In 1977, over 100 people with disabilities and their allies occupied a federal building in San Francisco for almost a month. Part of the national 504 Sit-In, this remarkable protest sought to finally sign into law Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973), which would make it illegal for any federally funded facilities or programs to discriminate against individuals based on their disability. Not only was the protest successful, it paved the way for the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
In this final episode of Season Two (recorded on July 19, 2022), Dr. Wes Jackson speaks with Dr. Cathy Kudlick (Professor of History and Director Emeritus of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, San Francisco State University) and Fran Osborne (Freelance Designer/Museum Consultant and Lecturer in Museum Studies, San Francisco State University) on their public exhibit about the 504 Sit-in. First launched in 2015, “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights” not only captures this pivotal historical moment but exemplifies innovative public history practice by making accessibility and community involvement integral to its design.
Check out the amazing virtual exhibit for “Patient No More”: https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/patient-no-more.
Learn more about the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability: https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/.
Explore the Global Museum at San Francisco State University: https://museum.sfsu.edu/global-museum.
For more on Dr. Kudlick: https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/catherine-j-kudlick.
For more on Prof. Osborne: https://art.sfsu.edu/fran-osborne.
The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph
In 1977, over 100 people with disabilities and their allies occupied a federal building in San Francisco for almost a month. Part of the national 504 Sit-In, this remarkable protest sought to finally sign into law Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973), which would make it illegal for any federally funded facilities or programs to discriminate against individuals based on their disability. Not only was the protest successful, it paved the way for the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
In this final episode of Season Two (recorded on July 19, 2022), Dr. Wes Jackson speaks with Dr. Cathy Kudlick (Professor of History and Director Emeritus of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, San Francisco State University) and Fran Osborne (Freelance Designer/Museum Consultant and Lecturer in Museum Studies, San Francisco State University) on their public exhibit about the 504 Sit-in. First launched in 2015, “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights” not only captures this pivotal historical moment but exemplifies innovative public history practice by making accessibility and community involvement integral to its design.
Check out the amazing virtual exhibit for “Patient No More”: https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/patient-no-more.
Learn more about the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability: https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/.
Explore the Global Museum at San Francisco State University: https://museum.sfsu.edu/global-museum.
For more on Dr. Kudlick: https://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/catherine-j-kudlick.
For more on Prof. Osborne: https://art.sfsu.edu/fran-osborne.
The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph
Welcome to Public Historians at Work, a podcast series from the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. I am Dr. Monica Perales, Associate Professor of History and Director of CPH. In this podcast series, we speak with academics, artists, activists, and community members about what it means to do history and humanities work, for and with the public. In our second season, we are examining public history as it relates to medicine, health, and the well-being of our global community. For more resources on these topics and ways to support the mission of CPH, make sure to check us out at uh.edu/class/cph or find us on Facebook and Twitter at uhcphistory. Together, we can help reclaim our past.
In 1977, over 100 people with disabilities and their allies occupied a federal building in San Francisco for almost a month. Part of the national 504 Sit-In, this remarkable protest sought to finally sign into law Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973), which would make it illegal for any federally funded facilities or programs to discriminate against individuals based on their disability. Not only was the protest successful, it paved the way for the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
In this final episode of Season Two (recorded on July 19, 2022), Dr. Wes Jackson speaks with Dr. Cathy Kudlick, former Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, and Fran Osborne, a Freelance Designer and Museum Consultant, on their public exhibit about the 504 Sit-In. First launched in 2015, “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights,” not only captures this pivotal historical moment but exemplifies innovative public history practice by making accessibility and community involvement integral to is design. Let’s listen in.
WJ: Before we get into the exhibit itself, I wanted to just ask both of you to talk about what sparked your interest initially from the beginning in public history and public facing projects. And Cathy, I thought we would start with you. My understanding is, is that you really had a traditional historian background – expected to write books, articles, monographs. When did you decide to venture into this area of public history?
CK: First of all, thanks for having me on. You know what is really fascinating is I didn’t know I was doing public history until somebody told me I was, so that was the interesting thing, the label thing later. So, I didn’t think, oh, I am going towards public history although obviously that is what I was doing. The reason I left mainstream academic practice was I was offered this job at San Francisco State University to direct the Longmore Institute and one of the things I wanted to do is reach more people, which I guess by definition is public history but I didn't know it at the time, and the notion of reaching more people meant not just publishing another scholarly monograph but really engaging people in some way to get them excited about an event or a person or a topic. And I was drawn to doing some kind of exhibit because I went to an exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library by a group called Community Works and what they had done was gotten a group of students, high school students, involved in putting together an exhibit to tell the story of the civil rights movement in the San Francisco Bay area, and they interviewed people and did all that. And so, that was kind of my little model in the back of my head and thought, oh wouldn't it be cool to do something like this around disability so that when I came to San Francisco State and they gave me the opportunity to do something more ambitious with some startup funds, that is kind of the place I gravitated go, so that was the kernel of how it all got started.
WJ: I love that. Fran, for you, was there something similar that sparked your interest? I mean, you already have a background in museum studies. Was the term “public history” thrown around when you were getting started?
