A grainy newspaper photograph captures a moment that local leaders say encapsulates a youth-led movement for disability rights in Rochester.
Sixty years later, leadership at the Center for Disability Rights wants to commemorate it.
In the image published in the former Times-Union, a group of picketers hold signs outside a Republican convention at the Rochester Community War Memorial, now known as the Blue Cross Arena.
“Governor Rockefeller says educate the handicapped. But where?” reads one sign held by the late Edward Hollembaek. He was 20 when the photo was taken.
Former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who served from 1959 to 1973, was credited with expanding rehabilitation programs for the employability of disabled people in the early '60s.
But a key aspect of employability — access to higher education — wasn't addressed until 1973, when a new law gave disabled students the legal standing to have equal access to programs that receive federal funding. And even then, physical access remained a barrier.
“Republicans were having their convention. We decided to picket it,” Hollembaek said of the 1966 protest.
At the time of his interview with WXXI News in June, Hollembaek was one of the few living people who attended that protest. He died on July 8.
The group was calling for SUNY colleges to be made accessible. Some of them, including Hollembaek and his friend James Leary, had attended Jefferson High School and were college-bound. They had state scholarships, but no state college “was equipped to accept them,” according to an article published in the Times-Union.
The goal for Hollembaek was simple: get through the door — to college classes, sure, but also to City Hall, to a restaurant, to anywhere, really.
“It was very important (to) me because I was in a regular wheelchair," Hollembaek, 79, said in his room at Monroe Community Hospital. "When I went across the street ... I had to go down the side street, find a driveway that went across, down the driveway, cross the street to another driveway, up that driveway, and over.”
The fight lasted decades, with tangible results, and in many ways it's not over — even now after his death.
What sparked Hollembaek's activism, according to him, was a story Leary told him when they were teens. Leary was not available to corroborate the story; he died in 2017. For now, it remains a piece of folklore.
Hollembaek described Leary, a student-athlete, as an Irishman with strong arms who used a wheelchair because of the lasting effects of polio, which he’d contracted at age 6.
"(It was) kind of severe. (He) spent about two years in an iron lung," he said. "... He got it just before the Salk vaccine came out."
One day, as the story goes, Leary was heading to the drugstore when a woman stopped him and asked what he was up to.
"She said, 'Well, you shouldn't be out of the house. My son has been in a chair for ... years and never left the house," Hollembaek said.
“It made me think about all the thousands that were in the house and not being able to get out because their stupid mothers or stupid fathers ... didn't want to be seen with them outside," he added. "And the state couldn't do anything because they didn't know about it, and the county didn't know about it."
Making it known circled back to the same challenge as before.
“We couldn't get up to the town hall to complain about anything because we couldn't get up the stairs to get into the town hall,” he said.
A ramp was installed at Rochester City Hall in 1971, according to the city Historian's Office — the same year Hollembaek turned 25.
But it wasn’t until the 1990s, when he was in his 40s and early 50s, that curb cuts became more ubiquitous. That was a result of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Back in the 1960s, during a time of grassroots activism for civil rights as well, he and several of the same activists he picketed with advocated for those very things.
They formed the Organization for Accessible Buildings. The group represented about 600 disabled people in Monroe County by 1969, according to the Times-Union.
Over time, the organization evolved into the not-for-profit advocacy organization Regional Center for Independent Living, according to the Center for Disability Rights.
"We now have the ADA, we have building codes, we have all of that," CDR President Bruce Darling said.
"We have all of that because these young people and other young people like them went out and did protest and did the work to actually get the ball rolling to say, 'Hey, we're a part of society. Include us.'"
Darling protested for lifts to be put on buses in the '80s, and he said the same activists picketing in 1966 were there, too, but he didn’t know it at the time.
“I knew them as board people who had careers and children and like eventually grandchildren and such, and ... they never said, 'Oh, we did this thing.'”
While it is widely acknowledged that disability rights activists learned direct action and civil disobedience from civil rights activists who came before them, there’s another detail that stands out to Darling.
Many of the disabled activists involved in the 1966 picket were athletes who traveled for competitions — including James Leary — and their coach was there with them in the headline image.
Darling’s got a working theory.
"The wheelchair sports events also pulled impacted people together. It was the space where they were talking to each other,” he said. “So, within that sports context, it appears that what they were doing was developing a consciousness, a disability consciousness.”
Darling wants to bring that awareness into the present day with some kind of historic marker, memorial, or mural at the site where that 1966 protest happened, as a reminder of who came before and what they were fighting for.
“Making the jump from 'I am broken and need to be fixed' to 'The system is broken and needs to be fixed,' is the jump that I'm trying to help people make," Darling said. “... Young people change the world. And just because, and particularly if you're disabled, don't think that that's not you.”
For Hollembaek, his message for future generations was simple:
“Continue the fight.”
