Willie Mae Goodman decided to send her daughter Marguerite to the Willowbrook State School when Marguerite was four years old. Marguerite was born with developmental disabilities, and doctors argued that Willowbrook was an appropriate place for her.
Conditions for Marguerite, and other children and adults at Willowbrook, were horrible. The facility drew criticism from Senator Robert Kennedy, who described it as “not fit for animals,” as Mrs. Goodman recalls.
Mrs. Willie Mae Goodman heard many people speak of her daughter’s death. When she was an infant and a toddler, doctors encouraged Mrs. Goodman and her husband to place Marguerite in an institution. Her doctors predicted that Marguerite would not live beyond two years, and they told her parents that they could send her away.
Marguerite Goodman lived at the Gouverneur Hospital in lower Manhattan. Her mother, Willie Mae Goodman, organized to improve Marguerite’s life at Gouverneur. This article by the New York Daily News identifies the many ways she and other family members of residents worked to change Gouverneur.
Located near the town of Hunter, New York, in the Catskill Mountains (a few hours from New York City), Camp Jened was unusual at the time for its focus on Disabled campers.1
The grounds of Camp Jened included a river, a lake with a dock for boating and places to row, swimming facilities, and a stream that was great for fishing.1 Camp Jened also had a large grassy field where campers and counselors gathered to play baseball.
Camp Jened was a private camp, and it charged campers’ families for attendance. Founders Leona Burger and Honora Rubenstein reported that they kept the fees as low as possible. But not everyone could afford to pay these fees.1
For Camp Jened to be accessible to Disabled children and adults, staff and counselors had to work well with campers. Some of the staff at Camp Jened were disabled themselves, but all received training in how to support Disabled youth and adults.1
Camp Jened was located in the northern Catskills, on over 250 acres (which is about ⅓ the size of Central Park, or as big as 250 football fields) with 22 buildings near the town of Hunter, New York. The camp’s founders designed it to welcome Disabled children and adults, who did not often have access to summer camps and outdoor recreation. Camp Jened was the first camp of its kind for Disabled youth in New York and first opened in July 1953. It ran until August of 1977, and then reopened in 1980.1
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated. At this time, public schools could still turn away children if they thought they were “uneducable.”1
Parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities were often told to send their children to a state residential school if their IQ scores were low. Schools could set a cut-off for IQ scores and then exclude children with scores below that cut-off from public special education classes.1 Some families who had the financial means chose to keep their children at home, but still wanted them to be educated. One such parent, Ann Greenberg, placed a classified ad in the New York Post, looking for parents interested in starting their own day program for children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Her advertisement (and others like this billboard) eventually attracted hundreds of people looking for similar support for their children.2
By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed. The difference of a few points on a single test could mean placement or exclusion from a regular class with academic instruction. CRMD classes - or classes for “children with retarded mental development” as they were called by the Board of Education - had much lower expectations for students and too frequently had teachers who were not trained to support students with intellectual and other disabilities.1
Scholar W.E.B. DuBois was an editor of The Crisis, a magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (or NAACP). DuBois wrote a short editorial in the magazine, responding to claims that intelligence test scores showed Black people to be less intelligent than white people.
The US Army offered up its recruits as a test population for the new intelligence tests. The tests had been initiated in France but then modified for new uses in the US by psychologists like Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes. The test’s creators promised to help the Army discern levels of preparation and aptitude among its soldiers.1
In 1905, French psychologist and educator Albert Binet created a tool that he hoped would help to identify and understand children who were struggling in school. Binet’s scale identified particular tasks that a “normal” child was supposed to be able to complete by a given age. This came to be called the person’s “mental age,” meaning that an 18 year old who could complete the tasks listed for a 12 year old but not those of older children would be said to have a “mental age” of 12. Binet did not think that the scale measured student’s natural intelligence, and he thought that intelligence could change over time.1
Henry Goddard was a psychologist living and working in New Jersey. He was the head of the Vineland Institute, but also researched and wrote about Disabled people and people labeled as disabled in locations around the country. In this report, he comments on the use of the Binet intelligence test to determine whether “delinquent girls” had the mental capacity to be responsible for their actions, or whether they did not.
A school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities opened on Randall’s Island in the East River in the 1860s - alongside the city’s almshouse, hospitals, and prisons. By the early 1900s, the school had been renamed the “Custodial Asylum and School for the Feeble-Minded.”1 At the time, the term “feeble minded” was a label used by educators, doctors, and government officials to indicate that a person had an intellectual disability. Intelligence tests were an important, if not the only, factor in deciding whether a person would be labeled “feeble minded.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City required more and more students to attend school and prohibited them from working. In these years, the school system created a variety of special classes and schools for Disabled children, as well as for students who skipped school or otherwise got into trouble. Deaf students went to specialized schools for a few years, and then were expected to join their non-disabled peers in general education classrooms. Blind students were also intended to learn beside their non-disabled peers with the help of special instructors. The Board of Education created ungraded classes for children with intellectual disabilities, who educators thought should be segregated from other children and learn different subjects. Though not specifically mentioned in this document, some children with physical disabilities received home instruction because architectural barriers kept them from accessing school buildings.
Special education classes for children with intellectual disabilities were pioneered in New York City by a social welfare reformer, Elizabeth Farrell. Farrell had been working with Lillian Wald and other reformers at the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. Henry Street was built to provide community support and education to new immigrants to New York City, most of them from southern and eastern Europe.
In the 1830s, the City purchased Randall’s Island to use as a remote burial ground for the poor and as an almshouse. Blackwell’s and Wards Islands were purchased later, and more institutions were built on the three islands to house and care for “various indigent, criminal, ill, poor, and disabled populations.”1 Journalist W. H. Davenport visited the “Insane Asylum” and “Orphanage and Idiot Asylum,” publishing his accounts of the residents and life in those facilities.2 The articles give a view of the conditions in these early reform institutions. Non-disabled children at the orphanage were taught in classes overseen by the NYC Department of Education. Children with physical disabilities (of which there were many) were taught how to craft products that could be sold. Children at the “Idiot Asylum” also had classes with a goal of preparing them for “useful occupations.”3
Édouard Séguin learned how to teach children with intellectual disabilities when he lived in France. Later, Séguin moved to the US and helped found schools around the country.
