A CHRONOLOGY OF THE DISABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENTS
1900 - 1910
1901
The National Fraternal Society of the Deaf is founded by alumni at the Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint. It becomes the world's only fraternal life insurance company managed by deaf people. Through the first half of the century, it advocates for the rights of deaf people to purchase insurance and to obtain driver's licenses.
1902
Helen Keller, the first deaf-blind person to matriculate at college, publishes her autobiography, The Story of My Life, in a serial 1903 form in Ladies' Home journal in the latter part of 1902, as a book in 1903.
1907
The first issue of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind is published.
1908
Clifford Beers publishes A Mind That Found Itself, an expose of conditions inside state and private mental institutions.
1909
The New York Public School System adopts Modified, or American Braille for use in its classes for blind children, after public hearings in which blind advocates call for abandoning New York Point.
The National Committee for Mental Hygiene is founded by Clifford Beer in New York City.
The first folding wheelchairs are introduced for people with mobility disabilities.
