By Arianna Basche

Phyllis Zlotnick graduated with honors from Portland High School on June 23, 1960. This occasion was one of the few times she had ever entered the school building because it was not accessible to her. She used a wheelchair, and schools were not yet required to have ramps, elevators, or wide doorways. So, from seventh grade through her senior year, Phyllis attended classes from home via an intercom system. The Hartford Courant published an article about Phyllis and a handful of other students on August 21, 1955, titled “Youngsters Go To Class By Phone.” The unnamed author wrote, “Many educators and civic officials . . . acclaimed the ‘home-bound’ phone system as a ‘lifesaver’ for the shut-in student.”

The characterization of disabled people as “shut-ins” was something that Phyllis fiercely challenged in her adulthood. She recognized she was being “shut out” of society, a phrase she used in her writings and public testimonies at the Connecticut state capitol. With this realization, she dedicated her life to claiming the right to participate in public life, starting with the legal fight over making sidewalks accessible to people using wheelchairs.

Facing Exclusion

Phyllis was born in Hartford in 1942. She was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition that causes progressive muscle weakness, at birth. Her older brother Seymour also had muscular dystrophy. When Phyllis started first grade, besides an inpatient institution, the only educational option available to her was extremely limited at-home tutoring sessions with four to eight hours of instruction per week.

When Hartford launched its first class for disabled children in 1949, Phyllis’s parents successfully advocated for their second-grade daughter to join it. On December 4, 1949, The Hartford Courant covered the launch of the new program with the headline “10 Handicapped Children Happy Over School Class.” Students aged 6 to 12 were taught in one room on the first floor of Naylor School. They did not interact with the rest of the students in the school. Transportation was handled by Peter F. Kelley, a driver who carried each child to and from the car every day.

Phyllis alternated between classes at Naylor School and Newington Children’s Hospital’s inpatient school until seventh grade, when her family moved to Portland, and she started attending school remotely. It was her first time sharing classes with nondisabled peers, but because the school building was not accessible, she could only do so through her intercom system at home. In undated handwritten remarks housed among the Phyllis Zlotnick Papers in the Archives and Special Collections of the University of Connecticut Library, Phyllis said the exclusion she experienced early in life left her “psychologically unprepared” to live in the “normal world.” She continued, “It took many years before I adjusted—a lot of pain before I was able to shrug off shyness and the feeling of being different.”

Building Community

During her teenage years, most of Phyllis’s socializing happened at Camp Hemlocks, a program in Trumbull for disabled children run by the Easter Seals Society. In an oral history recorded by Leslie Burkhart, Phyllis recalled participating in dances and other camp activities. She said she lived for her three weeks at camp, where she had the freedom to be herself: “It was all I cared about all year . . . I’d be packed weeks before I left” (Zlotnick Papers, UConn Library). She also found a way to interact with other people year-round using amateur radio. She would open her frequency daily and connect with fellow ham radio operators worldwide.

Phyllis worked from home for the first few years after high school, operating a self-owned telephone answering service. She could have continued harnessing the capabilities of telephone communication like she had in school and made this a long-term career. Still, in 1965, Phyllis entered the Hartford Easter Seals Rehabilitation Center’s occupational therapy program. This was a turning point for her. “Until I went here nobody had bothered to think of me as being able to do things for myself,” she said in The Hartford Courant’s April 8, 1974, article “Handicapped Woman Fights for Rights.” At the center, she learned how to do more tasks necessary for daily life without assistance, like transferring herself in and out of her wheelchair.

In January 1967, the center had a job opening for a full-time receptionist. She advocated for herself, and after a weeklong trial period, she was hired. Phyllis was 25 years old, and it was her first time working outside her home. Her father, Seymour, built a ramp and modified his Volkswagen van so he could drive her to work every day. He also crafted a wooden name block for her desk, a gift she treasured.

