Credit Disabled Rights Action Committee
July is Disability Pride Month, and the Disabled Rights Action Committee in Salt Lake City is celebrating with a hybrid virtual and in-person arts event.
The Disabled Rights Action Committee was founded in 1990 by activist Barbara Toomer with a mission to demand accessible transportation in Utah.
“She used to say that it s not the people that are disabled, it s the rights that are disabled, said Psarah Johnson, the board chair for the Disabled Rights Action Committee. So the fact that we have a society that isn t accessible, that s the problem.”
Johnson said that it’s thanks to the committee that Utah has one of the most accessible public transit systems in the country. Early members took direct action by parking their wheelchairs on the TRAX lines and having “bus crawl ons.”
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Dr. John McAllister, of Little Rock, has always known that he wanted to work in a field concerning vision, even though he wasn’t always sure what that career would look like.
“I was always enamored with the eyes and vision,” McAllister said. “I was trying to figure out my path of what I wanted to do in life, and one day I thought I wanted to be an optometrist. That opportunity got away from me, and the next opportunity was in the field of blindness and vision impairment. When I got into the field, I loved it.”