Tired of being called “Blindey”‘s and “cross-eyed queer”‘s, Halifax Blind people are organizing to end the social discrimination that they say they are facing. “We’re not naive enough to think we can do it overnight, ” said Blind Rights Action Movement (BRAM) Executive Vice-President Chris Stark recently, “but we’re going to keep on”.
“We hope we’ll succeed,” he added.
Stark, a fourth-year Saint Mary’s History major and former student at the Halifax School for the Blind said the movement started last April when the Federal Task Force on Youth came to Halifax and urged the blind people to organize on their own.
“By June we were organized,” said Stark, “but we only organized to the point where it was necessary.” He said BRAM is made up of “a number of civic-minded individuals from the community.”
“It’s an attempt to reduce, and if possible eliminate, some of the major obstacles which blind people are having and should not have to face in attempting to become an integral part of our society,” he said.
“They’re people, and if the system infringes on their rights, the system has to be changed,” he continued. “One thing we don’t want is the present system of education to continue. The people may be dedicated, but the system itself is inflexible,” he said.
“It doesn’t present any challenge or opportunity, and it doesn’t offer vocational training.”
He said the public attitudes to the blind were the ones most difficult to change.
“You can’t legislate against that,” he said, “but there are things you can legislate against, like housing and employment.
“If you can do something, it doesn’t matter if you’re blind or deaf. What we want is that ability rather than disability be considered,” he said.
BRAM has already begun a campaign to improve conditions at the Halifax School for the Blind, a 100-year-old structure on University Avenue in Halifax. In a letter to the Nova Scotia government, BRAM president Ed Russel said:
“Personally, one of my greatest fears is to wake up some morning and hear that one hundred and sixty-odd blind children were burned to death in a dilapidated old wooden school residence without any fire escapes, and without adequate protection equipment.”
He concluded, “Now, we feel it is time for the government to take some positive action.”
The report, submitted in early January, said a program for blind children should be worked out and conducted with the children’s parents, that the School for the Blind be integrated as fully as possible into the public school system “to create an environment which will bring the blind child and the ‘normal’ citizens of our country was the proposal for the four Atlantic provinces’ governments to “assume full financial and administrative control and responsibility for the Halifax School for the Blind before the commencement of the 1971-1972 school year.”
At the conclusion of a 13-page report to the N.S, government, BRAM repeated the recommendation.
“The Nova Scotia Government should deal with this matter independently of any decision made by the other three provincial governments, should they continue their immoral and medieval attitudes toward the education of the blind,” it said.
So far there has been no word of action taken by the government, except that Deputy Minister of Education, Dr. Harold Nason, has gone to several meetings.
St. Mary’s Journal
March 1971
JOURNAL AWARDS GOLD M’S
– Charter Day
– Golden M
We believe that those truly deserving recognition oare often the ones that never get it, and offer our M’s in the hope that they are not forgotten this year, too, in favour of friends of Student Council members.
Chris Stark: a graduating student, who…is more interested in people than offices, and who has spent this year organizing the Blind Rights Action Movement.