By the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of eugenics and scientific racism in the United States stigmatized Blackness as a disease, while also treating disability as a defect or medical issue. These developments had profound effects on disabled African Americans, as racism and ableism continued to reinforce each other well into the twentieth century and, many would argue, to this day. For much of the twentieth century, state and federal government ignored the numerous injustices and disparities that African Americans, disabled people, poor people, women, and other vulnerable groups experienced. Worse, at times federal and state bodies actively contributed to maintaining these groups’ social, political, and economic marginalization. Black disabled Americans faced discrimination from both racism and ableism. This was often worsened by classism (discrimination toward impoverished and working-class people), racialized gender stereotypes, and ableism within Black communities. This all made Black disabled individuals particularly vulnerable and forced them to navigate a multitude of discriminatory practices and policies.

Throughout the twentieth century, disabled African Americans faced overlapping forms of discrimination, marginalization, and erasure. In the Jim Crow south, Black disabled students were denied access to residential state schools for the blind and deaf as well as segregated public schools for nondisabled Black children. When states finally acknowledged the need to educate Black deaf and disabled students (which, in some cases, did not occur until the 1930s), they attended doubly segregated schools separate from both their nondisabled Black and disabled white peers. These schools often lacked equal and adequate funding, resources, and services. The last of these institutions, the Louisiana School for the Colored Deaf and Blind, did not integrate until 1978, more than two decades after the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Disability and race also intersected with education in complicated ways in other parts of the country. After World War II and the second wave of the Great Migration, New York City established its so-called “600” schools for “emotionally maladjusted” students. Many of these students deemed in need of remedial disciplinary attention were Black and Puerto Rican. Well into the 1960s, these interconnected forms of racial and disability discrimination justified the expulsion of Black and Brown students from mainstream NYC classrooms and their relocation to separate schools.[1] In fact, many students swept into the nation’s school-to-prison pipeline today are disproportionately students of color who are labeled or perceived as disabled.[2]

Beyond the public school system, medical racism and abuse were routine throughout much of the twentieth century. Such abuse intersected with disability in significant ways. The United States Public Health Service’s Tuskegee syphilis study (1932–1972) had long-term disabling consequences for its unwitting and nonconsenting “human subjects.” Researchers conducting a long-term study of the effects of untreated syphilis withheld inexpensive and highly effective treatment from poor Black sharecropping men living in and around Tuskegee, Alabama. As a result, some of the men died from the disease. Others experienced blindness, mental illness, and physically disabling symptoms of the illness’s neurological effects. Their wives also contracted the sexually transmitted infection. Those who became pregnant gave birth to children with congenital syphilis, a condition that can lead to blindness, deafness, developmental disabilities, and other physical complications. Racism and ableism also shaped the lives of Black men incarcerated in mental institutions, hospitals, and prisons who were disproportionately subjected to various forms of psychiatric abuse. These included involuntary commitment, forced medication, psychosurgery, electroshock therapy, prolonged restraint, and solitary confinement, among other harmful practices.[3] As the militant Black Power movement grew later in the 1960s and 1970s, white psychiatrists characterized Black men’s participation in activism as a disease. Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon’s 1968 article “The ‘Protest’ Psychosis,” published in the esteemed Archives of General Psychiatry, was an example of this pathologizing. The authors described a newly racialized form of schizophrenia supposedly characterized by “delusional anti-whiteness.” This perceived paranoia and aggressiveness conveniently justified committing Black men who challenged racial injustice to prisons or criminal wards of psychiatric institutions.[4]

Even for nondisabled African Americans, the stigma of disability could justify discrimination and oppression. Nondisabled Black students, for instance, experienced racist assumptions about their intelligence. This stemmed from ableist eugenic fears of the so-called feebleminded in the late nineteenth century. Early intelligence quotient (IQ) tests developed amid the rise of educational psychology in the twentieth century. This created a presumption that Black students were inherently deficient in relation to their white counterparts.[5] At the height of the civil rights movement, in his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sought to explain why more than one-third of African Americans lived in poverty. Instead of citing the deep structural inequalities of American society, he attributed this to the “breakdown” of Black family life. The prevalence of female-headed “matriarchal” families, Moynihan claimed, caused “a tangle of pathology.”[6]

When activists in the mid-twentieth-century civil rights, feminist, and disability rights movements began successfully challenging injustice, they rarely accounted for the intersectional experiences of disabled African Americans. While activists pushed for change, they usually addressed racial, gender, and disability inequality separately. Many of the initial gains of the civil rights movement that challenged racial segregation and the denial of voting rights, for instance, did not extend to or account for disabled members of the Black community. At the same time, disability rights organizations, such as the independent living movement at the University of California, Berkeley spearheaded by Ed Roberts, all too often advocated for middle-class white disabled Americans—particularly white men with physical disabilities. The movement often failed to consider the ways that racism created, shaped, and exacerbated Black people’s experiences of physical, sensory, developmental, and psychological disabilities and debilitating chronic illness.

Even as civil and disability rights legislation gradually brought about change—particularly the Rehabilitation Act (1973), Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), and Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)—Black deaf and disabled Americans increasingly organized around their intersectional interests. They challenged anti-Black racism in organizations like the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and National Association of the Deaf (NAD). They also established independent groups like the National Black Deaf Advocates (NBDA). By the 2000s, disabled people of color increasingly called on activists to address not simply disability rights but disability justice.[7] This approach accounts for the multiple ways that disabled people’s lives are further complicated by racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination and makes clear that it is only through intersectional organizing that disabled people can truly create radically inclusive communities of care.