THE BIRTH OF NDEAM
National Disability Employment Awareness Month, or NDEAM, dates to an act of Congress in 1988. But that’s not the beginning of the story, and if you stop there you’ll miss the hidden, unremembered radicalism of its actual origins, forty years before, at the hands of a multiply-disabled Texan named Paul Strachan.
In this image: Paul Strachan, undated photo. Source: University of Texas, Disability History Collection.
A survivor of both dysentery and the 1918 Flu Pandemic, severely hard of hearing due to diphtheria, and disabled from a car accident that killed his father, Strachan parlayed skills and connections gleaned from years as a labor organizer and legislative representative for the American Federation of Labor. He described his activism as “born of personal experience, as one 85 percent physically disabled,” and recollections of disabled veterans of the Great War, who were “pushed around and ignored as soon as the parades stopped.” Strachan was determined to challenge the “unreasoning, unjust prejudice against millions of Handicapped people,” and in 1940 he founded the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (or AFPH) with the purpose of ending “all unfair discrimination against the employment of otherwise qualified but physically handicapped individuals.”
Strachan moved fast. Within a few years the AFPH had founded forty-five local chapters—quaintly known as “lodges”—in a number of cities and towns across the country.
As a disability self-help and lobbying organization, unconnected to charity, medical care, or any particular type of condition, the AFPH was something new in the United States. It built a national network aimed at a national agenda—to get people with disabilities actually working. .
Strachan’s timing was perfect. With the nation’s entry into the Second World War in December, 1941, millions of men abruptly joined the military, at the same time as the war required vastly stepped-up industrial production. The result was an acute labor shortage. An amazing 83 percent of American factories hired people with disabilities during the war years, and those disabled employees proved exceptionally productive and reliable. The AFPH used these facts to argue that a substantial public investment would both meet the war effort and advance freedom and justice for a neglected population.
More than anything else, Strachan argued in favor of a specialized agency within the Department of Labor. As he put it to Congress in 1942, people with disabilities were “vitally important to continuance of our Nation.” If productively employed instead of uselessly segregated, they would become “tax payers instead of tax eaters.”
The coalition the AFPH built was far reaching. At its peak, around 1947, the AFPH boasted a remarkable 100 lodges and 17,000 members. Atlanta’s lodge, founded by a former Morehouse College football star, attracted strong support from that city’s Black community and developed ties to many of the same churches that went on to play a central role in the Southern civil rights movement.
Women were an important component of AFPH membership as well. Its national secretary was Mildred Scott, who had graduated from Teacher’s College in her home state of Pennsylvania only to learn that her visible disability statutorily barred her from teaching. Scott forged an AFPH alliance with the Zonta Club, a national organization of professional women, and women joined the AFPH in great numbers.
The most potent link in the AFPH network was organized labor. Strachan’s connections as a former union organizer played a big part here, and national labor leaders attended and presented at AFPH conferences.
In Image No. 2: AFPH bulletin, November, 1949, celebrating annual NEPHW. Source: University of Texas, Disability History Collection.
Congress proved notably receptive to the AFPH’s efforts. Federal rehabilitation policy was updated under the Barden-LaFollette Act of 1943, and the House of Representatives began a detailed investigation into the conditions and policies affecting Americans with disabilities.
The AFPH’s most important victory came in 1946, with National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week (NEPHW, which I pronounce “nephew”). President Truman signed a Congressional resolution authorizing national activities and ceremonies that would “enlist public support for and interest in” hiring qualified people with disabilities.
AFPH hoped to grow NEPHW into an annual informational and publicity blitz, a vehicle that would bridge ancient prejudices and promote its continuing push for a federal agency dedicated to the disability population.
But NEPHW proved to be the AFPH’s only major accomplishment, instead of its first. The main reason was the very strength of the organization’s ties to the labor movement, and its labor-focused agenda.
Because after the war ended, organized labor suddenly came under heavy challenge. In 1946, over President Truman’s veto, a newly elected conservative Congress passed the pivotal Taft-Hartley Act, an anti-union bill which is generally credited with stopping labor’s advance and inaugurating its decline.
Pushed along by the Red Scare and anti-Communism, the political tide turned incredibly fast. Organized labor retreated. Social outreach by government got cut back.
The AFPH’s proposed federal labor agency foundered, and as its political base dissolved, so did the organization itself. By 1957 the first national cross-disability-rights organization had all but disappeared. It is barely remembered today, even by disability activists.
Unlike the organization that created it, though, NEPHW never went away. President Eisenhower turned it into the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. In the early 1960s, the President’s Committee’s annual conventions in Washington became one of the first major gathering and networking opportunities, as the modern disability rights movement got rolling. Attendees heard addresses by people like Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Margaret Meade.
In 1988 Congress expanded the event from a week to a month—October, to be exact--and gave it the present name – National Disability Employment Awareness Month.
But to illustrate just how much remains to be done, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent information is that the employment rate for people with disabilities is less than a third of what it is for nondisabled people. That is really a stark, terrible discrepancy, which National Disability Employment Awareness Month is intended to highlight.
Just as Paul Strachan first proposed, three quarters of a century ago.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News, https://ablenews.com/
by Warren Shaw