Phyllis continued finding her community. She started attending adult sessions at Camp Harkness in Waterford, a program of the United Cerebral Palsy Association (UCPA). There, she met her lifelong friend, Bob Williams. She also started square dancing at UCPA’s Adult Activity Center, an activity she participated in for much of her life with her team, the Square Wheelers. These programs were possible because UCPA provided van transportation for participants. She thrived in these spaces designed for people with disabilities. She no longer experienced community for only three weeks a year; her life was now full of connection.

Gaining Momentum

In 1971, Phyllis’s growing sense of independence came undone when her father had a disabling stroke. He could no longer drive her to work. Public transportation was not an option because it was not accessible. After five years as a receptionist at the center, she was forced to resign. At this point, her thinking shifted, as she described in a January 9, 1979, letter to John Doyle, the executive director of Hartford Easter Seals: “My main involvement in the advocacy movement began five years ago as a lonely frustrated citizen trying to understand why I was being shut out of society. As an individual, I began to obtain information from state and federal agencies as to what my rights were . . . I learned I was one of many disabled people unaware of rights.”

Meanwhile, federal policy started to recognize the rights of people with disabilities. In September 1973, the newly enacted federal Rehabilitation Act borrowed language from Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It included a section that stated no person could “be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” on the basis of having a disability. However, no regulations were put in place at that time, so the law was unenforceable. Still, as historian Kim Nielsen asserts in A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2012), the act laid the groundwork for a wave of disability rights activism that would draw on principles and methods of the antiwar and Black freedom movements.

In late 1973, Phyllis and a group of nine other disabled people formed the Consumer Advocacy Council (CAC), a body elected by UCPA’s disabled members. Phyllis was the secretary and spokesperson; her camp friend, Bob Williams, was president. The group planned to tackle many issues: the first one listed in Phyllis’s meeting notes was architectural barriers, followed by transportation, housing, education, employment, medical equipment, and public attitudes. There was no way to achieve full equality without addressing all these intertwining problems. Without accessible transportation, there would be no way to get to work or school; architectural barriers would make it impossible to get through the door. For the government to act, public attitudes would need to shift, yet existing barriers made it difficult for people with disabilities to make their voices heard in public.

Phyllis gave public testimony at the state capitol for the first time on March 4, 1974. She told the Connecticut General Assembly Transportation Committee she was too unfamiliar with any legislation to quote bills, but “I am qualified to speak as an interested citizen.” She asked lawmakers to put themselves in the position of someone who had suddenly lost their means of transportation. “Would you give up your job, your social and recreational life, your opportunity to live as you see fit all because you didn’t have transportation?” she asked. “I did—no one gave me a choice.”

Two months later, Phyllis spearheaded Connecticut’s first statewide Awareness Day on May 1, 1974. The CAC invited leaders to spend the day in a wheelchair or blindfolded to help them recognize the many architectural barriers around them. Mayors and town managers from Ansonia, Bloomfield, Manchester, Middletown, New Britain, and Southington, a couple of state representatives, and faculty members on UConn’s Storrs campus all partook, making headlines in The Hartford Courant. In the lead-up to Awareness Day, journalist Rick Rogoway reported on his experience trying to navigate downtown Hartford in a wheelchair: “I realized quickly that, unless I wanted to limit my range to one city block, my mobility depended on either the magical emergence of curb ramps or the good will of others” (The Hartford Courant, April 28, 1974).

At that time, the only way for a person using a wheelchair to get from sidewalk to sidewalk without assistance was to “jaywalk” whenever they could find a private driveway to use as a ramp. Otherwise, they had to travel on the road. Phyllis could be seen wheeling down the busy streets of Hartford, as photographed by The Hartford Times. Phyllis later said that whenever someone would ask her where she got the nerve to propel herself down a busy road, she would tell them, “It takes more nerve to sit home and accept a futile existence” (Public Testimony, January 24, 1977).

