"Do you know what is harder and more daunting than the prospect of managing 400 staff and $10 billion under the eyes of a country made up of 263 million people and a bicameral Congress?" asks Judith Heumann. "Finding an accessible three-bedroom apartment" in Washington, D.C. Even as the Clinton administration's assistant secretary in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Heumann was still up against the sorts of obstacles she'd faced as a child paralyzed by polio.
The daughter of German immigrants, Heumann believes she got her fighting spirit from her mother, who rejected a Brooklyn public school principal's ruling that her daughter couldn't attend kindergarten because "Judy is a fire hazard." In 1970, when she was 22, Heumann successfully sued the New York City Board of Education: although she had passed her exams, the board wouldn't give her a teaching license because she used a wheelchair. Heumann's biggest victory--the story is the cornerstone of her book--entailed taking over the San Francisco Federal Building with a hundred-plus disability rights activists in 1977 in order to pressure Washington to sign an antidiscrimination law; the law was ultimately expanded into 1990's landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.
Throughout the awe-eliciting Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, the author is modest about her accomplishments--"You drop a petal in the water and it has a ripple effect"--but readers will leave the book feeling as though they've just encountered the mother of a movement. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer