In 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till was lynched after he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the young white wife of a store proprietor. Anne Moodys Coming of Age in Mississippi and Eldridge Cleavers collected essays Soul on Ice, show how men and women reacted to Tills transgression differently while experiencing an intense moment of political awakening. The photographs of Tills mutilated body in Jet were seared into the memories of African Americans, as they portrayed in grotesque pictures how racial oppression was often sexualized and normally gendered. This was frighteningly clear for Robert Lewis, an impoverished sharecropper in Louisiana who joined the Civil Rights Movement after his boss threatened him with a newspaper clipping of Tills death, a warning of what might happen if I stepped out of line. Even Rosa Parksheralded in popular memory as the quiet, pious, seamstress who ignited the Civil Rights Movementrecalled that she thought of Till when deciding to remain seated in the front of a Montgomery bus at the end of that fateful year in December 1955.
Parks, remembered as a humble secretary for the NAACP, was in reality an elected official in the large network of activists. As early as the 1930s, Parks learned leadership skills from colleagues such as Jo Ann Robinson and mentors Septima Clark and Ella Baker. Both the convoluted memory of Parks that venerates her as a quiet but bold model of dignified womanhood.” The increased portrayal of women in Civil Rights historiography from 1979 to 2010 has used womens intergenerational mentorships to provide new insight into the meaning of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, by tracking female dissent throughout the twentieth centurys black freedom struggle historians can arrive at a more accurate reassessment of the Civil Rights Movements periodization. By examining the relationships between mentors and mentees, historians have revealed how women experienced and participated in the Civil Rights Movement differently from men.
As early as the Second Wave Feminism movement of the 1970s, sociologists forged new avenues for Civil Rights scholarship by arguing that a focus on women could enrich our understanding of black freedom struggles. The oral histories conducted by sociologists shortly after the Civil Rights Movement are valuable resources to social historians interested in womens history, but sociologists almost exclusively limited their analysis to the Civil Rights Movement between 1954 (with the decision in Brown v. Board of Education) and 1968 (marking the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.). This historical periodization, which Bayard Rustin called the classic period and Taylor Branch identified in his biographical trilogy as the King years, was expanded by historians whose disciplinary focus on chronology, contingency, and contextualization recognized that the classic period marked heightened, widespread activity stemming out of a longer trajectory. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall defined this longer trajectory as the long civil rights movement. The October 1998 conference in Atlantaentitled Women in the Civil Rights Movement, Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965provoked an outpouring of historical research, which aspired to excavate hidden womens voices from this earlier period. Organized by Georgia State University and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the conference brought activists like Rosa Parks together with scholars like Charles M. Payne, encouraging dialogue while mapping out new questions and lines of inquiry for research throughout the 1990s. The historiography of the Civil Rights Movement divides between works that accentuate charismatic, nationally recognizable messianic-like leaders and their organizationssuch as Stokley Carmichael, Malcolm X, or Rosa Parks and ministerial luminaries such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. versus the history of the grassroots-organizing tradition, which focuses on the capacity of everyday people to elicit racial change. In the historical literature, organizations such as the NAACP are usually credited with legislative victories such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, while their lesser-known foot soldiers were primarily ordinary women engaged in sustained regional struggles as early as the Progressive Era. This older generation mentored young activists in the 1950s and 1960s in how to fight oppression and segregation. Thus women predominantly fall into the local-case study side of this historiographic divide. As Danielle L. McGuire stated, the spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the womens long struggle in the dimly lit background.” The books chronicled in this essay, however, have developed a scholarly pedigree that brings those womens voices to light.
Sara Evans Personal Politics: The Roots of Womens Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left(1979), described how young women who grew up in the 1950s stepped outside the assumptions on which they had been raised to articulate a radical critique of womens position in American society. The title of her groundbreaking book reveals how an independent womens liberation movement grew out of transformations in political culture and young womens developing sense of personal consciousness. Evans argues that, between 1963 and 1967, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Southern Civil Rights Movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the North became powerful sites of identification. While organizing a movement centered around collective action, white women found the inner strength and self-respect to explore the meaning of equality and an ideology that beckoned them to do so while experiencing sex-stereotyping within the Civil Rights Movement. At a moment when the emergence of Black Power began to marginalize the efforts of white women, female activists came to recognize that elements of racial segregation were analogous to gender oppression. They began to articulate gender grievances and apply their organizing skills to their own plight.
