Contact:
Harriet
McBryde Johnson
171 Church St, Suite 160
Charleston SC 29401
843/722-0178
(office - through Fri 31 Aug)
843/577-6550 (home - Labor Day
weekend)
HarrietJohnson@compuserve.com
Disability Activists to Jerry Lewis and MDA:
"WE'RE NOT STAYING IN OUR HOUSES!"
For immediate release:
Charleston, SC --- 8/22/01 -- On Labor Day morning, September 3, a group of people with disabilities and friends will take to the streets to protest the annual telethon of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Protesters charge MDA and its chief spokesman, comedian Jerry Lewis, with using false and demeaning stereotypes to raise money.
Protests have occurred here every Labor Day since 1991 and have occurred in other cities around the US. However, this year there's new fuel in the fire. In May, Martha Teichner of CBS asked Lewis how he felt about his disabled critics. His reply: "You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!"
Says local protest organizer Harriet McBryde Johnson, "The Remark of the 20th of May just floored me. Lewis is talking to a people who have a long history of being locked up in institutions and shut up in back rooms. His contempt for our hard-won right to be out in the world, speaking our truth, can't go unchallenged."
Over the years, Lewis has called people with muscle diseases "half persons," disabled children "mistakes who came out wrong," and wheelchairs "steel imprisonments." MDA has stood by him despite harsh criticism from some of the people it is set up to serve. However, a storm of protest after the May 20 remark did result in an apology -- the first ever -- from MDA and Lewis. But, according to Johnson, "It's way too little, way too late. MDA needs to give this open disability bigot the boot. And it needs to change its ways. A first step would be to stop putting children on the air."
Johnson has one of the neuromuscular diseases covered by MDA. "The telethon was a real cloud on my childhood," she says, "I thought of myself as a dying child." At age 44, she has practiced law in Charleston since 1985.
This year protests are expected in over a dozen cities, from Western Massachusettes to Southern California, and including Denver, Washington, Chicago, and Salt Lake City. According to Laura Hershey, a former MDA poster child who organizes the protest in Denver, "Activists will be sending the message that pity is a form of prejudice. People with disabilities want rights, not pity." Hershey has set up a website to coordinate Labor Day protests at www.cripcommentary.com/LewisVsDisabilityRights.html, to which Johnson has contributed material.
Says Johnson, "We are getting tremendously broad support this year. I'm very proud that our state AFL-CIO has made a public statement of solidarity." Last summer, Donna Dewitt, state president, wrote to all affiliates encouraging them not to participate in the telethon and to support the struggle for disability rights.
The Charleston group will picket and distribute handbills in the King-Meeting-Market area on Labor Day morning. They can be interviewed on the corner of King and Market at 11:00 am or by appointment.