FO: It sort of is, yes. I mean, I have been thinking about it for a few weeks since you invited us to be on this podcast, and thank you very much. I just wanted to say thank you. I think the term that I am most familiar with is sort of local history, so I don’t know how that compares to public history. I suppose the history that really interests me is about ordinary people and the circumstances that they find themselves in, and the significant events, and the part that they can play in them. But I have always really loved history. I had a really fantastic teacher at high school who always try to make us think about the other ways of diving into a history and thinking about it from different perspectives. And I think museums have been shifting an awful lot in the way they present history, and they have been allowing lots of other voices in. And increasingly, they are doing community-curated projects, you know, which wasn’t really something that they allowed to happen before. So, there is a lot going on in the museum world that is shaking everything up and letting go of that voice of authority, and letting go of the idea that they letting go of the idea that their neutral is a really important part of museum work as well at the moment. Yes, it is a conversation that is still developing.
WJ: Yes, well, and maybe we can talk about some of that, particularly how your awareness of neutrality or non-neutrality influenced even the Patient No exhibit. For those that aren’t really super-familiar with this history, the exhibit itself, we are coming up, I think, on almost exactly seven years when you all first opened the exhibit, so if my research is correct, that was July 2015 and it was opened for a seven-month run at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley and it stayed there through December and then, did it go into storage for a little bit and then 2017, it was the San Francisco main library that hosted it for a few months? And then, my understanding now is that it is in storage but there is the virtual exhibit that folks can enjoy.
CK: There is the virtual exhibit that you mentioned that anybody can access online and I provide the link in the show for the podcast. But the other one is that Fran, as part of the designing of the exhibit, designed what we call the traveling exhibit, so that is still traveling around, and it is kind of… I guess, Fran, I will let you explain the logic of it more, but the purpose of it was to bring the exhibit to places and people where they didn't have access to coming to the Ed Roberts Campus. And the idea was to get as many groups engaged with it in as many ways as possible. And Fran, maybe you could say something about how you went about designing it and how we work together based on the traveling exhibit versus the “main” exhibit which, for most people, would probably be a traveling exhibit, too.
FO: Yes, the main exhibit had to be moved out of the exhibit space that it was in about seven or eight times during that time that it was at the Ed Roberts Campus. So, in the end, it was on wheels. So, it could have traveled around the country as well, but it was a much bigger kind of structure and much more complicated. And so, we developed this traveling exhibit that can be put up in lots of different configurations depending on the space available and where the entrances are in a space because a lot of institutions like libraries or public kind of institutions where they might have it in a lobby space and there is lots of coming and going, we designed it so that there is no linear progression around it. You can sort of dip into it wherever you come across it. And it was meant to be a kind of taster for people to go to the website and do a deep dive into all of the interviews and all of the, sort of, thematic material that we have on the website. And I can't believe that it is still traveling around the country. It is fully booked up and they have just reprinted it. I am not sure where it is now, but it is managed by a group called Exhibit Envoy. So, if anybody wants to rent it, look up Exhibit Envoy and you can get there.
WJ: And so, for folks that don’t know, who are kind unfamiliar with this history, one of the questions that I was going to ask is with this exhibit, what were really the big ideas or the big story that you wanted to communicate about this really significant event in 1977?
CK: I think the main thing was to show that… Well, a couple of things. One, disability has a history. A lot of people don't believe that. They think it is a biological thing that happens to some unfortunate people and they leave it at that. They don't go any deeper to think, like, wow, it is associated with other big things in history like civil rights, like mass protests – things that people are more familiar with – and disability is part of that story as well. And the other piece was that this was a history that was made by people with disabilities themselves; that it was about grassroots activism, it was about taking matters into our own hands and saying, ‘Look, you know, we are not getting these rights that we deserve and that we have been fighting for. What are we going to do about it?’ So, it shows the activism and the engagement of people with disabilities. It is not some right that is handed down by a benevolent government or a well-meaning person, but to show really that there is a history and that it is because people with disabilities took this action and took this activism and said we need to push forward. And I think that is the main focus there.
WJ: When you were starting this, did you draw from any other exhibits specifically regarding the 504 Sit-In or, to your knowledge, was this really the first of its kind?
CK: There were other, sort of, grassroots-type exhibits and Fran, maybe you can comment on some of the ones that we engaged with, like Fabled Ask [ph. sp]. There were a couple of groups that had put together really grassroots and temporary exhibitions with maybe less ambitious, fewer resources, things like that, but they were still exhibits that were telling part of the story. But we didn’t set out to do a history of 504 – coming back to it, the initial impulse was to show disability history, in general, or, at least, in the 20th century, just to kind of give a big picture view. And when Fran and Emily Beitiks, who was the third, very much involved person on our team, when the three of us sat down, we kept coming back to the 504 and saying, like, “Wow, nobody has really dove in and told this story in a public way.” I mean, it just wasn’t know. And we just couldn't get over how interesting it was that people occupied a federal building for nearly a month, 150 disabled people, their allies, for a month, and nobody knows the story? And it changed the U.S. government and it paved the way for the ADA – and nobody knows this? How is this even possible? And so, there was some knowledge within the disability community of this event and acknowledgement of it but nobody that was building the bridges to the wider, more mainstream community. Fran, I don't know if you want to add anything to that?
