The state-operated boarding school from which I obtained my high school diploma was called the Illinois Children’s Hospital-School.
If that name makes you want to laugh, please do. Don’t be afraid. Laughter is the reaction I’m after. Your laughter is therapeutic and affirming for me. It makes me feel like real progress is being made.
When people laugh at my cripple segregation experience, it means they get the joke. That makes me feel vindicated. Because that’s how I’ve always looked at it.
The idea that disabled kids had to be educated in a deeply segregated environment under the constant surveillance of a skilled medical professional was indeed a dark joke.
But when I lived at the Illinois Children’s Hospital-School in the early 1970s, few people on the outside got the joke. At the time, there was nothing absurd or oppressive about that name. A Children’s Hospital-School was the kind of place fragile cripples needed to be. Nobody thought twice about it.
I also hope you laugh when you hear the word “special” used to sugar-coat cripple segregation. That’s a big joke, too. Segregated cripple schools like the Illinois Children’s Hospital-School were often referred to as “special” schools where “special” children received “special” treatment. Doesn’t that sound great? Who wouldn’t want to be special? To be special is to be among the chosen ones. If you say you went to a special school, it sounds so oooh la la—like you went to a Harvard prep school or something.
But life in our segregated environments was an absurd contradiction where the word “special” meant the opposite of what it actually means. For us, to be special was to be forsaken. We went to these special schools because we had no choice. Other schools wouldn’t accept us.
In the 1960s, my mother tried to get the public schools in our neighborhood to enroll me, but they said no. Kids like me belonged in special schools. There were no laws against that kind of discrimination at the time. The federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which established the rights (in theory) of disabled kids to a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment, was signed in 1975.
"Special" high schooler Mike Ervin.
“Special” didn’t mean greater than. It meant inferior to. So special treatment meant inferior treatment. If a place with a name like the Illinois Children’s Hospital-School sounds like the complete antithesis of a Harvard prep school, that’s because it was. Its name reflects the matter-of-fact lack of scholastic expectations, and thus the pitiful quality of the education. It was a pre-ordained dead end.
What college was going to take seriously the application of anyone with a diploma from the Illinois Children’s Hospital-School? But that’s a silly point to make because kids who went to special schools weren’t supposed to go to college anyway. Most of the kids at my school didn’t even get diplomas, let alone go to college. They hung around until they “aged out” of the school when they turned twenty-one and were then sent off to who knows where? A nursing home? They were the most special of us all.
The first school I attended that didn’t segregate crippled kids was Southern Illinois University when I was eighteen. How did I get accepted into SIU with my diploma from the Illinois Children’s Hospital-School? I have no idea. It’s still a great mystery to me. I chalk it up to computer error. (Computers weren’t too smart back then.)
Or maybe I got lucky and the human who processed my application had an absurd sense of humor and stamped “ACCEPTED” on it just for a joke. Whatever fluke got me in, I grabbed it and (figuratively) ran with it, fearing someone might discover the mistake.
As far as I’m concerned, the more people that laugh at my cripple segregation experience, the better. I hope it shows that I’m helping get across the once-hidden absurdity of it. Maybe if I expose this segregation as the joke that it is, this will take away its false sense of legitimacy. I hope that means I’m doing something to make the world better for younger generations of cripples by making it harder for them to get inextricably snared in the segregation trap.
Maybe that’s the real reason why, back in the mid-1980s, I jumped so hard and fast into the fight to make public transportation wheelchair accessible. In those days, every Chicago Transit Authority bus had three monster steps inside the entrances. If someone like me needed a ride, the CTA instead dispatched a wheelchair accessible minibus to take us door-to-door.
That sure sounds luxurious, doesn’t it? It sounds like a private limo service. But this door-to-door alternative was also a joke. Here’s how you know it was a joke: It was called the Special Service.
To attempt to get a Special Service ride, I had to call an 800 number at 5 a.m. the day before I needed that ride, along with many other people trying to do the same thing. If I didn’t break through the busy signal and connect with a human scheduler within twenty minutes or so, I might as well forget about it. All the ride slots were probably taken by then. No transportation for me. Better learn to hitchhike.
Or I might have to settle for a ride slot other than the one I actually needed. If I had to be somewhere at 9 a.m, I might have to schedule a pickup for 6 a.m. And the minibus might be an hour late picking me up. And then it might take me all over town picking up and dropping off others, thus getting me to my destination an hour late. It was all a giant crapshoot. But we put up with it because we didn’t have a choice.
So I joined up with others demanding wheelchair lifts on all new CTA mainline buses. We disrupted meetings of the CTA board of directors and blocked streets and traffic to get attention. Sometimes that got us arrested for disorderly conduct.
Of course, my main motivation for doing all this was that I wanted more freedom to get around. But subconsciously, at least, I probably also realized that once we started riding the same buses as everybody else, it might have a domino effect. The CTA was putting out a lot of alarmist propaganda about how if cripples are allowed to ride the mainline buses, it would throw schedules into chaos and cause fares to skyrocket. I knew that once we started actually riding, the other passengers would see that rhetoric as the enormous joke that it was. And maybe the next time they’re fed a line about how cripples need to be segregated away in special places for our own safety and well-being, and the safety and well-being of others, they’ll wonder if that’s also a joke.
Keeping us segregated made it easier for the CTA to screw us over in that “special” way. The CTA wouldn’t dare say to riders of mainline buses, “From now on, if you want a ride, you’ll have to call at 5 a.m. the previous morning and try to book it. Maybe you’ll get a ride and maybe you won’t. And if you do get a ride, maybe it will arrive and/or drop you off an hour late.” That would cause a riot.
The first wheelchair-accessible CTA buses hit the streets in 1992. Today, every CTA bus is accessible. When I tell people how ridiculous things were in the 1980s, a lot of them laugh because they think it is such a joke. And when they laugh I feel great satisfaction. Mission accomplished.
It’s usually not too difficult for me to expose the ridiculousness of my cripple segregation experience. I basically just have to show up to places and be me. And when I talk about the segregation traps I fell into, it sounds like an anachronism. But it isn’t. Today people like me often still become hopelessly trapped in stifling nursing facilities that call themselves “health and rehabilitation” centers, with rosy names like Sunrise Gardens. “Special” treatment still abounds.
I’m glad to be among the lucky ones who managed to break out of the cripple segregation traps, who can now tell the story from the inside. Telling the story is the easy part. Breaking out is the hard part. I still sometimes can’t believe I did it. Thank God for that computer error.