Creating Spaces for People with Disabilities

As we’re sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself looking for personal accounts of special public spaces. Judith Heumann’s piece on Camp Oakhurst, a camp for children with disabilities, was beautiful and moving.

Heumann grew up in a time when children in the US de jure didn’t have equal access to public schooling if they had significant disabilities (today, though access can be difficult to gain, it is at least specified in law). The educational opportunities she was offered were poor at best, and she and her fellow students got a clear message that they were considered second-class citizens.

“We spent hours trying to figure out why we were treated so differently from the ‘kids upstairs,’ which is what we called the nondisabled kids who went to school above us,” Heumann writes.

Camp Oakhurst, a summer camp on the New Jersey shore, gave Heumann a space where she and other children with disabilities could learn together and enjoy the outdoors. The joy she felt comes through strongly in her writing. (Now a multi-service center called Rising Treetops at Oakhurst, the organization still offers summer camp programs among other opportunities for children and adults with disabilities.)

Judith Heumann later attended Camp Jened, in Hunter, New York, which was one of the communities she credits with inspiring her to become an advocate. Camp Jened is the subject of the critically acclaimed documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, now available on Netflix, and Heumann is one of the spotlighted interviewees.

And since this post is a love letter to Judith Heumann (as why shouldn’t it be?), let me remind everyone that her book Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist was recently released and is available in fine bookstores everywhere.

(Photo courtesy of Camp Barnabas in Purdy, Missouri.)