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Frank Bowe, One of Our Greatest, Dead at 60.By P.A. Figueroa, Jr Frank G. Bowe, the first nationally recognized cross-disability leader, a deaf professor who helped win civil rights protections for people with disabilities, and an advisor to Congress, has died at age 60. Bowe, who died August 21st, 2007, at a hospice in Melville, New York, had been battling cancer that had spread throughout his body, according to one of his daughters.
He was known as the “Father of Section 504,” the first federal enforcement of the first major law to bar discrimination against people with disabilities. The law required federally funded institutions to make it possible for the disabled to access services and public places, a precursor to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. In 1980, Bowe was the first person with a disability to represent any nation in the planning of the United Nations’ International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP-1981). He later authored “Handicapping America,” the first full-length text on social policy and disability, published by Harper & Row. The oft-quoted book is regarded as one of the most successful books on disability and is used today on many college campuses. In the 1980s, he chaired the U.S. Congress Commission on Education of the Deaf (COED), which made 52 recommendations for improving education and rehabilitation. COED issued a public draft of its final report in January 1988. The recommendations were quickly embraced by Gallaudet University students, a Washington, D.C.-based institution for the deaf and hearing impaired, whose students launched the “Deaf President Now!” protest in March 1988. Professor Bowe testified frequently before the House and Senate and chaired the U.S. Congress Commission on Education of the Deaf from 1984 to 1986. He earned the Distinguished Service Award of the President of the United States, signed by President George H.W. Bush, in 1992 and a Mary E. Switzer Distinguished Fellowship for the 2002-2003 academic year; was listed in “Who’s Who in the World,” “Outstanding Scholars of the 20th Century,” “Academic Keys Who’s Who in Education” (2003-2007) and “Who’s Who in America”; and was named to the National Hall of Fame for People with Disabilities in 1994. In 1971 he received a master’s degree in education of the deaf from Gallaudet Graduate School. He received his Ph.D. in educational psychology (research) in 1976 from New York University. Gallaudet honored him with an LL.D. (honorary doctor of law degree) in 1981. Bowe was born to Frank G. and Katherine Windsor Bowe on March 29th, 1947, in Danville, Pennsylvania, and raised in Lewisburg, Penn. By the age of 3, he had lost his hearing through complications related to a case of the measles and possibly to the new antibiotic streptomycin. In recent years, he published a study on the financial and educational disadvantages faced by those with disabilities. Professor Bowe leaves his wife, the former Phyllis Schwartz, and daughters Whitney and Doran. ****************************** |
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Copyright © 2007 by ILCHV |
The resident of Lawrence,
N.Y., was a Dr. Mervin Livingston Schloss Distinguished Professor for the Study
of Disabilities at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. A disability rights
activist, author and teacher, he achieved a series of firsts for the disabled
community. He was the first executive director of the American Coalition of
Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD) of the first national cross-disability
consumer advocacy organization. In 1977, he was instrumental in helping to
direct the sit-ins that led to the signing of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation
Act of 1973 by then-President Jimmy Carter.