 I'm Kathy Kudlick, as I said, and I'm Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State. And our programs build bridges among scholars, students, and the broader community to promote the revolutionary idea that the world is better because of disabled people. And through exhibits like the one that you're about to visit, we showcase disabled people's experiences and expertise in order to bring deep lasting changes to how disabled and non-disabled people view one in five Americans. And it's an amazing number if you think about it. So it's really the one minority that anybody can join at any time, and we will join it once we get older. And it's really an important group to really think about. The story of the historic protests told by Patient No More continues to shape our world. In fact, every single one of us experienced the legacy of what's known as the 504 occupation when we entered this library today. Thanks to those protesters 40 years ago, and three of them are sitting up on the stage with me, all federally funded buildings have to be accessible with ramps and elevators and automatic doors. Those brave occupiers paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, 13 years later. The Patient No More exhibit takes access even further by bringing a sense of playfulness to it. Here's just one example. We've added extra braille to this thing called a braille rail that goes around the entire exhibit, and it's throughout the exhibit. And we've added extra things that's not on the printed text. So what this means is that if you're not a braille reader, you have to find somebody to help you out. So it all boils down to something really basic. We all need each other. The organizers of the 504 protest understood this when they built coalitions with community groups and politicians that sustained the 26-day occupation. And if they didn't know it already, more than 150 protesters inside the building, which happens to be right across the street from the library here, if they didn't know it already, they quickly learned that they needed each other to keep going. They offer an inspiring, and I mean that in the biggest, best sense of the word, lesson to people today. We all need each other, especially now when disability rights are in real jeopardy. In fact, much of what the 504 occupation made possible is under attack. We need each other to find the courage to push back. And we need each other to prove to ourselves that we have the strength and sense of shared purpose, not just to preserve those rights that are in place, but really to extend them, to make the world better for everyone. We need each other to find comfort and joy and humor when things get tough. We need each other to push one another onward to the best version of ourselves so we can fight for what we believe in. Now, as the one behind this exhibit and today's program, I'm a kind of poster child for the idea of needing one another. This is why I can't think, or I can't thank all who made this possible without having to keep everyone here for what would turn out to be our own occupation of the corret auditorium. But here are a few key thank yous. Our many supporters and donors who made this possible, thank you so much. The College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State. Students, staff and colleagues at San Francisco State who helped create the exhibit. Emily Badix, who even as I speak, is probably walking down the aisle as a bridesmaid. Fran Osborne, the exhibit curator and designer. And Fran is here. Where are you Fran? Make a noise. Yeah. The Longmore Institute student helpers. I think they're in the back. You guys all make noise and save their back there. All right. And of course the San Francisco Public Library including their hardworking staff. From the top administrators to the janitors who keep this awesome public super space clean. Above all though, I want to thank the 504 participants who are among us today. If you were part of 504, please give a hoot or wiggle or shout or whatever and just say hi to everybody because you're being everybody. All right. How you doing? How you doing? All right. And now that you know who the 504 people are, be sure to seek them out at the reception. To give you some background on the story, I'm going to show a 10 minute intro video that we made as part of the exhibit. You can get it online. It's at the exhibit. And I want to give special thanks to journalism professor Saachi Cunningham and students and staff at San Francisco State who did the oral histories. So without further, yeah. Could we announce that there's assisted listening devices by your feet? Oh, there are assisted living, assisted listening devices by my feet on the floor here if anybody should need one. So anybody come on up or make an indication that somebody can bring one to you? Again, the video is online if you wanted to watch it again or it will be upstairs at the exhibit also. And so you can get their credits and all that stuff. Before I introduce our panelists, I have three asks of you today. First, at the exhibit upstairs, seek out someone you don't know to talk to. Just do it. In building these common connections and all of that stuff with people we don't know, that's where strength comes. Second thing, spread the word about the exhibit. Go out there, tell everybody you know. I mean, send emails, send them flowers, whatever. Whatever gets people to go somewhere. Bring them. We have public events. We have all sorts of things that are happening, other programs and stuff. So it'll be here all summer and check that out. And then third, learn more about the Lawn Mower Institute. We have more information on the table when you came in. I'm happy to talk to anybody and come to our events, like us on Facebook, love us. We really need each other. You need us, we need you. And that's just a wonderful thing. So without further ado, what I'd like to do is encourage people to talk to me during the reception, talk to everybody that's on the panel, and I'd like to introduce our panelists. Each of them all participated in the 504 occupation, and they're going to each speak for approximately five minutes. And it's a great pleasure first to introduce my dear friend Corbett O'Toole, who was a 504 occupier, community organizer, and author of the book Fading Scars, My Queer Disability History. Well, first of all, I want to thank the Lawn Mower Institute for having put together this amazing exhibit. And one of the things that I think is really important about what they did is that they made sure that a full representation of who was actually in the building and actually outside supporting us every day were represented both in the film here and