They Made Us Invisible: From the Ugly Laws to Disability Pride
In 1881, the city of Chicago made it illegal to be visibly disabled in public.
The ordinance read: "Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of one dollar for each offense."
One dollar…Per offense (about $33 in today’s money). A fine for each time you dared to exist where someone could see you.
Chicago wasn't alone. Similar ordinances appeared in San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Columbus, and other American cities from the 1860s onward. Collectively, they became known as the Ugly Laws — a phrase that captures exactly what they were: legislation built not on public safety, not on any coherent civic principle, but on the idea that certain bodies were too unpleasant to be witnessed.
They stayed on the books for over a century. Chicago's ugly law wasn't repealed until 1974
Not the Civil War era. Not the Progressive Era. 1974. The year Blazing Saddles came out. The year Nixon resigned. That year.
The Architecture of Disappearance
The Ugly Laws were one piece of a much larger structure designed to keep disabled people out of public life — and out of public memory.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, forced sterilization laws were enacted across the United States. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled on Buck v. Bell*, a case involving a woman named Carrie Buck who had been institutionalized and deemed "promiscuous” and “feeble minded" — after being raped and becoming pregnant. The state of Virginia wanted to sterilize her. The Supreme Court said yes. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion, which included the line: "three generations of imbeciles are enough."
(*Buck v. Bell* has never been formally overturned.)
Alongside the legal architecture came the physical one: institutions. Built throughout the 1800s, originally framed as humanitarian alternatives to jails and poorhouses, many of these facilities became their own atrocities by the mid-twentieth century. Willowbrook State School in New York, exposed by a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera in 1972, housed residents in conditions of extreme abuse and neglect. It took fifteen years — and a federal lawsuit — to close it. Willowbrook didn't shut its doors until 1987.
The pattern is consistent across a century and a half of American history: disabled people were removed from public view, stripped of reproductive autonomy, warehoused in institutions, and arrested for the crime of appearing on a sidewalk. And then, largely, forgotten.
The erasure wasn't incidental. It was the point.
"The Insane Don't Feel Cold"
In 1841, a woman named Dorothea Dix agreed to teach a Sunday school class at the East Cambridge Jail in Massachusetts. She walked in and found mentally ill people — not criminals, people who had been assessed as mentally ill — housed in unheated cells. Some were unclothed. Some were chained.
She asked the superintendent why the cells weren't heated.
He told her the insane don't feel cold.
Dix had spent years dealing with her own serious illness, had been bedridden, had been written off. She walked out of that jail a different person than she walked in. She spent the next eighteen months visiting every jail, poorhouse, and asylum in Massachusetts, documenting everything she found. In 1843, unable to address the legislature directly (women weren't permitted to), she submitted a memorial — a formal petition — that was read aloud on her behalf.
It worked. And she didn't stop. Over the next forty years, Dorothea Dix directly influenced the establishment of state hospitals in fifteen U.S. states and Canada, and contributed to the construction of thirty-two institutions in the United States alone. She then served as Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War, reformed military medical care, and went back to her advocacy work when the war ended.
She spent her final years living in a room in a New Jersey state hospital — one she had helped build. She died there in 1887.
What the Movement Knew
By the mid-twentieth century, disabled activists had understood something that took the broader culture much longer to absorb: this wasn't about individual tragedy. It was about civil rights.
The disability rights movement borrowed explicitly from the framework of the civil rights movement — the language, the tactics, the understanding that dignity was not something to be granted by benevolent institutions but something to be demanded and fought for. And like the civil rights movement, it had leaders whose names history has been slow to record.
In 1977, over 150 disabled people occupied the San Francisco Federal Building to demand the government enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — legislation that prohibited discrimination against disabled people in federally funded programs. The regulations that would make 504 enforceable had been stalled for four years. Disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who had contracted polio at eighteen months and spent her life fighting a system that wanted her invisible (at age five, a school principal told her mother she was a fire hazard), helped lead the occupation.
The sit-in lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in United States history.
It almost didn't survive the first week. The government cut phone lines and tried to prevent supplies from reaching protesters inside the building. Then a man named Brad Lomax made some calls.
Lomax was a Black Panther Party member who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair. He was one of the key organizers of the sit-in. He called in the Black Panthers, who brought hot meals to the protesters every single day of the occupation. Protester Corbett O'Toole later said plainly: "The Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in."
The regulations were signed in April 1977. Section 504 became enforceable.
Brad Lomax died in 1984. He was thirty-three years old. The *New York Times* didn't run his obituary until 2022 — as part of their "Overlooked" series for people whose deaths went unrecorded at the time. Thirty-eight years later.
From 504 to the ADA
Section 504 was a foundation, not a finish line. Disability activists spent the following decade pushing for comprehensive federal civil rights legislation. In March 1990, with the Americans with Disabilities Act stalled in Congress, ADAPT — American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today — staged the "Wheels of Justice" campaign in Washington, D.C.
On March 12, 1990, 700 people marched from the White House to the Capitol chanting "What do we want? Our ADA! When do we want it? Now!"
Then sixty activists got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the steps of the Capitol building on their hands and knees. They called it the Capitol Crawl. The point was to show, in the most visceral terms possible, what it meant to live in a world not built for you — to demonstrate the indignity, the daily obstacle course, that disabled Americans navigated simply by trying to participate in public life.
On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. He said: "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down."
The ADA prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and government services. It mandated accessibility. It was the most significant disability rights legislation in American history.
It came 109 years after Chicago made it illegal to be visibly disabled in public.
What Disability Pride Is Actually About
Disability Pride Month is observed in July — the month the ADA was signed. It was first celebrated in Boston in 1990, the same year the law passed. Chicago held its first Disability Pride Parade in 2004.
