Michael Winter:
Man of
Thought, Man of Action
By Kathi Wolfe
“That’s my son’s cap. I’d
never wear anything with the Los Angeles Angels on it,”
disability rights leader Michael Winter said on the way to an interview at an
Arlington, Va., coffee shop, when a reporter asked about his baseball cap.
“I’m a Chicago Cubs fan!”
From the get-go, Winter, the 56-year-old director of the Federal
Transit Administration’s Office of Civil Rights, wants you to know his
many loves: his wife Atsuko Kuwana and 16-year-old son Taka, wheelchair sports,
philosophy, civil rights and his hometown of Chicago.
The former president of the National Council on Independent
Living said his disability “isn’t all of Michael Winter. I’m a
father, a son, a civil rights activist, a director of an agency in the federal
bureaucracy....a Bears fan.” But you shouldn’t try to deny that you
have a disability either, he added. “You should try (to) embrace it and
figure out ... how does that change you?”
Since his birth in 1951, Winter has had osteogenesis imperfecta
(known informally as “OI” or “soft bones”), and he uses a
wheelchair. The same disability affected his two brothers and his sister.
Like many others of his generation, Winter grew up before
inclusion of pupils with disabilities was common in schools. “Back then,
in Chicago, anyone who had a disability had to go to a ‘special
school,’” Winter said.
The Chicagoan first went to a “special” grammar school
and then to Spaulding High School, where every student had a disability. The
school was primarily a “big babysitting service” and “the
environment was condescending,” Winter said.
But for Winter, there were some positive elements in his years
at Spaulding. At that time in Chicago, schools were segregated according to
race and class by neighborhood, but Spaulding “was the only integrated
school (across racial and class lines) in the whole city.”
Learning “from different people and different
cultures” was a good experience, said Winter, citing the peer support he
received from being with other disabled people. Even though only 5 percent of
Spaulding students went to college, “there were a lot of teachers there
that ... were ahead of their times in terms of challenging students.”
Winter recalled one math teacher as very strict, making it
“hard to get a good grade from her.” Even so, he got A’s in her
class. “I ended up in a good position to deal with numbers, which I deal a
lot with now. I deal a lot with budgets.” When he was NCIL president from
1989 to 1991, budgeting was “one of the big issues.”
Advocacy was in Winter’s DNA. His mother, despite being a
single parent and having a very mild form of OI, was a “strong advocate
for us” and “helped me to....capitalize on opportunities,” he
said.
One of Winter’s earliest experiences with advocacy occurred
in 1965 when he was a freshman at Spaulding after school officials ruled that
“we couldn’t have any French fries....any fun stuff.” His
brother Russell, a senior (since deceased), led the lunchroom protest, he said.
Approximately 300 students, opposed to being served
“institutional food,” sang protest songs and staged a lunch strike
that lasted about three weeks, Winter said. Things got “testy” when
the protesters threw hot dogs, served by the cafeteria, into the air. “The
principal was....saying how bad we were....how ‘crippled’ kids
weren’t allowed to go to school before us.” In the end, though,
“We won!” he said, adding that the experience was good preparation
for becoming an advocate.
In 1969, he enrolled at Southern Illinois University in
Carbondale, Ill., later graduating with a B.A. in 1973. At college, “I
really fell in love with philosophy,” said Winter, who majored in that and
minored in black studies. Philosophy “gave me the ability to ....think
about different ways of doing things.”
Around this time, philosophy was just starting to deal with
civil rights issues, Winter said. “It fit in with the 1960s and early
1970s, getting into ‘we exist to have meaning, and having meaning is
taking on the social and moral issues of the day.’”
Reading Socrates taught him how to engage in dialogue and how to
question things, Winter said. Reading Descartes showed him how to think about
things from a logical point of view. “This was helpful,” Winter
added, “because....when you’re looking at civil rights issues....you
have to think about what’s going to happen if you do this...if you do
that.” That, in turn, helps you form arguments and develop strategies, he
said. For his thesis, Winter compared the thoughts of Immanuel Kant and
Friedrich Nietzsche. (It was heady stuff, but interesting, he said.)
Karl Marx’s theory of alienation interested Winter. “I
thought it was interesting to see....the identity of people and how they relate
to their environment,” he said. French existentialist philosophers Camus
and Sartre also fascinated him by raising such thought-provoking questions as:
“’Do I want to be here just to exist? Just to make a living? Or do I
want to go beyond that and make an impact on society?’”
Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired
him “to look at....how they were able to....deal with independence and
civil rights issues in a peaceful manner,” Winter said. From them, he
learned, if you think something’s right, don’t be afraid to act on
what you need to, but “do it in a peaceful way.” From them, he got
“true philosophical grounding.”
For a more practical point of view, Winter studied the work of
community organizer Saul Alinsky, who also hailed from Chicago.
“It was amazing! How he used the peaceful tactics of
organizing to achieve what he wanted to achieve.” Winter began to use
Alinsky’s methods at Southern Illinois University.
In 1954, because the school’s president’s wife used a
wheelchair, Southern Illinois became one of the first accessible colleges in
the country, Winter said. “It wasn’t perfect, but by 1969 it was a
pretty accessible campus, (although) the community wasn’t as
accessible.”
The college, though, still needed to be more inclusive for
students with disabilities, Winter said. Taking their cue from Alinsky, he and
others with disabilities took over the university president’s office and
chained a wheelchair to his desk “when we wanted to make....
transportation accessible to disabled people,” Winter said. The group had
a good relationship with the press, he said, so knowing that this would get
attention, “we blocked traffic during the lunch hour.” Such
high-profile techniques worked successfully to improve transportation and to
“get disabled students more involved in campus life.”
