Mobility Impairment in Louisiana: Background

Acceptance of people with disabilities by society is a relatively new phenomenon. Also new is the idea that society should permit them to freely move around and participate in society.

Around 2400 years ago, one of the foundational writers of Western philosophy saw people with disabilities as an aberration which should be eradicated.

The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.

---Plato, The Republic

Western literature is full of hunchbacks, ogres, and hook-handed killers.

Popular culture reflected the idea that people with disabilities were bad people. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt went to great lengths to hide his disability, because people in wheelchairs were seen as something less than able-bodied people. They were as twisted as their bodies. In 1946 the rich and crafty banker Mr. Potter in It's A Wonderful Life tried to buy and control the entire town. In 1964 the ex-Nazi mad scientist Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb reveled in post-apocalyptic fantasies. In 1975 Dr. Who battled the evil Davros, a mad scientist who exterminated his own planet and tried to conquer the universe, all while rolling about in a mobilized wheelchair of his own design.

For most of the twentieth century, people with disabilities were viewed as either an embarrassment to be shut away, or as a burden upon society. Law review articles focused on how to employ and train people with disabilities to make them useful. It wasn't until the 1970s that people began to view people with disabilities as having rights of their own. One journal had a piece called "Society Is Awakening to the Rights of the Handicapped," 9 HUM. RTS. 11 (1980).