culminating role from 2012 to 2022 was as Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities under three different Administrations. Victor is regularly sought out to serve in prestigious leadership capacities, in the past as Mayoral appointee to the Board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and currently on the Board of Trustees for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

A native New Yorker, Victor, is an internationally recognized inclusion champion. An avid athlete, he was a member of the first U.S. national sled hockey team and represented his country at the 1998 Paralympic Games in Nagano, Japan. He is married to his beautiful wife Susan, and they have two daughters. 

Dominique Jean-Louis, Ph.D, is the Chief Historian of the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library. Among the exhibitions she has curated are The Battle of Brooklyn: Fought and Remembered, Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn, and a pop-up exhibition, Memories Matter, in the Euclid Avenue subway station as a collaboration with the MTA's Vacant Unit Activation Program. Previously, she held the position of Associate Curator of History Exhibitions at the New York Historical. She received her Ph.D in US History from New York University, with her doctoral research focusing on race, ethnicity, and immigration in post-Civil Rights Era Brooklyn schools. Dominique regularly writes and lectures on Blackness in America, schools and education, and New York City history.

Warren Shaw a writer, activist, attorney, and historian of the New York City Disability Rights Movement.  Warren curated the first-ever museum exhibit on the movement, at the Brooklyn Historical Society.  His monthly history column can be found at Able News, the newspaper of record for the disability community in the Tristate area.  Warren's website, www.DisabilityHistoryNYC.com , is a unique on-line resource which includes essays on a wide range of topics and previews of his book-in-progress, Never Stand Alone.  Warren's parents, Mollie and Julius Shaw, helped pioneer the movement in the early 1960s, and engineered the establishment of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.  Warren has presented lectures on the disability rights movement for Columbia University, the City of New York, WBAI, Long Island University, and dozens of other forums. 

Jo Anne Simon has been a New York State Assemblymember for District 52 since 2015, representing the neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO, Gowanus, and parts of Park Slope and Prospect Heights, as well as the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A disability civil rights lawyer, educator, community activist, and progressive NY State Assemblymember, Jo Anne Simon has dedicated her life to fighting for equal rights.  

She chairs the Mental Health Committee, and formerly chaired the Assembly Committee on Ethics and Guidance. Jo Anne has advocated for affordable housing, literacy reforms (including New York’s first dyslexia law), better transit, and climate protections. She has passed major legislation on health care, education, campaign finance reform, and gender equity. 

Jo Anne grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Yonkers and was the first in her family to attend college. She became a teacher of deaf students, then got a law degree and opened her own disability rights law firm in Brooklyn. She represented people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and marginalized clients fighting for their rights and dignity. Jo Anne fought a landmark case on behalf of a dyslexic law school graduate that went up to the Supreme Court and changed the landscape for disability rights.