Disability and Ethnic Diversity

Historical Perceptions of Disability

Prior to the 20th century, the term disability was not commonly used to describe a group of people with varying impairments. More common names were blind, deaf, mute, inferior, imbecile, idiot, cripple, midget, monster, and freak. In extreme cases, disabled people were put to death under law or murdered. More often, newborns with disfigurements or defects were killed or died from neglect or the denial of treatment within days or weeks of birth. Family members with impairments were frequently hidden from view to protect them from ridicule or the disabled member from harm.

Often children with disabilities were excluded from public school programs. A few private entities offered educational opportunities that only wealthy families could afford, such as the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb that opened in 1817. State educational institutions for the deaf began in 1823, and for the “feeble-minded” in 1852. Black children had no access to public education, regardless whether they had a disability.

Data on the prevalence of disabilities in the general population of enslaved people prior to U.S. independence from Great Britain do not largely exist. The earliest data from the U.S. Census of 1830 found 5,363 whites and 743 free blacks and enslaved people identified as “deaf and dumb,” and 3,974 whites and 1,470 free blacks and enslaved people as “blind.” These persons accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. population at the time. In subsequent censuses, additional disability and racial data were collected, including for the categories of “deaf, dumb, idiotic, blind, insane, or pauper” in 1850; and differentiating between whites, “free mulat-toes,” “free blacks,” and slaves in 1860; and adding mixed race, Chinese, and Indian, as well as multiple disabilities, in 1870.

Civil War to 1900

The U.S. Civil War created a cohort of veterans with disabilities; more than 850,000 Union army veterans, including nearly 200,000 African Americans, acquired a permanent disability. Over the next 50 years, Congress implemented and enhanced a pension scheme of medical care and monthly compensation for Civil War disabled veterans to offset their inability to work, under the General Law of 1862. The General Law created a comprehensive evaluation system for rating claimants in terms of their inability to work, based on impairment to specific physical functioning (such as one amputated leg or loss of vision in both eyes). Quantification of impairment in this manner shaped public understanding of disability for the next 100 years, whereby “disability” was defined and determined by the medical community based on the “incapacity to perform manual labor.” This medical model viewed having a disability as a “personal tragedy” that ensured the “victim's” low productivity or inability to work, and condemned them to “the mercy and charity of society.”

...