in the exhibit upstairs. Too often I've seen disability history be very literally whitewashed, and it tells stories of just a few people. And one of the things that the exhibit does really beautifully is tells a much broader story of those of us that were there. And I think that's a really important historical contribution because quite frankly, it's not captured much of anyplace else. The major disability rights oral history collection, which is at the Bancroft Library, has 109 oral histories and 107 of them are white. So I think that this is a very important historical contribution, and I also thank you, Kathy, for making it available online. Because for so many of us, being able to come here is not a realistic option, and having so much of the material available wherever people are is really important. My big takeaway from the 504 sit-in was I went into the building because my girlfriend went into the building, and because my friends, where I was working, went into the building, and because I was supposed to do that, or I wouldn't be cool. I literally had no idea what Section 504 was. I had absolutely no idea. I had no idea why we were doing it. I just knew that the people who were saying, like Judy Heumann, like Kitty Kohn, who you saw in the, like Mary Lou Breslin, that the people who I knew that I could trust, because when we were having discussions about curb cuts or when we were having discussions about schools, they were the people that were saying this is the way we fight and win, because they had done it in other places, and I didn't know how to do any of that. So I was kind of just, if you will, just fodder. I was just a body taking up space. I had absolutely no insight, no leadership, no knowledge. But what I learned in the building completely transformed my life. And a couple of things that I learned in the building was one, if people can figure out common ground and work together and stay focused, they can accomplish an amazing thing. I mean, in 1977, we literally couldn't take the bus. We couldn't cross the street. We couldn't get into a public library. But we took over a federal building for almost a month and took down the federal government on the issue that we targeted. And that's an amazing accomplishment. And the second thing is people have asked, because it's been a big anniversary year for the 504 sit-in, people have asked a lot about, well, why did it work? And my number one reason is because, you know, it's kind of that old quote about you can get a lot done if nobody cares about who takes the credit. And the leadership of the 504 sit-in was very much primarily a group of disabled women who didn't care who took the credit. They just cared that the 504 regulations got signed. And that taught me a lot about what a leader looks like and how to make social change. And so much of the time when I see groups of people aim for something and fail, it's often because somebody has to be the most important person in the room and they need everybody else to know that. And what 504 really taught me was it doesn't matter whose name is on the, in the news or whose picture is in that video that social change happens because people commit themselves to trusting and working together and making a difference. So thank you. Thanks Corbett. That's great. Next we have Dennis Billips who was also in the building and he describes himself as the chief morale officer of the 504. And I have a feeling that you will know exactly why in about one minute. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here at this 40th anniversary of 504. I'd like to thank Kathy and the LaMaur Institute, San Francisco State, the library and all the people back then who helped us, the Black Panthers, the American Foundation for the Blind, the IB, the IM Machinists Union, all of the churches that were available to us and all of the people, the senators, the people who helped push this together. And of course my friends Corbett, Judy, and many, many others who are no longer with us. I really do appreciate their valid comments, their valid ideas and opening the door for having us to have curbsides, bus routes, open for education. Many things that have happened in the last 40 years for disabled persons. It's been a pleasure thinking about this for so many years and it's a pleasure. I've waited another two years to come to this anniversary so that I could really, really tell you how helpful it has been in my life and in my sister who was blind's life and my family life as well. Because of we, our families and people who are in the army and in the farm services and many other places. Martin Lucy King who opened the door for a vibration of coexistence with other people and many other people that have helped us open the door for disabled rights. And we've become the golden bridge I'd like to say for humanity to really pull together, really understand how to work together and empower ourselves. And I think that the Black Panther Party was a key part in making sure that we were empowered and by showing us that we were empowered 40 years later this is still now going on. So I really would like to thank all of the people who were involved and all of the people who are involved today. All of the people who have seen this online and all of the people who are just heard about us because it's a liberating experience once you really understand what we did and how it happened. And if it wasn't for Richard Nixon not signing the regs and you know and I don't want to mention that too much but I do have to say thank you to him because because he did we got to do what we did today. It's an irony I know but that's the way history goes and sometimes we can feed off history to make it work for us and that's exactly what the ladies with Judy Heumann and the leaders and people with disabilities did. We took a bad thing and made it a great thing in the world and from today on and all more than into the world and many centuries and years later we're going to make this and have made this a place and an understanding where people can move together people can be together and can work together and once we find out how to liberate each other and liberate ourselves we will be empowered. I have a small song to do that I'm going to attempt to make sure that we get and get it done in a two minute fashion. I know they've only given me a couple minutes and it's slowly moving on but the songs that I did in the building were to help people enthusiastically stay awake in the building and to make sure that the eyes is on the prize. That was the main thing of what I did is to make sure that people had their eyes on the prize they stayed awake and they could meet other people with