The issue of identity was paramount to Winter during his college
years. “I was always trying to understand (it),” he said. “Who
am I? What am I?” He found it intriguing that the feminist movement
attacked this issue head-on. “That was the first issue they went
after,” Winter said, “How are we defining ourselves? How are we
letting other people define ourselves?”
Winter, like a few other pioneering disability advocates of his
generation, began to apply those feminist questions to disability rights
issues. “One of the problems that we’ve had in the disability rights
movement is how we’re defined,” he said, “Part of the issue has
always been that we’re treated as medical problems on the medical
model.”
He’s not the first to come up with this analysis, Winter
said, but “it was interesting....going to college...being a
‘handicapped student,’ (figuring out) how to deal with that identity
crisis.”
Winter formed his identity through wheelchair sports (basketball
and track and field), studying philosophy and getting involved in protests
against the Vietnam War. The anti-war crowd was perhaps more accepting of
differences, such as disability, he said. “I....enjoyed my identity as a
disabled person....because it helped launch my advocacy career.”
After college, Winter went to grad school and studied
rehabilitation administration at Southern Illinois. His budgeting and
management classes helped develop his skills, “but in terms of the rehab
model....I just didn’t enjoy it at all.” Most of the other students
were condescending. “Sheltered workshops” were their “big
thing,” he said, “I never finished (the graduate degree). I decided
that I didn’t want to do it.”
In 1977, seeking a “radical” locale, Winter went to
the 5-year-old Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, Calif., where he
completed a six-month internship with renowned disability rights activist
Judith E. Heumann. After that, the CIL hired him to be client service manager,
a position he held for four years.
The Berkeley CIL then was “revolutionary – cutting
edge,” Winter recalled. It was exciting to watch Heumann and others
“organize demonstrations.... (provide) services to get disabled people out
of institutions,” he said. In those days, the idea of people with
disabilities living in their own homes was beyond belief to some, Winter said.
“Some people felt this was very dangerous to put a blind person in society
– they were going to get hit by a car — (or) a person in a wheelchair
wasn’t going to be able to take care of himself.”
His work with client services was grueling, Winter said. Then as
now, people needed peer counseling, independent skills training and help with
finding accessible housing and personal care assistants, he said. The
excitement of working at the CIL, plus the work of the 80-something staff and
volunteers whom he supervised, kept him from getting burned out.
Winter places the founding of the Berkeley CIL at the forefront
of the independent living and disability rights movements. “It created the
organizational structure to get to ‘504,’” he said.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits entities
receiving federal funds from discriminating against people with disabilities.
Demonstrations and sit-ins conducted by disability activists in San Francisco,
Washington, D.C., and across the country led to the 1977 signing of regulations
implementing Section 504.
Winter managed client services at the Berkeley CIL until 1981.
For two years, he directed a center for independent living in Hawaii, then
returned to Berkeley and directed the CIL for 12 years. One of his key
responsibilities was to help the center deal with some financial difficulties.
“When President Reagan got in, he cut a lot of the money to
social services,” and organizations did not want to lay off staff.
Winter’s strategy was “first of all...to bring about fiscal
responsibility. We had to make sure that we only did what we could pay
for.” At the same time, he began aggressively raising money in the private
sector. “We ended up raising about a million dollars a year,” he
said.
While Winter was at the Berkeley CIL, he studied business
administration at San Francisco State University and succumbed to the lure of
politics. Though he lost when he ran for a City Council position in Berkeley in
1986, Winter soon successfully campaigned for a seat on the Alameda-Contra
Costa Transit District (AC Transit) Board of Directors. He served on the board
for six years, four of which included chairing the finance committee.
During that time, Winter was elected president of NCIL.
“The reason I ran for that was that was during the ADA legislative period
(the time spent lobbying for and implementing the Americans with Disabilities
Act, enacted in 1990).”
During the ADA signing, “it just felt like you were truly a
citizen of the United States of America,” he said. NCIL’s main role
in getting the ADA passed “was to understand the legislative part. NCIL
(also) led the way in grassroots organization, getting people to lobby.”
During this time, there were echoes of his Berkeley days, and he
ended up in jail during one protest, which he believes was organized by ADAPT.
Though he and the other demonstrators were in jail for about a day, “It
was OK,” Winter said. “We sang songs. I’ve been arrested about
10 times for civil disobedience.”
Since 1994, Winter has held various positions at the U.S.
Department of Transportation. From 1994 to 1997, he served as special assistant
to the associate deputy secretary and director of the Office of Intermodalism,
a branch within the office of the secretary of transportation. Winter was
associate administrator for budget and policy with the Federal Transit
Administration from 1997 to 2000.
Since 2001, in his current FTA post, he is responsible for the
full range of federal civil rights responsibilities as they apply to the ADA,
the amended Rehabilitation Act, the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program,
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and environmental justice issues.
“They’re all ... tough jobs,” Winter said. Though
it’s hard to do civil rights work in today’s climate, he added,
“I really admire my staff (of 29).”
The independent living movement is still on Winter’s mind.
Today, people involved in CILs don’t see themselves in as much of an
advocacy role as he and his colleagues did in the movement’s early days,
Winter said. “There needs to be a re-energizing of the independent living
movement. There (are) issues that (still) need to be taken on: personal care
assistance, health care issues, voter registration.”
Though Winter enjoys his work, he’s ready, he said,
“to let go a little bit” so that the next generation can begin to
take over leadership of the movement. Passing the torch is critical, he said.
“It’s important for us to trust them.”
*******************************
Kathi Wolfe, a Washington, D.C., Metro-area writer, was a
1998-99 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow.
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