But Disability Pride isn't a celebration of overcoming. It isn't about inspiration. It isn't about disabled people defying the odds in ways that make non-disabled people feel moved.
It's about something harder and more specific: the right to exist in public, visibly, without apology. The right to be seen — which was literally illegal in Chicago for over a century. The right to access, to participation, to self-determination. The right to be remembered.
The women we talked about in this episode — Sarah Biffen, Harriet Martineau, Dorothea Dix, Judy Heumann — and the man who kept the 504 sit-in alive, Brad Lomax — none of them are household names. That's not an accident. When the people who fought hardest aren't remembered, the system doesn't have to account for how bad it was. Or how recent.
The Ugly Laws stayed on the books in some American cities until 1974.
*Buck v. Bell* has never been formally overturned.
Willowbrook closed in 1987.
The fight for the ADA included people crawling up the steps of the United States Capitol in 1990 to make a point that should not have needed making.
This is not ancient history. Disability Pride Month exists because the work is not finished — and because the people who did the work deserve to be named.
**Further reading & resources:**
- [Disability Belongs — Disability History](https://www.disabilitybelongs.org/resources/disability-history/)
- Susan Schweik, *The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public* (2009)
- *Crip Camp* (2020, Netflix) — documentary covering the 504 Sit-In and the road to the ADA
- Brad Lomax, *New York Times* Overlooked obituary (2022)
- [ADAPT](https://adapt.org/) — still fighting
---
She spent her final years living in a room in a New Jersey state hospital — one she had helped build. She died there in 1887.
What the Movement Knew
By the mid-twentieth century, disabled activists had understood something that took the broader culture much longer to absorb: this wasn't about individual tragedy. It was about civil rights.
The disability rights movement borrowed explicitly from the framework of the civil rights movement — the language, the tactics, the understanding that dignity was not something to be granted by benevolent institutions but something to be demanded and fought for. And like the civil rights movement, it had leaders whose names history has been slow to record.
In 1977, over 150 disabled people occupied the San Francisco Federal Building to demand the government enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — legislation that prohibited discrimination against disabled people in federally funded programs. The regulations that would make 504 enforceable had been stalled for four years. Disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who had contracted polio at eighteen months and spent her life fighting a system that wanted her invisible (at age five, a school principal told her mother she was a fire hazard), helped lead the occupation.
The sit-in lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in United States history.
It almost didn't survive the first week. The government cut phone lines and tried to prevent supplies from reaching protesters inside the building. Then a man named Brad Lomax made some calls.
Lomax was a Black Panther Party member who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair. He was one of the key organizers of the sit-in. He called in the Black Panthers, who brought hot meals to the protesters every single day of the occupation. Protester Corbett O'Toole later said plainly: "The Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in."
The regulations were signed in April 1977. Section 504 became enforceable.
Brad Lomax died in 1984. He was thirty-three years old. The *New York Times* didn't run his obituary until 2022 — as part of their "Overlooked" series for people whose deaths went unrecorded at the time. Thirty-eight years later.
From 504 to the ADA
Section 504 was a foundation, not a finish line. Disability activists spent the following decade pushing for comprehensive federal civil rights legislation. In March 1990, with the Americans with Disabilities Act stalled in Congress, ADAPT — American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today — staged the "Wheels of Justice" campaign in Washington, D.C.
On March 12, 1990, 700 people marched from the White House to the Capitol chanting "What do we want? Our ADA! When do we want it? Now!"
Then sixty activists got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the steps of the Capitol building on their hands and knees. They called it the Capitol Crawl. The point was to show, in the most visceral terms possible, what it meant to live in a world not built for you — to demonstrate the indignity, the daily obstacle course, that disabled Americans navigated simply by trying to participate in public life.
On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. He said: "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down."
The ADA prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and government services. It mandated accessibility. It was the most significant disability rights legislation in American history.
It came 109 years after Chicago made it illegal to be visibly disabled in public.
What Disability Pride Is Actually About
Disability Pride Month is observed in July — the month the ADA was signed. It was first celebrated in Boston in 1990, the same year the law passed. Chicago held its first Disability Pride Parade in 2004.
But Disability Pride isn't a celebration of overcoming. It isn't about inspiration. It isn't about disabled people defying the odds in ways that make non-disabled people feel moved.
It's about something harder and more specific: the right to exist in public, visibly, without apology. The right to be seen — which was literally illegal in Chicago for over a century. The right to access, to participation, to self-determination. The right to be remembered.
The women we talked about in this episode — Sarah Biffen, Harriet Martineau, Dorothea Dix, Judy Heumann — and the man who kept the 504 sit-in alive, Brad Lomax — none of them are household names. That's not an accident. When the people who fought hardest aren't remembered, the system doesn't have to account for how bad it was. Or how recent.
The Ugly Laws stayed on the books in some American cities until 1974.
*Buck v. Bell* has never been formally overturned.
Willowbrook closed in 1987.
The fight for the ADA included people crawling up the steps of the United States Capitol in 1990 to make a point that should not have needed making.
This is not ancient history. Disability Pride Month exists because the work is not finished — and because the people who did the work deserve to be named.
**Further reading & resources:**
- [Disability Belongs — Disability History](https://www.disabilitybelongs.org/resources/disability-history/)
- Susan Schweik, *The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public* (2009)
- *Crip Camp* (2020, Netflix) — documentary covering the 504 Sit-In and the road to the ADA
- Brad Lomax, *New York Times* Overlooked obituary (2022)
- [ADAPT](https://adapt.org/) — still fighting
---