Visionary Voices
Interview with Thomas K. Gilhool
Chapter 1: Early Career and Association with PARC
16:42:33:20 - 16:42:55:19
LS: Tom,I just wanted to introduce our interview by saying we are happy to be interviewing Tom Gilhool here at Temple University, today, September 28[2011]. Also present is our videographer, Lindsey martin, and our student intern Rob Greenberg, and Tom, do we have your permission to proceed with the interview?
TG: You certainly do.
LS: Thanks so much.
16:42:56:00 –16:51:34:01
LS: Tom, one of the things that I wanted to start off with was talking about some of your early work. You came of age professionally in the ‘60s, which was really an exceptional time in our country’s history. Johnson had declared a war on poverty, there was a civil rights movement, there was a war in Vietnam. And it seems as though these times were giving rise to a kind o a new breed of lawyer, a rights lawyer, and I wondered if you would describe yourself as a rights lawyer, and if so, what dew you to that type of work?
TG: Certainly I would, ummm, my wife and I, Gillian, were at law school from 1961 – 64, uh, it was an extraordinary time, uh, several classmates of ours at Yale Law school were deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly the Student non Violent Coordinating Committee. Indeed, one had been sent to Yale Law School by his colleagues at SNCC, um, lest many of them be killed, he would be able to step in, in a serious and well prepared way. Um, those were the fears of that time. Another classmate of ours had been in the first set of sit ins in North Carolina, another was the right hand of the person who organized the March on Washington in 1963. I had come to Yale form Lehigh University and from the 1959 National Convention of the National Student Association, where all of us there were introduced to the Southern Student Movement, which was kind of [inimining?] then, and when the sit-ins began in early February of 1960, at Lehigh we gathered the first Northern action, demonstration, uh library steps, talking and sending telegrams to the Governor of the two Carolinas and so on, in support of the southern student sit-ins. When we got to Law school surrounded by these additional colleagues who had come directly out of the southern Student Movement, and were still very much a part of it, uh, as we used to say, we knew what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement before it was on the front page of the New York Times, because the network included us. And in the first year, uh, the undergraduates at Yale and a couple of us at the Law School had started what became known as the Northern Student Movement, framed initially to organize Northern University Campuses to support the South with money, with telegrams and such political support, uh and with people going South to work with them. Uh, about a couple of months in, Chuck[ McDew?], who was the first chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, he said “we’re going to deliver Mississippi before you guys even touch Harlem”. And so, we marshaled to focus the Northern Student Movement upon real action in Northern Cities, uh, uh, originally around tutorial programs which most every major university in the country that was within reach of a major city, uh, ultimately joined, um, tutoring addressed to junior high school and high school students. Uh, and then that movement turned to organizing of a different sort, uh, in Virginia, for example, in Northern Virginia, Prince Edward County, the schools had been closed and the Supreme Court ultimately held that they were unlawfully closed. But while they were closed, the Northern Student Movement, with folks from Campuses like Temple and Amherst, and Williams, and all the rest, ran the schools, there, ran Freedom Schools. We had a union organizing project supporting, uh, some of the unions who were engaged with growers on the eastern shore of Maryland, awe had in Philadelphia, uh, the Philadelphia Tutorial Project, the first of its kind, headquartered at Temple University on the famous Park Street, uh, which over a good 15 years, engaged students in the Philadelphia School system and university students from here and, during summers form everywhere, in learning together and quite early, oh, by this time I was here, and in practice, in creating what were called self-help centers, about twelve of them around Philadelphia. Some of them were at the center of the Welfare Rights Organization, where people changed the face of poverty enormously in the late ‘60s, some were in intensive young peoples’ neighborhoods where in two years in the late ‘60s, we, the welfare Rights Organization, and the Self-help-Centers, ended gang killings in a city which in 1968 had been the country’s most mortal city in terms of killings of gang members, one of the other. All of that happened because they had been successful in bringing a Governor of Pennsylvania in intense quarterly negotiations, between the Welfare Rights Organization and the Governor, to raise public assistance grants from $1800 for a family of four to $3600 for a family of four, which was then the poverty standard. Families now able to things with and for their children that they could not do before were an important part of the undertakings that ended those gang killings. That’s a, that’s a slice of, uh, my work that precede the disability undertakings, uh, I had been chair of the Northern Student Movement, I was chair of the Philadelphia Tutorial Project in m early days in practice here in Philadelphia, and it is a fact that, uh, those experiences, uh, very much framed my approach to the Law, and to actions using the Law to advance the rights, our subject of today, of people with disability, and their families and friends. Uh, I was much informed by all of that, and when the ARC of Pennsylvania came to me, they came largely because of their understanding that I had been involved in such work, and they understood that they needed a lawyer who was prepared to imagine with them, and dream and act on those dreams with them, to kick over the traces and restructure the world which had so thoroughly confined them.