When Phyllis saw Awareness Day participants pledge to remove certain architectural barriers, she called the day “a shot of adrenaline toward change” (The Hartford Courant, May 9, 1974). She kept up the momentum. Over the course of a few months, she went from being unable to comment on specific bills to proposing policies herself. Between the 1974 and 1975 legislative sessions, Phyllis compiled laws from other states and cities regarding curb cuts—ramps cut into curbs to provide access between the sidewalk and the street. She subscribed to Accent on Living, a national publication about living with disabilities, and clipped a page from the winter 1973 issue: an engineering diagram of a curb cut with the caption, “This diagram may be helpful to your city officials. Show it to them; it could get this idea started in your city.” Phyllis turned her findings into a list of bill proposals, which she shared with the General Law Interim Subcommittee on Removing Architectural Barriers to the Handicapped and Elderly on September 30, 1974.

Making Progress

“It has taken me a lifetime to overcome social prejudice and be able to say to you that I am as worthy a neighbor and citizen as anyone,” Phyllis testified before the General Law Committee in March 1975. “It is not charity or humanitarian to remove physical and attitudinal barriers; man put those barriers there, man can remove them.” She argued for a host of bills, including one requiring all newly constructed and reconstructed sidewalks to be ramped at intersections, accompanied by a textured edge to notify blind people of the crossing. A small group of others who used wheelchairs, including fellow CAC members and her brother, Seymour, also testified. Phyllis handed the committee a statement and a list of signatures, ensuring those who could not attend the hearing could still be represented. In May, Phyllis organized another Awareness Day to continue building public support for the proposals. The curb cut bill passed the Connecticut House and Senate in a unanimous vote of those present.

Removing architectural barriers required sustained action. According to a January 25, 1977, Hartford Courant article, the Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed a bill that year to eliminate all specifications for curb cuts because, a DOT spokesman claimed, they inhibited construction. When Phyllis went to testify in opposition to the bill, she found the Transportation Committee hearing was being held in an inaccessible room with eight steps leading up to the entrance. This did not deter Phyllis. In fact, she saw it as an opportunity to expose the barriers standing in the way of full democratic participation for people with disabilities. She got legislators to lift her up the stairs and had the whole thing photographed. In her testimony, she said, “It is unconscionable that a bill directly concerning the physically handicapped would be discussed in a room that is inaccessible.” She went on to say that since the 1975 law went into effect, “only a handful of sidewalks installed . . . have been cut and then only after pressure.” The DOT withdrew its proposal, and instead, an amendment was passed to enhance enforcement of the 1975 curb cut law. The revised law also pushed back the timeline for implementation to October 1977.

Making Waves

Phyllis wanted to share her newfound legislative knowledge with as many people with disabilities as possible. She began a nationally published column for Accent on Living called “Eye on Congress,” where she broke down proposed and existing legislation and called on readers to speak up for themselves by contacting their representatives or writing to their local newspapers. In her first column in the summer of 1975, Phyllis wrote, “Much can be done without ever leaving your room, and much can be done by those who are able to make themselves visable [sic],” recognizing that people with disabilities could find ways to join the struggle for their own rights, even if the existing obstacles made it difficult. “Make waves—you’ll be helping yourself and others as well.”

Throughout the 1980s, Phyllis pushed Connecticut to become more accessible, working for the office of the Connecticut Speaker of the House and then as a consultant for the newly created Office of Protection and Advocacy for Handicapped and Developmentally Disabled Persons. Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut recommended Phyllis for the National Council on Disability, as reported in The Hartford Courant on November 27, 1985. Weicker said that considering the council’s goal was to help shape federal policy, “I know of no one better to make such a contribution than Phyllis Zlotnick.” She was appointed to the council by President Ronald Reagan and served during the critical period between 1986 and 1990. The council’s report, titled On the Threshold of Independence, helped shape the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), first introduced by Senator Weicker in 1988. Bob Williams was one of the key lobbyists for the bill, which finally passed in 1990. The vision put forth by Phyllis and other disabled people started to become a reality. Barrier after barrier came down in Connecticut and across the country.

Phyllis died at her home in South Windsor in 2011. She was 69 years old. While creating a path for herself, Phyllis Zlotnick paved the way for others with disabilities. The curb cuts we see in sidewalks today are traces of her legacy.

Arianna Basche is the editorial assistant for Connecticut Explored.