A Brief Biography of Ed Roberts

By Xander Evans

The 1960s was an era of America defined by activism and by the leaders of those movements. Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and Malcom X are among the most well known leaders, leading the movement for black civil rights. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta led the civil rights movement for migrant farm workers. Yuri Kochiyama led the push for reparations for Japanese Americans after internment. The disabled had leaders fighting for their rights as well, most famous among them being Ed Roberts. Stricken with polio and wheelchair bound, Ed Roberts asserted that his disability did not compromise his humanity, and became the father of the Independent Living Movement.

Ed Roberts was born a normal kid, entirely able-bodied and neurotypical. At the young age of 14, Roberts found himself with polio only two years before the vaccine was widely available. He was entirely paralyzed, required an iron lung to breathe, and fell into a deep depression, refusing to eat in hopes of starving to death. After a few years, his personal nurse would quit, and now with no one doting on him, he would regain a passion for life. He found that his depression stemmed from being out of control of his own life, and without doctors and nurses constantly controlling him, he loved his life again [1]. He attended school remotely, through a phone connection, before attending classes in person during his senior year after no longer needing his iron lung during the day. When his high school principal nearly prevented him from graduating due to not taking physical education classes, Roberts’ parents advocated for him and helped him graduate [2]. This kind of advocacy would be Ed Roberts’ first experience with any kind of protest, and would begin a pattern of able-bodied people using Roberts’ disability as a reason to keep him from advancing his life

Roberts would attend a community college for two years before attempting to transfer to UC Berkeley. Despite having good grades, he was rejected from Berkeley, with an administrator saying “We tried cripples, and they don’t work.”  Roberts sued and won, attending Berkely in 1962; the same year the University of Mississippi accepted its first black student. Since Berkeley did not have dorms accessible for those in a wheelchair or his iron lung, he lived in a renovated floor of the Cowell Memorial hospital. Within four years, seven more disabled students had joined Roberts in his makeshift dorm. These students found themselves loving their newfound independence, being treated like human beings. As civil rights protests began popping up on college campuses like Berkeley, Roberts found similarity in their causes and attempted to reach out for solidarity. To Ed’s disappointment, other student groups and civil rights leaders did not see similarity in their struggles, and did not include them in their demands for greater liberties [3].  This did not stop Roberts, nor did it stop his disabled allies. After graduating Berkeley, Roberts left to teach at Nairobi College, which served “less traditional students” while his disabled allies at Berkeley founded the Center for Independent Living, which advocated for the rights and humanity of the disabled and with Roberts returning soon to lead the young organization[4].  

The CIL became very prominent soon after Roberts took over, and the organization quickly made Berkeley one of the most disabled-friendly cities in the country. This effectiveness was observed by people in the halls of power, as California governor Jerry Brown appointed Ed Roberts as the director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, which had ironically deemed him completely unable to work years before. Ed used his newfound position of power to become a stronger advocate for disability rights, setting up CIL centers all over California, and engaged in battles to enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which was the greatest assurance of civil rights for the disabled before the ADA. This advocacy, along with public displays of protest demanding that disability rights laws actually be enforced paved the way for the passage of the ADA in 1990 [5]. Roberts would pass away soon after the passage of the ADA, dying of a heart attack in 1995 at the age of 56, advocating for disability rights until his last day.

Ed Roberts is not like many people on this website. He was entirely neurotypical, with his disabilities being physical and caused by an external source rather than a developmental disorder. Yet despite all these differences, the activism of Ed Roberts exemplifies the core of all disability advocacy. He did not ask to be pitied, nor did he ask for special treatment. He asked to be treated as a human who had different needs than others. That is the core of disability advocacy for every person regardless of how disability manifests. Ed Roberts is not a person that “didn’t let his disability define him,” because it did define part of who he was. He simply did not allow it to be a bad thing. Disability can define the way a person exists in the world, and Ed Roberts shows that being “defined by disability” is not inherently a bad thing.

Sources:

[1] Danforth, S. (2020). Teaching and the experience of disability: The pedagogy of Ed Roberts. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 9(5), 464-488. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v9i5.705

[2] Kent, Deborah, and Kathryn Quinlan. “Ed Roberts” in Extraordinary People with Disabilities. Children’s Press, 1996. 

[3] Patterson, Lindsey. “Points of Access: Rehabilitation Centers, Summer Camps, and Student Life in the Making of Disability Activism, 1960-1973.” Journal of Social History, vol. 46, no. 2, 2012, pp. 473–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23354140. Accessed 7 Mar. 2025.

[4] Kent, D.; Quinlan, K.A. (1996). Extraordinary People with Disabilities. Children's Press. ISBN 978-0-516-26074-7. dissertation.

[5] "Ed Roberts: The Father of Independent Living - FoundSF". www.foundsf.org. Archived from the original on December 8, 2017.