16:51:34:03–16:54:41:08
LS: Tom, prior to being approached by PARC did you feel attune to the struggles and particular needs of the disability community?
TG: I did indeed, my uh, uh, my brother, uh, I was going to say my youngest brother, but he’s my only brother (laughs), the third of the three of us, is developmentally disabled. Uh, he was born in 1944, and, um, um, we, umm, we shared is experience, uh, of the late’40s and early ‘50s, seeking to find, uh, for him, some education and some points of engagement in the community an, and for my parents, some, some support in their undertakings. And I vividly remember the, the couple of days a week when he, for a couple of hours a day, went to a school in Lower Merion, the Lower Merion Township School District, um,uh, I can almost call the name of the teacher, uh, and I can remember as well that when all o the other children in the neighborhood,uh, we all lived together on Rising Sun Road in Ardmore, uh, when all of the other children had gone off, to first grade in those days, at least for parochial schools, and it was pretty much a parochial school kind of neighborhood – there were no kindergartens, when they had gone off to first grade, my brother was without playmates, until uh ,uh, the young man who was the child of a woman who helped my mother around the house several times a week came with her and engaged Bob, became his friend. And when I was called upon at the first meeting in the basement of the Berean Institute in Philadelphia, to explain what I was doing here, why I was involved in the Northern Student Movement and the Philadelphia Tutorial Project, and seeking to assist in some way the Civil Rights Movement of the late’50s and the 1960’s and ever since, I explained it in significant part in those terms, that, that my interest my experience of race came from that support and solace which this young man offered to my brother. And so they did not know I had a background in retardation, uh, when they came to my office, but they quickly found out.
Chapter 2: PARC Approaches Gilhool
16:54:42:00 – 17:09:19:14
LS: Can you describe that first meeting with Jim Wilson and Dennis Haggerty, what it was they asked you to do and I think also, I’m curious, was it their stated goalat that time to close Pennhurst?
TG: Well, that’s a very nice question that I have pondered a lot, and I think there are different senses of how playing and how still developing their ultimate objectives were. I can describe the scene, right? I was a young associate, two years, maybe two and a half years into practice, having graduated from Law School in 1964, at Dillworth, Paxon and [Kaliesh?], Cohen and Dilkes, the Philadelphia Law firm of Philadelphia’s great reform Mayor of the 1950’s. Uh,it was a long narrow office, um, and , uh, with one window looking out on South Philadelphia, um, and uh, Jim Wilson, the President of the Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Children, as it was then called, and Dennis Haggerty who had chaired the Residential Services Committee, and, and the then recent, the most recent, because there had been many since the late ‘40’s, when this ARC, like most in the country, was first founded, of Pennsylvania’s flagship institution, which had been commissioned by the legislature in 1913 explicitly to segregate people – they didn’t say people with disabilities, or people with developmental disabilities, or anything like that. It was to segregate the ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, uh, and ‘feeble minded’ – the ‘feeble-minded’ word was all over the legislation, and as well the ‘epileptics’ and the ‘palsied’ , uh to segregate, explicitly, its objective the institution was created. Uh, and they had just completed their most recent, uh, investigation, of, uh, Pennhurst, and had found conditions there still nasty, brutish, and of short life,um,um,and they had resolved to borrow a leaf from the Civil Rights Movement of Black people, uh, and, uh, to think seriously about how they might use the courts to advance the life situation and the life chances of people with retardation. Um, and they came to me because I had come back to the Dillworth Office from practice for three years at Community Legal Services, the War on Poverty Legal Services Program, and had represented the Welfare Rights Organization ad Public Housing Tenants’ Organizations in many undertakings in the courts and litigation and Governor’s offices and in negotiations, and in the media and in the public media and so on. And it was that willingness to suspend disbelief and pursue what might be, might be gained from the Law that uh, bought them to me. Uh, Uh, Dennis I had known; I had actually succeeded him as the Chair of the Public Services Committee of the Philadelphia Bar Association a couple of years before when Community Legal Services as just being formulated. Jim was, uh, a new and now longstanding friend. Uh, and they asked if I would look at their report and advise them on what cases might uh, arise to alter the situation. The conversations over the next year, year and a half, as I explored with them the possibilities, with them and with Gunnar Dybwad, their long time advisor a man who had been the Executive Director of the National Association for Retarded Children in the 1950’s and who was now a professor at Brandeis University. The Pennsylvania Association was his favorite Association because Harrisburg had a greasy spoon on the Main Street that he couldn’t resist (laughs), and so he was always coming back. Um, um, as we explored the possibilities, it became very clear