FO: Yes. No, that is a fantastic description of it, Cathy. I think, yes, there was a 20th anniversary committee that made a video that we had seen, and I think there was a publication that they created, which came from within the community, but nobody had really kind of given it, like, a sort of museum-level treatment that wasn’t in a corridor somewhere or downplayed or not treated with respect and dignity. And, as Cathy said, we thought it was such an exciting story that we wanted to give it… Elevate the whole thing so that everybody's perception of the story shifted, including the people who had been involved in it. And that it wasn’t some dusty old past thing that had, sort of, withered away. But the impact of it was still being felt by young people today. So, there were lots of things going on in this project. It was a very multifaceted thing.
WJ: I just wanted to ask and I think we had even talked about this earlier but am I right that Fran, when you stepped into this and began working with Cathy, was this new history to you as well or did you kind of already know the 504 story?
FO: I did not know the story at all, and many people I spoke to did not know the story. And the more I read about it, the more it kind of blew me away, and the more it seemed like the story that we should be telling on this anniversary of the passing of the ADA, because it was such a San Francisco story.
CK: Yes.
WJ: That’s right, and it is, and it is because there were other sit-ins and protests across the country but the San Francisco crowd was the one who, they held on.
CK: Right, and that was because of partnerships that the organizers – Judy Heumann, who people might have heard of, and Kitty Cone, her story is a lot less told than the more recent tellings of the 504 story, bit Kitty Cone, in particular, had built a lot of partnerships with groups that ended up supporting the protest. So, for local activists such as the Black Panthers and gay organizations and things like that, they had built these partnerships… And so, when it came time to occupy the building, these groups showed up. And, in the case of the Panthers, for example, they had a couple of people inside among the protesters. So, you know, there was this sense that, like, this isn't just about these few people with disabilities wanting a few rare things – it was these partnerships. The other piece was that San Francisco was a mecca for all kinds of activism at this time. So, that was another part of the story that we wanted to tap into; that San Francisco was already this place where lots of people came to be activists, to reinvent themselves, to test and challenge the status quo – all of those things. So, that was a piece of it as well.
WJ: You know, I had on my questions that I wanted to ask why an exhibit and not, Cathy, for you, why wasn’t this just another article or another monograph that you could have written, but it sounds like that that activist approach was something that influenced and inspired you both – you wanted to reach more people than just a niche scholarly audience. Is that accurate?
CK: Yes, and it was the 25th anniversary of the ADA. So, you know, there was that piece as well and we wanted to commemorate that. It was just a bunch of things coming together that just it totally made sense to tell this story in this way at this time.
WJ: Okay. Well, can we transition and talk a little bit about the specific design of the exhibit? I know both of you worked with a lot of different people thinking about what this exhibit would actually look like, feel like, sound like. I have read that both of you really wanted to prioritize a variety of accessibility options. How did you determine what the experience would be? How did those ideas start coming together for you?
FO: Well, it is quite a long time ago now so it is hard to remember, but we had weekly meetings, sessions, and we sort of inched forward in the way that we approached it because I had done a little bit of work on accessibility. There was so much I didn’t know and I learned so much from Cathy and Emily at the Longmore Institute, but I knew that there was this way of prototyping with people with disabilities that was going to really make a difference. This might be jumping the gun a bit but I do remember, Cathy, that meeting with Josh Meeley [ph. sp.] where we had gotten to a certain stage. We did a lot of prototyping of the storytelling and how the whole thing was going to be physically in the space, but I remember Josh Meeley sort of saying, “Well, you know, you’ve got to sort of focus on Braille. That’s got to be the star of the show.” And there was this sort of moment of thinking, oh wow, how are we going to do that? Like, I just could not think of how we were going to do it. It ended up being this really fantastic part of the exhibit that had started for me as a massive headache. I just could not think of how we were going to do it when he first sort of said that. And Cathy, I know you had lots of thoughts about it, and Cathy did fantastically subversive things with Braille and the information on the Braille word, so I am going to hand that over to you.
CK: The idea with Braille is complicated because a lot of blind people don’t read Braille. In fact, most, like 90%, don’t, so the Braille literacy rate is pretty low. And yet, it is seen as this kind of iconic way that blind people communicate and get information and things like that. So, that piece was a little bit complicated because it is this feature that everybody adds on at the end of their exhibits, they push it, and they are just, like, oh my God, we’ve got to come up with a Braille binder and somehow do that. And they put Braille labels up but they always put them in a different place. And so, one of the challenges was how to make it central, how to make it findable for people that do read Braille because, you know, if the exhibit is putting Braille up in the place that it looks nice to the designers as opposed to it being something that people will actually use and read and engage with, you need to always have it in the same place, more or less, or, at least create the expectations of where people can look for it. So, Fran came up with this great idea of using... I don’t even remember… Do you remember how the Braille rail came about?