Evans was the first historian to argue that the intergenerational mentorship between Movement Mamas and young female activists helped Civil Rights participants develop a deep sense of kinship.” Evans argued that women actively sought role modelsa completely new concept in how historians understood female participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Womens role models not only taught leadership skills and effective organizing tactics, but also provided emotional support in the 1960s, while young activists constructed alternative black and white womanhoods. As women in the movement were defying racial, class, and gender roles, as they learned to stand up for themselves, breaking through patterns of passivity, they learned new-self respect in the process of defying racial oppression. They looked for mentoring relationships that constituted distinctive models for the unique challenges and questions they faced as women. Many young women moved in with surrogate parents like Carl and Anne Braden, who housed female activists and recreated domestic family relations within the movements structure. Such surrogate households provided stability for girls whose parents disagreed with their radicalism, and taught young women by example how to live lives with new models of gender equality. Evans showed that intergenerational mentorship operated through a form of fictive kinship, providing the groundwork and gender consciousness that allowed young women to recreate family bonds laterally, in the form of sisterhood and gender solidarity.
In 1995, sixteen years after Evans examination of how the Civil Rights and New Left spurred Womens Liberation, Charles M. Paynes powerful social history, Ive Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, made salient contributions to the history of women in the Civil Rights Movement. In his antecedent 1990 article, Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta, Payne identified religious womens ability to capitalize on existing social networks and their realignment of social infrastructures as a leading reason that Greenwood, Mississippi women (aged 30 to 50) exceeded the participation of men in the same region. With his books publication, Payne complicated his claim that men lead while women organized by focusing on the intergenerational mentorship of Mississippi men and women at the grassroots level, which, he argued, ultimately democratized leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. Ive Got the Light of Freedom expanded Evanss timeline by three decades, to a period from 1930 to 1970, and described how movement families, under the leadership of women, not only nurtured uprooted activists but raised activists from birth which also aided in the development of institutional organizations throughout the twentieth century.
Between the publication of his article and book, Payne realized the answer to one of his main questions: How were a few organizers able to accomplish as much as they did in so short a time? In Greenwood and McComb, Mississippi, young activists built on the decades-long efforts of their female mentors to achieve their historic successes. Payne credited Ella Jo Baker and Septima Clark with transferring those ideas of collective leadership to the young militants of SNCC and CoFo. Intergenerational mentorship was crucial to the development of voter registration drives for two reasons: for one, young SNCC activists could use pre-established networks and plug into work that an older generation of activists had begun; secondly Clark and Baker helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement as early as the 1930s, by teaching everyday people leadership skills through Citizenship Schools and the Highlander Folk School (founded during the Great Depression). These educational initiatives raised consciousness of the movement and helped locals to pass literacy exams, register to vote, and communicate their struggles. That literacy became an important organizing tool for younger activists in Mississippi and virtually everywhere else in the South indicates both the successes of these women and the vital nature of their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. Under the guidance of Baker and Clark, Highlander workshops taught the philosophy of collective leadership to emerging activists E.D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Diane Nash. Payne argued that these women ultimately transformed political action throughout the 1960s. By concluding that women, not men, established the precedent that allowed Civil Rights to be successful, Ive Got the Light of Freedom presents a field-changing development in Civil Rights literature.
