In his new book Silent No Longer: Advancing the Fight for Disability Rights, Robert Stack says all the right things about the horrible history of warehousing Americans with disabilities in institutions like nursing homes and large congregate facilities. “Institutions,” he writes, “are where people’s dignity of choice and freedom go to die.”
Stack explores the historical roots of a still pervasive attitude that has been used for centuries to justify this harsh segregation and continues to devalue people with disabilities today.
He played a role in the movement by and for disabled people to overcome this reality by starting up Community Options, a housing and employment nonprofit, at his kitchen table in 1989. According to the organization’s website, it now serves thousands of people with disabilities across twelve states.
Silent No Longer: Advancing the Fight for Disability Rights
By Robert Stack
Matt Holt Books, 272 pages
Publication date: September 30, 2025
Matt Holt Books
In this book, Stack relates how, for decades, Community Options has built or renovated homes discreetly nestled in ordinary American neighborhoods. They serve as group homes for no more than four disabled people each. Many of their residents used to live in the type of large, impersonal, and distant institutions that Stack laments. Community Options’ quest to free them from the paternalistic grip of these institutions has been needlessly complicated, Stack writes, by the political cowardice of people who refused to challenge the status quo, the views of parents and guardians who were convinced that institutionalization was best for their disabled charges, and just plain old NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”).
The organization’s mission statement says, “Community Options believes in the dignity of every person, and in the freedom of all people to experience the highest degree of self-determination.” Stack adds in the book, “The United States has been failing people with disabilities for a long time. I hope I can do my small part to reverse this trend.”
It’s important to keep in mind, however, that while Stack speaks the truth about the evils of the knee-jerk impulse to institutionalize disabled people, as well as the roots of that impulse, the remedy he puts forth would not work for everyone.
I’m one of those disabled folks who isn’t too far removed from a time and place when the powers that be might have sent me off to live a cloistered and powerless existence in some distant institution. I have been disabled for almost seventy years, and I use a motorized wheelchair all day, every day. I live in a condominium with my wife and dogs. I’m unable to do many of the things that everyone has to do every day, such as getting in and out of bed and getting dressed, without assistance from others. But I get that assistance from a crew of people I’ve hired to help me. They are paid an hourly wage for helping me via a state program that is largely funded by Medicaid.
So if I lived in one of Stack’s group homes, I wouldn’t feel as if I were experiencing my highest degree of self-determination. I’d probably feel like I was living in someone else’s home. I’d probably feel like I had no power to determine who assists me. In my current situation, I am able to recruit, hire, schedule, and supervise everybody on my crew. And if they aren’t meeting my needs, I can fire them and look for someone else. I wouldn’t want it any other way, because I think it gives me basic control over the trajectory of my days, something we all desire.
Because of the nature of their disabilities, some people need different support than I do. So what Community Options offers works just fine for them.
As Stack writes, “Every person has potential . . . . Whether they reach it depends on the level of support they need and receive. We, as a community, need to recognize the value in humanity—all humanity.”
Silent No Longer is an up-close account of how much the movement to deinstitutionalize people with disabilities has made things better and how much work must still be done.