FO: It wasn’t me, actually. I think it might have been Emily.
CK: I think it was some conversation or Emily or whatever, but we came up with the idea of having a rail, so that would be the central place that the Braille would be in every panel. So, Fran then ran with this, saying, okay, I am going to make this a design element for every panel in the exhibit so that anybody that would go up to the panel would say, “Oh, yeah, I know there is Braille in the middle.” It was the location of the Braille and that was constant, that was a consistent piece, and Fran came up with this cool way of making it kind of a place that you could hide wires and stuff for parts that needed to be more mechanical and plugged in and all of that, so you didn’t have wires dangling all over the place. So, it was like a little slide of two inches or something wide or deep or I don’t know, whatever.
FO: It might be four inches.
CK: Something, yes, but it was there on every single one. And then, I was the one that said, look, well, let’s make content that is not just reproducing what is up there. We want a lot of that information to be conveyed. But I decided that we should add in a few extra things here and there so that blind people who read Braille could become the experts on things, and we kind of spread out the rumor a little bit that this information is there so that when a blind person was looking at the exhibit, suddenly people would flock to them, like, “What are the secret things that I don't have access to,” because it is always the sighted people providing blind people with information, and this was flipping that script. And we had a wonderful moment where there was a blind woman at the exhibit that was experiencing that and she just about cried that, like, wow, they want to know from me what something says! And so, it was just incredible. The access piece, Fran – do you want to tell the story about the day we set up the Braille rails at the exhibit and what happened that day where we had to…
FO: Yes, so, we did a lot of collaborating with people in the community with all different kinds of disabilities, and I remember when the Braille rail was being prototyped, the activation button for the videos was in the center of the Braille rail, this big red button, and we did a lot of testing with that to make sure that people could just go alongside it with their wheelchair and activate it. But we had a long period of time doing evaluation with people in the site itself with the exhibit and we knew there would be some tweaks that we would have to do. And some wheelchair riders who knew the project really well came in and they said, “What’s that rail thing? We don’t know what that is. It is excluding us. And we were, like, "Well, it is the Braille rail.” And they said, “Well, you have to say Braille rail on it so we know what it is for and it is not something that we can’t access.” And then, of course, we realized that because we had text there, we had to have that translated into Braille. So, we also had to have the words in Braille over Braille rail. So, every time we did something, there were all these repercussions. And you can’t make something accessible for absolutely everybody all the time. So, I can’t remember some of the decisions that we made but I think along the way, we had to be quite judicious with our funding and the time that we had available to balance out what was going to get the priority.
CK: I mean, the guiding principle beneath it all was, one, everybody should come to an exhibit to have an experience that they get to carry away; that they may not be party to every single thing and every single panel but they get a big part of the exhibit and the big takeaways and all of that. So, that was one piece. The other piece was when you build it in from the beginning, it is like discovery for everybody. It becomes one of the guiding principles of the exhibit as opposed to that thing you slap on at the end that people kind of hurriedly at the end try to, like, uh-oh, we’d better make this accessible and all of that… Because I think the other place that this came about was Fran designed this really spectacular and beautiful mural that you can still see that was a product of the exhibit. It is still at the Ed Roberts Campus because it was so beautiful. Fran did such a great job of it. It is a spectacular mural that follows a wheelchair ramp up to the second floor. I don’t remember how many pictures are in there but it is a lot of black and white photographs, and the ramp is bright red, the sighing of it. So, it was like a really interesting challenge in terms of how to make something beautiful and great. But there were tons of pictures. And so, we went through… We had a bunch from the exhibit… Tons and tons and tons. But the problem was that, you know, how do you then make something like that accessible to people who can't see it? And so, we came up with the idea that we would Commission a couple of poets from the disability community to write poetry based on their experience of the mural. They read their poetry and then it was recorded. So, instead of saying, like, you know, “top row, left, you have blah, blah, blah,” which is a total snore, especially if you don’t know who these people are, that information is available and we make it clear where it is but it is not going to benefit everybody. But a person just listening to the exhibit would be able to benefit from it, too. So, like Fran was saying earlier – it is not that you need the same experience but you need experience for everybody to enjoy it, and that was the guiding, sort of, principle – build it in early from the beginning and be flexible and let it be an experience for everybody. And then, that is one of the coolest parts about it.
WJ: I want to talk more about that in a little bit and the towards accessibility and whether or not you can have a truly universally accessible experience or whether or not that should be the goal, but I want to go back, first of all, to this idea that this really was a hugely, hugely collaborative effort and not only were you all working with people from the community and gathering their input, but there were students, there were lots of students that you all integrated into the production. Cathy or Fran, were you both teaching a course? How did you get these students involved and what was their role?
CK: I am a history professor so we hired people from the history department to help us with research, and that was kind of an obvious way to use students, and we had a couple of history people doing interviews, but Fran, do you want to talk about the other parts that you were involved in?