Unlike Sara Evans, who described how mentorships and the unique set of challenges facing women prompted gender-motivated partnerships, Payne acknowledged that men and women instructed young activists differently, but did not explore the gendered motivations for doing so. Additionally, his focus on mentorship is limited to how leadership tactics, ideology, and information were passed down, creating a form of grassroots memory. Unlike Evans and Ransby, Payne did not explore how the lives of older female activists provided alternative lifestyles and models of womanhood for the 1960s generation. Payne contended that in its organizational structure, its program, its ideology, early SNCC was exactly the kind of organization Ella Baker had been trying to create for almost three decades. While Baker tried to mold a generation, her male colleagues looked for specific individuals to replace them. Baker recognized that early female activists found leading people to freedom as a contradiction; leadership should be a form of teaching, as Payne paraphrased Baker, where the leaders first responsibility is to develop the leadership potential in others. She was the first full-time executive director of the SCLC to unite sit-in activists and to encourage a democratic form of leadership, which she believed would sustain change at the grassroots level long after activists left town. Unlike Clark and Baker who were weary of top-down organizations and favored facilitation over leadership, prominent male activists believed dynamic figures were essential to the guidance of foot soldiers. Bakers male colleagues hand-selected specific protégés who came from similar, humble beginnings; this approach developed into an exclusive kind of father-son relationship, in Paynes words. Evans portrayal of the Civil Rights Movement almost exclusively looked at female activists; while Evans method brings new voices to the historiography of Civil Rights, Paynes writing structure shows side by side how women and men experienced the Civil Rights Movement in different ways, justifying a further look into the efforts of ordinary women at the grassroots level.
By fleshing out the contributions of these men and women, Payne was one of the first major historians to expand the oversimplified Civil Rights Movement timeline (1954-1965) with the early efforts of female activists. Payne deemphasized cataclysmic events like the 1963 March on Washington and the integration of Mississippi universities, while demonstrating the importance of how womens behind-the-scenes work helped the movement to function. Payne stresses the longevity of intergenerational ideologies and their endurance through mentorship, as Depression-era and World War II activists brought newcomers into the infrastructure developed since the 1930s. Paynes narrative structure, centered on multiple biographies in a loose chronology, is one of the earliest articulations of the bifurcated timetables applicable to the classic movement: either it accelerated over two decades incrementally, or it was a convergence of efforts by generations of activists transferring knowledge to new participants through organizational networking and mentorship. Payne unquestionably aligns himself with the latter. He concluded that the SNCC and CoFo organizers who went door to door in the Deep South were heirs to a complex intellectual legacy shaped by older people whose thinking had been informed by lifetimes of practical experience, a legacy reaching at least as far back as Miss Bakers grandfathers farm.
Like Evans, Payne explored how women organized with family structures. Evans tracked fictive kinships in which activists who welcomed marginalized white female activists into their homes. Conversely, in They Kept the Story Before Me: Families and Traditions, Payne studied how biological black movement families (such as the Johnsons, the McGhees, the Morgans, and the Greenes), often under the leadership of women, harbored race pride and groomed [their] members for roles of leadership. Movement families were crucial as local movements exploited communal and familial traditions and produced offspring who were dedicated to the cause. These households refused to see themselves as merely acted upon, and encouraged their childrenespecially femalesto believe that even within an oppressive social structure one retains some control over ones life. Paynes work on women in movement families is substantive as he restores the generational legacies these matriarchs produced for black freedom struggles, which history overlooked.
Barbara Ransbys Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision bridges the historiographical fissure between biographies of famous male leaders and women at the grassroots. Ransby used Ella Bakers political life from 1930 to 1980 to show how womens lifelong activism connected through intergenerational Civil Rights organizations link together a long tradition of African American resistance. Baker, who advanced a radically democratic political tradition with women at its center, was a leading member in the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC. She pioneered new modes of political participation for black women in interracial organizations that were previously male-dominated, which provided an alternative model of womanhood for the young activists whom she mentored. Diane Nash, one of her mentees, rose from the head spokesperson for the sit-in movement in Nashville to an appointment by President John F. Kennedy to the committee to oversee the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While founding SNCC, Nash found but a few role models and was uncertain of her own abilities as a leader until she met Baker.
Ransbys biography notes that a previously muted, black, female voice to the chorus of people from the past, is a crucial contribution to the field of womens history. By looking at Bakers life in historical context with a continued focus on intergenerational mentorship, Ransby extends the roots of womens participation in Civil Rights to the turn of the century, connecting the Old Left to the New Left, and Suffrage to the roots of Womens Liberation. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement highlights just how unconventional Bakers life truly was. As Baker maintained her maiden name, never gave birth, lived independently from her husband while traveling for her career, and then ultimately divorced, her significance as an alternative role model was more extensive than the organizational skills Payne argues she instilled. According to Ransby, Baker offered a different model of gender relations and a broader spectrum of gender identities. Ransby therefore focuses on how Bakers unorthodox example of womanhood develops Paynes realization that Baker was a role model and mentor for an entire generation of activists who came of age politically in the 1960s, while personifying how Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP provided a social framework that gave women significant power as early as the 1930s.