disabilities and figure out a problem in which they had no answer to so what I tried to do is to become the engine and the voice to help since I was blind and there are other blind people one thing I had in my favor is that I had one of the loudest voices not the loudest voices one of the loudest voices and what I was able to do is to create music harmony and joy another thing I was able to do and help do is to do some meditation meditation which I still do today and teach here at the library on every other Sunday is to focus your mind on your inner strengths to focus your mind on the universal law of mankind and to make sure by doing that we all benefit from it okay so uh let me see if I can do this one uh this one's called thumbs up all right are you ready I'm need I need a little help so give me a thumbs up got to get it together thumbs up the world's a better pleasure thumbs up we got to win we are the victors thumbs up we got to move don't you know we got the thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up boom boom we are the people thumbs up boom boom we are the leaders thumbs up boom boom we are the people with thumbs up, boom, boom. We are the leaders, boom, boom. Be your own constitution. Be your own bill of rights. We are people of creator is the love of harmony and justice like, boom, boom. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Dennis. That's great. So last but not least, we're fortunate to be joined today by one of the 504 organizers, Judy Heumann. And among her many noteworthy accomplishments, she most recently served as the Special Advisor for International Disability Rights in the US State Department under President Barack Obama. Judy. Thank you. All right. So I'd like to thank Kathy and San Francisco State and the library and everyone who's been involved with setting this up. And one of the important parts I think about the work that Kathy and her group have been doing in putting together Patient No More. And I think a discussion about the terminology is very important. And in the five to seven minutes I have, we're not gonna get into that discussion. But I think thinking about that title is important because really what Corbett and Dennis have been saying is very much the fact that people came together became in many cases empowered in a way that they hadn't realized they could become empowered and how really the theme, one of the themes of our efforts was to no longer be seen as patients. And since that was and still is one of the issues that we're fighting against looking at disabled people as being a part of a civil rights movement. And as disabled people ourselves owning who we are and the dignity of who we are and respecting the fact that we have civil rights and we demand civil rights laws be implemented that in and of itself is a wonderful example for the general population, many of whom will become temporarily or permanently disabled. I think one of the important components about the 504 activities went beyond what was going on in the building. And you see a little bit here about demonstrations that were going on every day outside of the building. And I think the demonstrations outside of the building in many ways were as important as the demonstrations in the building. And although we were not allowed to come in and out of the building, I did leave the building a couple of times to do some things. And speaking on the street to people was very important. And unfortunately footage from ABC News got lost because there was a strike going on at the time and the materials got lost. What I thought was also interesting was to hear and to look at the work that was going on also from within the building. Messaging that we were giving was not just to the Congress but it was also to the average person in the Bay Area. And that was that passage of signing of the regulations. Resection 504 would not only benefit disabled individuals but in making things accessible and dealing broadly with what 504 is supposed to do, it would also be creating jobs and preparing our community for universal design and allow people who would become disabled to be able to stay more as integrated members of their community. The building itself, Jimmy LeBreck and his crew here who are working on a film called Crip Camp, for me I went to camps for disabled kids and it was a very fortunate, we can discuss the issue of segregated camps but one of the values of being in these segregated camps when there were progressive leaders in those camps who were all non-disabled gave us the opportunity to begin to talk and dream together about what we wanted our futures to look like and to be able to discuss what we thought the barriers were and really to begin to become empowered to recognize that we all had similar thoughts. We all felt that no matter how hard we worked in school, no matter how hard we followed the rules, it really didn't matter because at that time there were no laws protecting our rights and so coming into the building, one of the reasons why we felt it was very important to stay in the building, not just because of the occupation but because of the difficulty in getting people to a place who had disabilities, many of whom were adversely affected by lack of accessible transportation as an example. So being able to be in one place, we were not only becoming empowered from each other, learning about the power of a movement and learning how to use our voices. Inside the building there were all kinds of committees that were set up, communications committee, food committee, I don't know how many committees but everyone had a job. So nobody was in the building doing nothing. For lots of reasons, one people would have gotten totally bored but the other was there was a lot of work that needed to be done and the signing of the 504 regulations, also there was a national organization that had been created called the American Association of People with Disabilities. They were in Washington DC. When the demonstrations started here in the Bay Area, there were nine other cities around the country where the demonstrations started but the Bay Area was the one that really held on by 26 days. I think the longest other demonstration might have been two nights. And that was for a very specific reason. There had been a lot of work going on in the Bay Area and in California and Roberts was the director of the Department of Rehabilitation. He had put money into setting up 10 centers for independent living in California. The California had the most CILs and we had demonstrations in a couple of cities in California alone. But it was really a national effort. I think when you look at some of the other films, you'll see that