FO: Yes, so, I know one of the first meetings with Cathy, she really emphasized how important the oral history component of the project was. I had never worked on an oral history project before and I think what was different about this project was that it was not just a general history but it was specifically about this protest. So, it wasn't that we were diving into an archive to try and take things out that were relevant but, you know, we wanted people to tell their story of their time in the protest. And so, journalism students from SF State were assigned with doing these interviews. It was for a whole semester. Lots of students. I can’t remember how many were involved, Cathy, but it was a lot of journalism students from SF State. And so, they had to get the technical side right. They were learning all about disability and accessibility at the same time. It was just this sort of wonderful overlapping of lots of different learning for everybody. And I did teach an exhibit development class at the same time and so some of those students also were exposed to lots of conversations about disability and accessibility. And they generated some ideas. And there were students in the design department, too, that were involved in prototyping designs for the actual exhibition structures that we used. And I think what happens at SF State now is that disability gets incorporated into the conversations quite a lot rather than just being, like Cathy said – this, sort of, add on at the end where everybody sort of feels guilty and they, like, forgot about the accessibility. So, I really love what is happening at SF State because, you know, it doesn't take that many conversations with students to have them get it and then, they carry that with them out int the world in lots of different ways.
CK: Yes, they carry it forward as a part of the creative process. That is the co-part. It is an opportunity rather than a block. So, it is, like, oh, yes, okay, well, gosh, if we want this and this and this to happen and we can’t do this, how do we do it?
FO: Yes, and we definitely encourage them to be sort of advocates for it as well because it is not standard practice in the museum world, even now, I can tell you. Exhibit development… It is, like, there is so much institutional inertia and lack of familiarity that was not present in this project, which I think is why it was so interesting and so unique.
WJ: It is just such a transformative process in and of itself. I am just thinking of the impact on the students. Fran, I know we had emailed a little bit prior to this conversation and you were talking about the interviews that the students were conducting. Cathy, do you remember, like, what were some of the takeaways that the students were coming away with as they are doing these oral histories, capturing the video from the original activists who were there?
CK: You know, it is interesting because I think it happened at a couple of levels. I mean, one of them was just a student engaging with somebody with a disability. Some people had, like, speech impediments or the kinds of differences that students when they are 18-25 years old are not always encountering. So, there was that piece of how do you get past your embarrassment or awkwardness or worry that you are going to ask the wrong question or make the person uncomfortable… Like, with anybody with disabilities, it is just part of the awkwardness of culture. And then, the students would get past that and get to the place where they would be hearing the stories, and what was really cool was in a few of the cases, the students were interviewing people that were their age when they were in the protests. So, there was this way that the students were kind of, like, they suddenly were talking to somebody that was 25 years old, even if they were, like, 70 years old, you know, and that was really, really powerful I think for them to have that moment of, oh, yes, I could have been in a building like that, or what would I have done. In fact, it became an icebreaker question to get my students to think about in history class, is, like, “What would make you go into a building and occupy it for a month if you didn’t have this, didn’t have this, didn’t have this? What would make you go in and stay?” And what would make you get somebody else to go in with you? What thing would you be willing to do to have that happen?”
FO: I think, for them, it was an experience they will never forget. Even if there is no, sort of, one story that they remember. I think they were completely blown away by what these young people had done and the line that they had crossed by going into the building and being civilly disobedient. And then, not backing down and sticking to their guns and not getting the regulations diluted or changed in any way, because it really was a kind of model protest… You know, like, if you were designing a protest, they did everything right.
WJ: Well, this taps in… We were talking about students and the impact on them. I wondered if we could talk a little bit about just the reception in general of visitors to the exhibit; certainly students had this huge impact on them as they are producing this, but after the exhibit was actually designed and you started getting visitors coming through, and you both have already talked about this a little bit, and Cathy talking about the impact of the Braille rail, but can you talk more about the reception of the exhibit once it went live? What new questions came up as a result of the reactions? What, sort of, reactions did you notice first and foremost? Was there a consistent response that visitors to the exhibit had?
CK: I think a lot of people were so delighted finally to have this history out there, that was just really powerful. And the people that were participants as well. I want Fran – probably you are the better person to tell the story of Dennis, but to have people whose voices hadn’t been told or heard or whatever, get to explain what this was that they were part of to other people. So, there was that piece. There was the public piece of spectators or attendees to the exhibit who… You know, we had a big opening event and there were, like, 200, 300 people that came to that when it opened, and people were so delighted; 1) to find each other; 2) to see this story out there, all of those pieces. And we tried really, really hard to incorporate the stories of people who traditionally weren't associated and being told about in the stories, the histories of disability rights at the time – for example, a lot of people of color, queer people, people in the margins of the margins whose stories hadn't been really told before in conjunction with this massive action and yet, they were so central to it. Fran, I want to give you a chance to tell the Dennis story because it is such a great example of impact.
