Among the people who were tried as witches and burned at the stake in Salem, Mass., were persons who had noticeable physical disabilities. Later some cities passed laws to prohibit disabled persons from appearing in public. Within just the last 30 years, disabled individuals have been murdered in infancy, incarcerated in institutions, used as surgical guinea pigs, refused admission to colleges, denied jobs for which they were qualified and assumed to be people that any ordinary person would want to avoid.
The non-disabled traditionally have viewed the disabled as victims of fate whose sad situation was preordained by their limitations. The ''handicapped,'' after all, were not normal. They were nature's mistakes or embodiments of accidents and as such they could only benefit from and were only entitled to ask for charity, treatment and acts of God. That myopic perception was shared by many people with disabilities.
When he was president, Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted the expansion of rehabilitative services. However, he, a man in a wheelchair, never questioned what was then the universal practice of building public buildings with steps suitable only for the able-bodied rather than with ramps usable by all.
Somewhere during the '70s something happened. Scattered groups of people began to quietly and tentatively speak of ''disability rights.''
In Connecticut, at least, some progress has been made. Last November Connecticut citizens voted 3-to-1 to amend the state constitution to prohibit discrimination and segregation based on disability. The disability civil rights groups were jubilant.
The amendment is more than just a statement that we who are disabled must be given the same rights as others. It is a belated acknowledgment that persons with disabilities, like blacks, women and some religious groups, have suffered from a pattern of discrimination. In short, disabled people have come of age. We are a minority group now.
Now that the amendment has been passed, we who have disabilities must make good use of it. That is not to say that we should rush into court on every possible occasion, although sometimes resort to the courts will be necessary. Rather we should simply seek equality for ourselves and other disabled persons and expect to receive it. The only limitations we should be prepared to accept are those that are entirely related to our disabilities.
We should apply for the job we know we could do as well as anyone. Most important, we must challenge the basic assumptions that the non-disabled have about the disabled. We must discredit the whole notion that a disability automatically makes a person categorically different from all others.
A new vocabulary must be developed. Racism and sexism are words known to every schoolchild but there is no word to describe bigotry against persons with disabilities. Thus it is easy for the non-disabled to think that such bigotry is non-existent or unimportant.
We must also become more insistent that people with disabilities should be referred to as just that. Words such as defective, deformed and cripple should not be applied to human beings.
Those of us who also belong to other minority groups must work to have these groups recognize the disabled as full members. Disabled women, for example, must press feminist groups, which now at best ignore the concerns of women with disabilities, to represent the interests of all women equally.
But the disabled, like other minority groups, must guard against seeing prejudice where none exists. Many of the non-disabled are well-meaning people who have little contact with disabled persons. They may do or say things that are offensive without intending to. A non-disabled person may, for instance, treat a disabled person as if he was in poor health because he is unaware that a stable disability has nothing to do with health.
Gentle education, not angry confrontation, is needed. The ultimate goal of the disability civil rights movement always should be to have the disabled become partners with the non-disabled in the community, not adversaries. The disabled are a minority group now, and the fight for equality has just begun. But at least it has finally begun.