We take you to the opening of Patient No More! People With Disabilities Securing Civil Rights, an accessible, interactive exhibit celebrating the Bay Area’s contributions to the disability rights movement. The opening ceremonies focus on the participants in the ground-breaking 504 Occupation of the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco in 1977.
The exhibit continues at the Ed Roberts Center in
Berkeley through December 18, 2015.
For 29 days, more than a hundred women and men held a 24 hour protest demanding their civil rights. It was the longest occupation of a U.S. Federal Building to date and paved the way for so many of us and the passing the ADA thirteen years later.
We listen to some of these brave protestors, and experience the chants and music that kept them going.
Then, we take you to a San Francisco Celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of MediCare, the wildly successful federal program which provides health care for seniors and people with disabilities. Venerable activist Delores Huerta was on hand, as were California politicians Betty Yee, Dave Jones, and Tom Ammiano. Listen in as this celebration of the need for and strength of MediCare becomes a rally for Single Payer Health Care and MediCare for All.
Sheela Gunn-Cushman gathers the audio, hosts and produces the program (with some editing assistance from Adrienne Lauby).
The “Patient No More” exhibit was produced at the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. Pino Trogu and Silvan Linn, Assistant Professors of Design and Fellows at the Longmore Institute, coordinated the work of twenty design student interns to design and develop the exhibit.