FO: Yes. So, when you are doing a project with a huge community, there is a lot of sensitivity to things that have happened and there were a lot of wounds and we had to do a lot of bridge building, but we were determined to find certain key figures who had not really been included and we knew that they were there. And Dennis Phillips was one of those people. He is an African-American man who is blind and had played a really vocal huge role in the protest. He was the, sort of, cheerleader person. There is a great photo of him with a bullhorn doing a kind of chant. He was like the morale officer. He would get everybody kind of fired up. He was just so delighted that we had actually gone to the trouble of inviting him to give his story. And now, he is, like, this huge part of the community; whereas, that was not the case for a very long time. And it is just so great to know that he feels, not healed but it went a long way to kind of change the trajectory of how it could have gone if that project had not happened, you know.
CK: Exactly, and I remember him saying, like, “I kept telling people I was in this building, I was part of this protest and people just thought I was out of it.” What he said about what he did, nobody believed him or they played it down or whatever. And then, when this exhibit came and we were interviewing him, he was in tears. He was, like, so excited that his story was going to be out there, and I think that was huge. And, again, it might have happened that somebody else would have come along – I would hope that that was the case – to bring his story up, but I think a lot of times, you know, people that make history and know in their hearts that they have made it, have been ignored. And here was the case where, thanks to some detective work and perseverance, because it would have been so easy… Like, oh, we tried, we couldn’t find him, oh well, sorry… We really pushed. And he was even local. I mean, that was the other thing that was weird, but he had gone under the radar. He wasn’t on social media, he wasn’t in any kind of public persona at all… He had done this thing and it was forgotten and he was forgotten. And yet, he was an amazing force.
WJ: I mean, that just speaks to the power of doing projects like this, to highlight people and to validate their contributions. That is just so incredible.
FO: And I think also what I remember is that you do have these, sort of, gatekeepers of the story that don’t necessarily want you, kind of, going back in and digging around because, you know, the story has been reshaped slightly and there were quite a few myths about the story that we wanted to dispel – that it wasn’t organized by white men. It was definitely organized by lesbians. But I think we had the luxury of a lot of time, so if you don't have a lot of time, it is almost impossible to do these projects really thoroughly and well. We didn't have a lot of money but we did have time and we used it to sort of slowly carve this path through all of the stories that were there and bring them altogether.
WJ: Yes, Fran, now that you say that, I would love to sort of bridge in to precisely that question about resources, time, and money, and particularly to the public historians or faculty members or teachers who would love to create something similar but feel discouraged that they just don't have all the time and money and so, of course, you know, what’s the point? So, you didn't have all the time and the money in the world to put this together and yet, you all did create just a fabulous exhibit, but could you talk about those constraints?
FO: I think having deadlines is very important but recognizing that it takes a couple of years to get something like this from start to finish. And a lot of dogged work by a lot of people as well. So, it is more a, kind of step-by-step thing rather than some big, grand gesture or some huge amount of money funding it. It was so incredibly… The story was so compelling, actually, that it kind of took on a life of its own. So, choose your story really well. I mean, if it is not a very compelling story, it is really hard to get people on board, you know? And it did, sort of, have this momentum after a while that it was hard to stop. You have to kind of get it right at the beginning, I think. And I am sure, Cathy, as the Director of the Longmore Institute, do you have a lot more…
CK: Well, yes, but, I mean, the constraints… It is sort of interesting because Fran is the kind of designer that turned constraints into opportunities. So, from the beginning, we had financial constraints that affected, like, how stable the exhibit was… I mean, physically just in terms of getting the pieces of wood together, that kind of thing, but it was also we were in this building at Ed Roberts Campus, which was great because it is a hub in Berkeley of disability rights organizations and a lot of service organizations that came together in this one space. And the building had opened about 5, 10 years before. But they have this big Atria where we put the exhibit but, as Fran said early on, we had to be able to move the pieces in and out so that they could have other events. We had very few outlets on the floors and it is not like we could say, “Hey, put in another outlet.” We had to work with and design it so that there was, like, one outlet for 20 kiosks. What we decided… I mean, Fran strategically said, “Okay, we can only have, like, four kiosks with power to them and we will build these bridges,” and she came up with a design to do that. Because of this needing to move, they had to be able to be designed in such a way that they could get in and out of this one freight elevator. So, we did all sorts of measuring. Fran designed… I remember the first time we wheeled it into the elevator, we couldn’t believe it – I was like, “Oh my God, it fits!” Things like that that were just very, very… They were constraints but they made the kiosk important stationary elements. Even if they moved, it was, like, everything had to fit into these kiosks as part of the storytelling. We also had the issue that people entered the building from multiple entrances. So, it is not like people would come in and do it in a linear way. So, how do you make an exhibit interesting when somebody comes in through the parking lot and somebody else comes in through the elevator and somebody else comes in through the front door? All of these things. And then, the last thing I will say is, of course, the accessibility was its own form of constraint and yet, it was this amazing opportunity as we talked about earlier. But all of those things weighed in. And I guess what I want to say to future exhibit designers is that you can do anything if you build the constraints into part of the design thing and you don’t get defined by the constraints as limiting but you say, okay, this is what we’ve got – how do we do it? Let’s work from here, here, and here. And then, the other piece I would say is that, as we have been saying all along in this interview, is that groups and partnerships and all of the things… In a way, we were reproducing the spirit of 504 itself in the way that we approached the design; that we worked with what we had to push it out into the world and be able to tell our story in the way that we wanted to and needed to.
