Interview with Willie Mae Goodman, excerpt
Willie Mae Goodman decided to send her daughter Marguerite to the Willowbrook State School when Marguerite was four years old.
intellectual disabilities
Willie Mae Goodman and Marguerite Goodman
Mrs. Willie Mae Goodman heard many people speak of her daughter’s death.
Mom is Worthy Opponent for State
Marguerite Goodman lived at the Gouverneur Hospital in lower Manhattan.
Reflections - August, 1967, excerpt
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.
Baseball
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.
Camp Scholarships Will Be Awarded to Handicapped Adults
Camp Jened was a private camp, and it charged campers’ families for attendance.
Memorandum to Counselors
For Camp Jened to be accessible to Disabled children and adults, staff and counselors had to work well with campers.
Camp Jened - Real Camping for the Handicapped, cover
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.
We Kept Our Retarded Child At Home, excerpt
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.
AHRC First Fundraising Billboard
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.
Jim Crow School Kids as Mentally Unfit
By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed.
Race Intelligence, excerpt
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).
Army Beta Test and Results
The US Army offered up its recruits as a test population for the new intelligence tests.
The Binet-Simon Scale, excerpt
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.
Delinquent Girls Tested by the Binet Scale, excerpt
Henry Goddard was a psychologist living and working in New Jersey.
The Feeble Minded in New York, excerpts
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.
New York City’s Schools and What They Cost
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City required more and more students to attend school and prohibited them from working.
Elizabeth Farrell and Ungraded Classes
Special education classes for children with intellectual disabilities were pioneered in New York City by a social welfare reformer, Elizabeth Farrell.
Map of Randall’s, Hart, and Blackwell’s Islands
In the 1830s, the City purchased Randall’s Island to use as a remote burial ground for the poor and as an almshouse.
The Idiot School
Édouard Séguin learned how to teach children with intellectual disabilities when he lived in France.