If you haven’t watched Crip Camp: a Disability Revolution yet, stop reading this blog post and do it right now. Nothing I can say about the film is worth more of your time than the movie and the people in it who changed history, this country, and the world.

The Netflix documentary came out in 2020 to critical acclaim, but my husband and I only watched it recently. I expected a moving narrative about kids finding a home away from home at a sleepaway camp for kids with disabilities, and Crip Camp is that story, but it’s more about how that home (Camp Jened, in the Catskills) provided a necessary foundation for the American disability rights movement. And it’s a phenomenal work of art and political history that made me equal parts inspired and angry.

The film introduced me to Judith Heumann, who should be a household name, but who I’d never heard of. One of the deeply thoughtful counselors at Camp Jened, Heumann built on the community and solidarity that Jened inspired to become a leader in the civil rights movement for Americans with disabilities. In 1977, she was integral to the success of the 504 sit-in in San Francisco, part of a nationwide protest for the implementation of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which was intended to protect people with disabilities from discrimination by any federally funded entity. But by 1977, 504 had not been enforced. National marches, protests, and sit-ins were organized to draw attention to the lack of progress in, among other things, making federal buildings and public transportation accessible.

In Crip Camp, we see both Heumann’s deeply felt commitment and her steely resolve in organizing and providing for her fellow protestors at the Health Education and Welfare office (HEW). We also see her skills at collaboration with fellow organizers, and how the success of this moment depended on the allyship of many in the community, especially the essential work of the Black Panthers in providing food for those occupying the building. Sit-ins were happening across the country, and the one Heumann helped lead in San Francisco was the longest, at almost one month.

Eventually, President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph A. Califano Jr., relented and moved ahead with implementing 504. This groundbreaking move, made possible only because of the relentless advocacy of activists and allies, paved the way for the Americans With Disabilities Act, signed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. The ADA extended protections for people with disabilities to private businesses.

By 1995, when I was working at a summer camp for kids with disabilities, I wish I could say the ADA had transformed our country absolutely. But my own high school, from which I had just graduated, was full of inaccessible stairways and doors. Yes we had curb cuts in downtown Ithaca, but we were not seeing kids like our own campers integrated into our classrooms or daily activities in ways that should have been more visible.

More recently, in 2017, my congressional representative, Elise Stefanik, supported a House bill that would have basically nullified much of the ADA. (The bill stalled in the Senate.) Decades after the bill was signed by a Republican President, businesses still complain about the cost of accessibility, even though accessibility always improves the lives of everyone in a community. Accessibility also acknowledges the likelihood that most of us will gain a disability of some kind in our lifetimes. (Stefanik’s support for undermining civil rights in this tangible way, in the early days of the Trump administration, is one of the many reasons I’m always arguing she hasn’t so much transformed from “moderate” to “MAGA” as come into her own as a deeply uncaring and short-sighted politician.)

Politicians like Stefanik and the billionaires who love to exploit their vapidness will always be fighting to go backwards. Which is why Crip Camp is essential viewing now, in 2024, and forever after. Progress requires strategy, patience, resolve, and persistent action and collaboration. Heumann never stopped fighting. She died in 2023. We lost a great activist before I knew of her existence.

In the New York Times, she reflected on the 504 sit-in, and her words should be a perennial call to action: “‘We were creating a community that hadn’t existed earlier. We stayed together because people were recognizing and really were believing that we could make a difference.’”