a group of about 20 people left the building and went to Washington DC. Dennis, you were a part of that group, right? I was a part of that, yeah. So there were 20 people went back. Dennis was one of those people and we stayed in a church. We had demonstrations outside the house of Secretary of Health Education and Welfare which is what the agency was at that time. And having demonstrations out in front of his house, everything was very locally oriented. So we had flyers that we were giving out to people in the neighborhood to give to the kids and we were talking to the kids, please tell Secretary Califano to sign the 504 regulations. And he was pissed off. If any of you, he wrote, he has an autobiography which is very hard to get, but there is a chapter in the book on the 504 demonstrations because the first night we went to his house but four nights later we went back to his house and a lawyer named Phil Newmark and myself went up his driveway into the back of the house. Phil went and knocked on the door because he wanted to have a meeting. He had driven off, but that is part of the chapter of the book, his dog barking and him being afraid that the dog was gonna get out and bite somebody. At the end of the day, it was a national effort where the Bay Area, because we were the most organized, we were not organized only as disabled individuals but as Corbett was referencing earlier, connections to the civil rights movement, we had a letter or a telegram from Cesar Chavez. We had support from Glide Memorial Church and as we said, the Black Panthers and the Black Panthers got involved because one of their members had multiple sclerosis, Brad Lomax. And so there were lots of connections and Safeway was involved. Mayor Mosconi, who was the mayor at that time, was very involved. Sacramento government, the mattresses and the blankets were sent down from Secretary of Health from Sacramento. So bottom line, people came together and as Corbett rightly said, I think we all believe that we were in it as a group and the most important thing was that we get these regulations signed unchanged in just a second on that mental end. The real issue was over the fact that there was a draft set of regulations and when Jimmy Carter ran for president, he had committed to sign those draft regulations. When Secretary Califano came in, they started doing a review of the draft regulations and what they had decided to do was to make some very significant changes to the proposed regulations and when the disability community found out about that, that's when we decided to set a date for a demonstration that was called by the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities and one of the most momentous parts of those demonstrations where a few of us were on the phone with one of the lead lawyers from the federal government going over what they were not publicly discussing which were the changes that they were considering and a man named George Miller, who was a congressman who retired a few years ago, some of you may know him or know his name, he was in Contra Costa. George happened to drop by that morning and we asked him to quietly get on the phone and at the end of the discussion, George knew Peter Lobasi who was on the other end and George is this very big guy, really big with this really deep voice and he goes, Peter, this is congressman George Miller. And we are not, because he was in Washington normally, they were not being told about the changes that were seriously being discussed and then George turns around to the group of people in the building and says, don't leave the building until these regulations are signed. And so that really was one of the highlights and then there were hearings, unofficial hearings that were held in the building. So I think people felt empowered, their voices individually and collectively were making a difference and people's lives were being changed. And I hope that what is the result of the great work of Patience No More, Patience No More is that this will be a catalyst for people around the country to use this and to have discussions about what's going on in their local communities because storytelling is really so important, personal stories, how change has occurred, what it's like to be able to work together. And now with some of the major threats around Medicaid and many, many other things under this new administration, more than ever, it's important not just to look at this and learn from it, but to act on it. Thank you. So thank you so much, Judy and the other panelists. And again, I want to give everybody a huge round of applause. The panelists here and all the 504 and everybody that's going to keep fighting to close our program. I want to introduce Marty Goddard who's the library's director of access services. And I want to thank Marty again and I want to thank Joan who left and the San Francisco Public Library for making this possible. So Marty. Thank you so much. First I want to say this day is like a dream come true for me. We've been waiting, our staff has been waiting for this for nearly two years. And I can't tell you how happy we are that the exhibition is opening today. And we have a number of activities that are going to be going on over the next two months. We will have author talks by Corbett O'Toole and by Holland DeLille. I hope I say her name correctly. Anthony Tusler who's one of the occupiers and a photographer is going to be talking about the power of imagery. We have a couple of film events and I just noticed on our very fancy postcard that we have the wrong location. The Latino Hispanic community room which is on this floor and which is very flexible. So all the wheelchair riders in the room are going to be able to comfortably sit with their friends. So we have two film programs, a Superfest Disability Film Festival showcase and we're going to be showing the power of 504 and Life is Worth Living on another Saturday. We have a panel from DREDF who are going to be talking about disability activism, a conversation with organizers about lessons and prospects. So we have a number of things going on. Fran who is the curator of the exhibition is going to be doing tours of it. Two with ASL interpreters, one with audio description. So I'll stop yammering about all that but just say thank you so much for coming to the library, for bringing this to the library and I'm so excited about the next couple of months. And I would invite all of you now to go up to the sixth floor to our Skylight Gallery. You're going to have to move through the exhibition to get through the food. So please do join us upstairs and enjoy seeing the most accessible exhibition we ever have seen. Woo hoo! Woo hoo!