that the purpose of the ARC was to get rid of the institutions, um, they concluded form their experience in trying to improve them that that was not possible. Um, and later, they proved that by Frank Laski and Ned Stutman’s and Carla Morgans and Nancy Zollers, and Eleanor Elkins and my hand in the Pennhurst case. But the first thing we noticed as we were talking and exploring was the data that showed that nearly everybody in the segregated and remote dreadful public institutions had gone there when they were in their early teens. Well that’s the time when children as everyone with experience with children knows, begin to reach out to try to take control of their world, and shape it themselves, and most children, of course, and their families, had, schools also (laughs) as well as families, but retarded children and other disabled children did not have schools, and, um, indeed, there was nothing of much use to families in the community. The ARCs, the county chapters of the State ARCs that existed in pretty much every state in the country, um, we doing their best to create schools, but not all on the scale, um, that could serve. So,um, I, we put together a list of four or five undertakings in the court that might advance the ARCs objectives. One of them was what became too traditional for a little while, Right to Treatment suits addressed the institutional conditions, which were intended to improve the institutional conditions, that was not an approach that commended itself to the ARC given their intimate and long experience with the Pennhurst Institution and other among the institutions in Pennsylvania. There was some thought about litigation which was later brought, and successfully, to require that states pay the people who lived at the institutions who, in largest number, worked there, in the farms, in the kitchens, on the grounds and so on. That was a [Peonance?] lawsuit that camedirectly from the 13thAmendment to the United States Constitution, the Civil War Amendment that abolished slavery and forbad [peonage], uncompensated labor. Um,uh, and the theory of that case would have been, well if we get then paid, then they can buy their own way out of the institution, and into the community. And there came to be many such suits and they were almost all successful,and it had a couple of effects (laughs), one, it did cause a significant number of people to be paid, and t o be able to lay some money aside and undoubtedly helped ease their way into the community when it happened, but mostly it raised the price of the institutions, the cost of the institutions, and it became increasingly attractive therefore, to the states perhaps, to think about stepping out of those institutions. There was a third lawsuit that, uh, ultimately the ARC’s political action took the place of. It would have been a lawsuit in state court. The Pennsylvania Legislature in the late 1960’s,probably ’69, ’70 had appropriated 21 million dollars to fix Pennhurst up. And this lawsuit would have, in state court whether that was not irrational and hence a denial of substantive due process since spending that 21 million dollars to quote ‘improve the institution’ would not have any significant effect. Um, we did not bring that lawsuit as it happened, but uh, the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children, still, engaged the Governor and the LieutenantGovernor in conversation asking them to take that 21 million dollars and spend it instead on community services. And they engaged a brilliant former Texas institutional superintendant, longtime Delaware educator named Floyd McDowell, to create a typology of community residences, uh, for people with disabilities, uh, particularly for retarded people. And that, um, undertaking was very important when in the late 1970’s the Pennhurst suit was filed to replace it directly with community services because this typology and that 21 million dollars had allowed many people to leave Pennhurst. The Pennhurst population at the time of the ARC’s investigation was in the two thousands, somewhere, by the time of the late ‘70’s trial, it was 1100 people. And the other had all gone to one or two person, uh, community living arrangements in Pennsylvania. And so the Institute on Disability, Jim Conroy and the wonderful graduate students who were around then put together what we call the Twin Study, matching every one of the 1100 people at Pennhurst with at least one and sometimes two and three people who were functional twins, a similar configuration of disabilities,a similar number of years at the institution, uh, and so on, in order to show that everyone in the institution could make it in the community given proper community services and supports. So that third piece of litigation, which was considered, had been brought home and had considerable yield for advancing the movement that PARC was eager to and did initiate. But we focused particularly on the schools because everyone in the room at the ARC had had the experience of being unwelcome in schools. And nearly everyone had had the experience of their own children or brothers and sisters being dismissed,uh, excluded, uh, there for play school and nothing more and that in a very limited number of hours, and had had the experience that when the children began to reach out and in the nature of things became troublesome to the rest of their family and the rest, and the families had no other ways to del with their newfound interest in the world, had led to so many institutionalizations. So, we settled upon addressing access to the schools, as the action of choice.