WJ: I love that! I love that! As you look back on the exhibit, I am curious – Are there any elements that you would have done differently or things that you feel like, oh, we wish we could have included that, we chose not to in the end? Was there anything like that, that looking back on it, you would have changed?
CK: I think that if we had had more resources to do research and find more people, I think, even as hard as we try to incorporate people of color and marginal groups, I still think we could have done better there. I wish we had. Knowing what we know now, we know there were stories we didn't get to. We worked with every bit of ability that we had at the time, all of our resources. I mean, we were a limited team in terms of who could do the resources and where we could go and how much time we could spend. So, we worked with what we had. If we were coming into it now, knowing every single thing we know, we probably know better where to go for that. But we did well with what we had. I wish we could have had more to do more but we didn’t. And so…
FO: Yes. I think that is a really good point, Cathy. That is such a good way of describing it, because I think also people were a bit suspicious of us and didn’t think that we would deliver the goods necessarily. And then, when the goods were delivered, they kind of were quite impressed, you know. So, maybe if they had known back at the beginning, the reach could have been a bit wider. I think we definitely did everything we could to make it as good as we could, for sure.
CK: That underscores another point. Quality was always super important to us. We wanted it to be good, we wanted it to be beautiful, because so much around disability is, like, packed together at the last minute to work, which is great – there is a place for all of that – but if you are doing an exhibit then is celebrating the community and trying to introduce that community to a mainstream audience with used to more, I guess, you want it to be good. And it Was really important to me from the beginning that we could look back on something and say, you know, that was good, not just in terms of storytelling and content and people and all that, but the actual design was beautiful, that you could hold your head high and bring your friends, your aunts, your uncles, whatever, and say, “Hey, I own this.” And we saw people come in owning it. I would walk into the Ed Roberts Campus sometimes and see people walking up the ramp and pointing to things and talking about them with other people, and that was just, like, oh, yes, you know? I think it still probably happens, Fran, you know?
FO: Yes, I think it does, and I also just wanted to acknowledge Emily Beitiks, too, because she was a hugely important part of everything, too.
CK: Absolutely.
FO: And she came up with the amazing title for the exhibit as well.
CK: She made sure no more double entendres, yes. I realize that there is another entendre that I didn’t pick up until after I was going around talking about is Patient No More, and “no” could be spelled “know.” But, no, Emily was just absolutely amazing. We were a trio. I mean, we worked, the three of us – me, Fran, and Emily – we would meet constantly, we enjoyed each other, we pushed each other and challenged each other and all of these things, shared frustrations and shared joys and all of that. It was beautiful.
WJ: Actually, I was reading an article by Emily about the exhibit and it must have been written pretty soon after it went live. She brought up some of the initial reviews, some of the scholarly reviews of the exhibit, and I really found this interesting that disability studies scholar, Amy Homreigh [ph. sp.] at Vanderbilt really, really liked the exhibit and praised it and said, “Rather than making accessibility invisible, the exhibit itself and these design features showcased disability as an aesthetic and functional resource. These design strategies,” so, your design strategies, “signal disability acceptance and materialized the aspiration for accessible futures.” And I thought it was just a really, really interesting quote. Could you both talk a little bit about what would cause someone like Homreigh [ph. sp.] to say that the exhibit signaled “disability acceptance?” What would they mean by that?
CK: That whole discussion that we had about the Braille rail, I think that embodies it – the idea that you make accessibility the focal point of conversation as opposed to trying to, like, hide it off in a corner, because accessibility is part of the story, it is part of the exhibit, but that’s what these people were in there fighting for in a lot of ways, so, why wouldn’t we highlight it?
FO: Yes, absolutely, Cathy. I am not an academic, so I get myself caught up in lots of circles talking about design theory and everything… It can mean so many things, but actually, what was so great about this was that Cathy and Emily were so determined to make it accessible. So, I think we probably sort of invented new aesthetic values for it, a new approach that was not by a typical, sort of, designer kind of way of doing something which is that they deliver this solution to you and you sort of say, “Thank you very much.” It was challenging kind of every single thing and also, because I am such a visual person, it was fantastic to work with Cathy who would so say, “Well, that’s not going to work.” And I would be, “Ah!” So, I think, yes, because people with disabilities are the center of the story but also it is very matter… Everything is as accessible as we could make it.
WJ: Wasn’t part of the exhibit, like, didn't you incorporate a bullhorn and it was, like, the Patient No More bullhorn, and people could shout out what they were deciding to be Patient No More about? Can you talk about that because I don’t think the bullhorn was part of the original concept? Is that right?
FO: We wanted to have interactivity because that is the thing of people having exhibits, and so we had a selfie station where people could hold up a sign and say what they were Patient No More about, they could sort of write their own protest thing on it, and it was great for me because I realize that blind people take selfies and should not be excluded from that whole thing. And we had to have markers that didn't trigger people's chemical sensitivities. But then, because that was prioritizing the visual, we wanted something that would work for audio. So, we wanted to balance it out with… And I can't quite remember exactly what the thinking was on that whole bullhorn thing, but people were less keen to shout.
