How Deaf Protesters in 1988 Changed Perceptions of Disability—and U.S. Law

In March 1988, the campus of Gallaudet University—the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf and hard of hearing people—became an epicenter of advocacy. For a week, a large contingent of impassioned students, faculty, staff and alumni assembled on the Washington, D.C. campus and the U.S. Capitol to urge the university's Board of Trustees to appoint a deaf individual as president.

Just months before, on August 24, 1987, Jerry C. Lee, a hearing man, had announced his resignation from his position as Gallaudet’s university president. In the ensuing months, news had circulated on campus that the Board had selected two deaf men, Irving King Jordan and Harvey Corson, and one hearing woman, Elizabeth Zinser, as finalists. Leading up to the announcement of the Board’s decision to select Zinser, protesters had made their desire for a deaf president clearly known.

At the announcement of Zinser’s appointment, protesters organized what would become known as “Deaf President Now!” (DPN). They coordinated rallies; marches on Washington; a campus lockdown; and interviews with the media, including Academy Award-winner Marlee Matlin, who became an advocate for the cause. After only four days with Zinser as president, the protesters were victorious: Jordan, then the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, was named Gallaudet’s eighth president, and went on to serve for 18 years, until 2006. 

The Deaf President Now! protests thrust disability rights into the national spotlight, shifting attitudes toward people with disabilities. They were helped by a supportive political and cultural climate, which had started to emerge in the years after the civil rights movement, write sociologists Sharon Barnartt and John B. Christiansen, in Deaf President Now!: The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University. The authors, who are themselves deaf, were Gallaudet teachers at the time of the protests.

In addition to the larger deaf community surrounding Gallaudet and beyond, hearing individuals offered strong support during the protests in the form of donations, American Sign Language interpretation and resources, such as meeting spaces. And within weeks of the protest’s conclusion, Senator Lowell Weicker, a Republican, and House Majority Whip Tony Coelho, a Democrat, introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to the House and Senate on April 28 and 29, 1988, respectively.

Coelho, who has epilepsy, said in Congress, “It is time, I think, to stand up. I think Gallaudet proved that and sort of lit a spark not only with the hearing disability but with the disability community all over the country. We do not want to be patient anymore.”

Two years later, on July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the bill into law in a ceremony on the White House lawn. The ADA became a landmark civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in various aspects of public life, including employment, transportation, public accommodations and telecommunications.

“It is probably an overstatement to argue that DPN, by itself, caused Congress to pass the ADA... However...without DPN, the ADA would not have become the law of the land in the summer of 1990,” Christiansen writes in Vibrant Mosaic: A Deaf Sociologist Explores Issues Impacting Deaf and Hard of Hearing People. “In a sense, DPN’s success became an icon, a positive symbol that was diffused within the wider disability community and served as a significant source of support in the successful effort to enact the ADA.”

Reframing people with disabilities as a minority group with civil rights “played an important role in congressional willingness” to pass the ADA, write Barnartt and Christiansen. But the fact that disability rights became a household topic was by accident, not design. Within this movement, the Deaf community holds a unique position. Many Deaf people—that is “Deaf” with a capital “D”—consider themselves part of a culture with a set of values, traditions and a unique, bona fide language (American Sign Language or "ASL"). Because of this distinction, many don't view themselves as members of the larger disability community.

Christiansen says that he believes this perception of deafness as a linguistic, cultural identity—and not as a disability—has held true among many deaf signing people in the years since DPN. Moreover, “disability” as a concept varies by perspective. Differing views about defining disability have shaped the disability rights movement, contributing to the complicated legacy of the ADA and its efforts to represent a wide range of experiences through legislation.

Barnartt adds that while the passage of the ADA benefited D/deaf people to a large degree, the goals of the Deaf community and those of the larger disability community have sometimes conflicted. For example, the late Judith “Judy” Heumann, who used a wheelchair after contracting polio as an infant, and was known as the “mother of the disability rights movement,” fought fiercely against the segregation of disabled and nondisabled people in education. “Not only were we not required to participate in the American system of education; we were actually blocked from it and hidden away in the basement," wrote Heumann in her memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist. Heumann’s later advocacy work, including the implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the passage of the ADA, ultimately led to the desegregation of disabled and nondisabled students in educational settings.

But Deaf leaders, then and now, feel differently, due to a long history of forced integration. They point to a pivotal global conference in 1880 in Milan, Italy, the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, where educators decided by vote that the best way to educate deaf children was by prioritizing the use of oralism—teaching deaf people to speak and lipread—over sign language. This effectively led to the banning of sign language in many parts of the United States, the underemployment of deaf teachers and, ultimately, the decline of academic performance among deaf and hard of hearing children. As a result, many cherish residential schools as places where deaf students can not only learn to sign and thrive academically but also develop a sense of Deaf identity and community, given that more than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents.

Despite some Deaf people’s complex feelings toward the term “disabled,” many believe it is undeniable that the DPN protests were at least partially instrumental to the passage of the ADA and in the continuing march toward full rights and inclusion for people with disabilities. 

“I think it’s important to recognize that, at least in the U.S., historically marginalized groups have more power and resources than they may initially realize to encourage the kind of social changes that ultimately benefit them and, indeed, many others as well,” says Christiansen.