How Camp Jened Changed Perspectives
HUNTER — When we look back on the many activist groups in the United States during the 1960s and 70s, our minds quickly turn to the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-War protests, Feminist groups, Gay Rights, and early Environmental activism. They were busy, culture-shifting times. Amidst all of it, the story of Disability in Action (DIA) has often been shamefully overlooked in conversations about the revolutionary era. Fortunately, the story of the long road toward the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and some of its most ferocious activists has been told in the 2020 documentary, “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution,” which is currently streaming on Netflix. “Crip Camp” begins in the summer of 1971 at Camp Jened in Hunter.
The summer camp for disabled teenagers started in 1955, but after passing through the revolutionary spin cycle of the 1960s, Camp Jened had become a wildly different place by the summer of 1971. One camper reminisced about listening to the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival on her aunt’s shortwave radio in 1969 and wishing she could be in the mud with everyone else. She commented on her arrival at Camp Jened in 1971, “This was our Woodstock!” Footage from the summer shows counselors and campers playing Grateful Dead songs on acoustic guitars and banging on chairs. Camper James Lebrecht (who co-directed the film) explained he’d heard a rumor the counselors might smoke joints with the campers. The tantalizing rumor sealed the deal for Lebracht, who’d been born with spina bifida, to make the trip for the summer. One former camper recounted how a counselor taught him how to kiss, calling it “the best physical therapy I have ever had.”
Camp Jened comes across as a land of the forgotten in the film, with no apparent oversight or regulations. Many campers found love, and one hilarious scene shows the campers irreverently reacting to an outbreak of crabs. Two former counselors noted they’d had no experience with a disabled person before arriving in Hunter and indicated that they had changed as people upon leaving. The head of the camp, Larry Allison, explains that they wanted to make Camp Jened a place where “teens can be teens” and repositioned the counselors as representatives of society as a whole, explaining that they, not the disabled campers, were the problems that needed to reconfigure their perceptions.
The film also offers a brief, nightmarish glimpse into the horrific conditions at Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, and we can only come away thinking the folks at Camp Jened were getting something very right in 1971 and the Jened campers very lucky.
Camp Jened’s 1971 campers emerged from their experience changed and motivated. Judith Heumann remains at the center of the film’s story. The former camper spearheads an unrelenting activist movement following her time as a that runs into barricade after barricade. Feeling that they had reached a “Yahoo moment” in 1972 with the Nondiscrimination Act for People with Disabilities, the joy quickly flatlined following a veto from President Richard Nixon, citing the high costs of upgrading infrastructure as the reason (a moment that caused me to yell at my television). Their fight continued through the Carter administration, involving risky sit-ins, hunger strikes, and building occupations. They watched in sadness as the Reagan administration ramped up weapons spending and threatened the funding of their goals. By the time we finally see George H.W. Bush sign the ADA into law, our relief as viewers is tempered with anger that the path was so long and hard-fought. It had been nearly 20 years since the life-changing summer at Camp Jened, and the summer spent in Hunter revealed to campers and counselors alike that things could be different for them and inspired the young group to prove that to the rest of the world.
“Crip Camp” charts the unbelievable path of the campers from teenagers enjoying a loose summer getaway to challenging and defeating oppressive governmental and societal blockades to their freedom. Their story has every bit of the revolutionary spirit and fight we associate with other activist movements of the era, yet somehow, it isn’t the first to come to our mind. “Crip Camp” might just change that for you.
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