CK: I think it was because there was the bullhorn with the picture of Dennis in it. And so, you saw people at the protest with bullhorns and that’s why we did it that way; that it was this way to bring the protest into the room and make it contemporary. So, you had people, in the selfies anyway, a lot of commentary and conversation about, like, current political issues. No, the bullhorn made total sense. I remember Fran going to the… or Sylvan, one of our design people that worked with us from the Department of Design, going and finding a bullhorn at a flea market or something… I can’t remember… That was the other thing – tons of flea markets. And Fran would call us up, like, “Oh, wow, I found a perfect television set that we could put a video in.” It was kind of being willing to go to flea markets and all that kind of stuff, too. It was pretty hilarious.
FO: We also had this fantastic old payphone that you could listen to some of the victory speeches on.
WJ: Oh, wow!
FO: But then, there were also these other layers because somebody said, “Well, you can’t just have that audio track for deaf people. You have to have it interpreted by an interpreter,” so we had to have a screen as well with an ASL interpreter with a caption interpreting the speeches as well. So, there were lots of ways, I think, that we really pushed it as far as we could.
CK: And with the poetry, so then we had the poets reading their poems and we had people interpreting the mural that they were seeing, so then we needed interpreting there, but we didn’t just do standard interpretation – we hired ASL interpreters that specialized in poetry. So, that became part of it, too. It was a way to show the beauty of certain kinds of ASL that when it is taken to be something really more creative than the usual, like, okay, I am covering the information here, here you go.
WJ: That’s awesome. With such a fantastic and revolutionary exhibit behind you both, I want to ask what the projects are that you are looking forward to next?
CK: I recently retired in the past couple of weeks, so that’s what I am looking forward to. I think, really, to me, I look forward to being in the position of talking to people in situations like this or whatever and encouraging them to come forth with what they want to create because I think storytelling is not going away and exhibits are not going away and disability history is not going away, so I think it is time for other people to try their talents in these things and see what we can come up with. And, you know, they are going to surpass us and that is great… I think any good foundation laying needs to be surpassed by others. That’s what I would say.
WJ: Fran, how about you?
FO: It is interesting because I am working on an exhibition with students at SF State for the Global Museum at SF State. It is a project that came out of Black Lives Matter about environmental racism in the Bay Area. It was really useful to really encourage the inclusion of oral histories with community members into that project and that is going to be opening in the Museum in the fall. And it has an online component, too. The experience I had in Patient No More was so valuable and saying to people, “You know, the gold is in these interviews for this exhibition. It is not all the information that you are going to try and ram down people's throats. It is the interviews of people’s experience.”
CK: Well, what about the accessibility piece? Are they kind of open to that?
FO: Well, you know, it is still a hard sell. You still have to sort of keep pushing away. It doesn’t come naturally to the museum world at all, and I don't know how accessible it is going to be.
CK: Yes, that is the reality out there, unfortunately. Well, you keep chipping away but eventually…
WJ: So, Fran, for that exhibit or I want to ask for you both, where people can find your work, find more about what you are doing… Fran, do you have any recommendations?
FO: I think maybe just checking out the Global Museum website or on Instagram. They have lots of social media stuff.
WJ: And Cathy, where can people find you, get in touch with you?
CK: Longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu. I think that is the website for the Institute. And, you know, there is a contact there and I will get it eventually. I still have my San Francisco State e-mail address which is my last name – but I don’t get as regularly now that I am retired. But I promise I will get back to people – just maybe not, like, superfast, but I will. Yes, follow Longmore. I mean, my goodness, they are still doing great stuff, and Emily is taking over as the Interim Director while we try to figure out next steps for that but the Institute… And I say, “we,” but it is a hesitant “we”, it is a past tense “we” because I am allowing the next generation to move forward and come up with what is best. But Longmore Institute is doing great stuff. Check out our film festival. Check out all of our cool public facing events, some programs and things.
WJ: Well, and is that a good place… If people want to know more about the Patient No More exhibit…
CK: Yes. There is a link there. And then, you can also just search “Patient No More.” It will take you to the virtual exhibit and you can get all the interviews, all the videos. You will get a virtual walkthrough of the entire exhibit – all of that stuff will be there.
WJ: Awesome. Okay, well, I hate to have to go ahead and wrap this up but I am so thankful for you both being willing to join us on the podcast here. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for your incredible work. It has been inspiring talking to you both. I have been online and looked at what you have online for the Patient No More exhibit and it is incredible, it is inspiring. Again, a lot of these histories that I wasn’t aware of. So, thank you so, so much.
CK: Thank you.
FO: Oh, thank you. Yes, thank you.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Public Historians at Work. You can show your support for this podcast and the Center for Public History through a donation at giving.uh.edu/publichistory. For more information about the diverse work of the Center for Public History, find us online at uh.edu/class/cph or on Facebook and Twitter at uhcphistory. Remember, we are all keepers of our history.
[End of Recording]