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|  | | A Life Like Anybody Else by Michael S. Long (as told to Karl Williams)
Michael Long was the first person with cognitive disabilities employed by a state government (California]. He was a liaison to the disability community. He went through the CA school system before the Right To Education.
| |  | | Hello, Stranger” by Barbara Moran (as told to Karl Williams)
"Hello, Stranger" (KiCam Projects, 2019) was done with a graphic artist who has autism.
In the early 1960’s, at age eight, Barb finds herself living in Menninger’s Clinic in Topeka, KS, diagnosed as schizophrenic and treated with drugs and punishment for her inexplicable behavior. From the start she’s been very bright but human connection simply eludes her. She imagines objects (buildings, traffic signals, etc.) with faces and arms and legs; draws this world of her imagination; and speaks to objects as if to human beings. She’s in her forties before her sister Ruth, back in school to become a doctor, helps Barb receive a proper – and “forgiving” (as Barb terms it) – diagnosis of | |  | | Lost In A Desert World - Roland Johnson (as told to Karl Williams)
After spending half his childhood in Pennhurst State School and Hospital for the Mentally Retarded, Roland Johnson emerged to become a captivating speaker and a respected leader of the self-advocacy movement. The story of the path he traveled and of the people who helped him along the way is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit and the power of good will as a strategy for effecting social change.
Roland Johnson spent half his childhood at Pennhurst State School and Hospital for the Mentally Retarded, where he was sexually abused and, essentially, enslaved. When he'd won his freedom as a young adult, he spent several years putting his life back together and learning to control the anger his experience at Pennhurst had kindled in him. And then he happened upon the Philadelphia-based group Speaking For Ourselves. He quickly rose to the presidency and, in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose career he'd followed and whose death he learned of at Pennhurst, was soon traveling across |
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