Recently on Facebook, Senator Bill Frist shared a fascinating account of a Native American community that thrived in Tennessee’s Harpeth River Valley 1,000 years ago.
Think about that. A thousand years ago, people were building communities, raising families, developing traditions, solving problems, and creating a culture. They had stories worth telling. Today, we are still discovering who they were and how they lived.
Frist’s account made me think about another history that is in danger of being lost — the history of Americans with disabilities.
For generations, people with disabilities were hidden away, institutionalized, excluded from schools, denied employment, and treated as objects of charity rather than people with rights. But that is only part of our history.
There is another story. One of extraordinary courage, ingenuity, determination, and sometimes outrageous defiance. People with disabilities organized, protested, challenged laws, changed public attitudes, and demanded the right to participate fully in American life.
I was privileged to participate, along with Senator Frist and others in some of that history, particularly the development of federal disability rights legislation. I knew many of the people who made it happen. Some are gone. Others, like me, are getting old. Our memories, documents, arguments, victories, disappointments, and even our mistakes are part of America’s history.
And much of that history is disappearing before anyone bothers to preserve it.
That is why I am working with others to establish a National Museum of Disability History and Culture on the National Mall.
Not a museum about what society did for people with disabilities, but about what people with disabilities did for America.
Our contributions to civil rights, education, technology, transportation, employment, architecture, and community life have changed this country for everyone.
A thousand years from now, what will people know about us? Will they have to piece together our lives from fragments? Or will we have had the wisdom to preserve our history while the people who made it are still here to tell it?
We rightly devote resources to discovering and preserving the lives of people who lived a thousand years ago.
Surely we can find the will to preserve the history being made in our own lifetimes.
History doesn’t belong only to the powerful, the famous, or the people who could climb the stairs to enter the buildings where decisions were made.
It belongs to all of us.
And it deserves a museum.
Patricia Morrissey
Chair, Friends of the National Museum of Disability History and Culture
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