Ransby uses Ellas mentors to extend the Civil Rights organizing tradition timeline deep into the early twentieth century, with womens early involvement with the NAACP, the suffrage movement, and black womens clubs. While working at the New York NAACP branch during the 1930s, Baker found a political mentor in Daisy Lampkin. Walter White brought the two togetherhoping, in his words, that Baker could observe Daisys techniques in putting over a campaign. Vice President of the Pittsburgh Courier, Lampkin taught Baker organizing tactics to engage widespread political action by women, tactics which she perfected while working to promote the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. As an acclaimed suffragette who worked with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the National Council of Negro Women, and the NAACP, Lampkin taught Baker how to fundraise and organize women in local campaigns within a nationalized umbrella organization. As a role model for Baker when she was first hired, Lampkin exemplifies the striking continuity between black womens suffrage and Civil Rights tactics. Through intergenerational mentorship, Ransby illuminates how Bakers firm convictions of forming alliances across racial lines on pragmatic political grounds for sustained change stemmed from the organizing forms she learned from Lampkin in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement with the NAACP. Significantly, Baker went on to instill these principles of interracial alliance and political pragmatism in SNCC. As a result, SNCCs Freedom Rides, voter registration efforts, and Freedom Summer were successful in drawing national attention, in part due to the interracial element of the movement.
The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence
–Ella Jo Baker
Shannon Frystaks 2009 Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967returns to the nameless masses while in direct conversation with Evans and Payne. Frystaks interpretation of mentorship and female role models sought to revise Paynes argument that men led; women organized by broadening the definition of leadership. She also questioned Evanss emphasis on sexism in the Movement. Frystak viewed Payne as an intellectual pioneer for the ways he integrated women into the dominant narrative, but she contended that Paynes conception of leadership is long overdue for reassessment. Her innovative revision of Paynes family argument stresses that the most formative mentors in the movement were mothers, who set an example of dissent for their children. The chapter entitled Hardly the Southern Lady: Boycotts and the Vote chronicles how on 7 May 1954, a biracial New Orleans PTA, in conjunction with NAACP women, organized a massive boycott of the school systems annual McDonogh Day Paradea public celebration of a plantation owner notable for his benevolent treatment of slavesby educating families about the days heritage. Frystak read this successful boycott, which built biracial coalitions days before the Supreme Court (on paper, at least) desegregated schools nationally, as an example of how mothers mentored their children, teaching the younger generation in the Orleans Parish school system how to successfully challenge white supremacy through organization and protest. Using Susan Stall and Randy Stoeckers 1998 article, Community Organizing or Organizing Community? Gender and the Crafts of Empowerment, Frystak continued in the historiographys tradition of examining how women used family structures to mobilize. Women of color and low-income women expanded the boundaries of mothering and the private sphere beyond the private household; by extending familial networks they expanded community networks, as was the case in the successful PTA boycott which became the foundation for black womens activism.
Juxtaposing this boycott with Brown in 1954, Frystak argues that the classic civil rights era is only definable as it made visible decades of incremental change in an era of mass victory, especially for legal cases and legislation. Frystak argues that as early as 1924, women became role models who formed the bedrock for the civil rights movement proper of the 1950s and the 1960s. Although Frystak notes that Louisiana did not colloquially use the term Civil Rights until the 1940s, her analysis indicates that the genesis of the Civil Rights Movement was in the Progressive Era, with the 1909 founding of the NAACP. The women role models who expanded legal precedent in this period provide further evidence for the expanded periodization; they created public sympathy for their cause, and their acts of bravery demonstrated how to resist discrimination in housing, education, voting, employment, and public transportation. Frystak, like Ransby, shows how the NAACP provided funding and framework that allowed women to emerge as Civil Rights leaders in Louisiana. Frystak covers a series of legal campaigns ranging from voting rights, equal pay for black teacher union members, and desegregating transportation in which women active in Progressive Era womens clubs organized, fundraised, and served as case studies to help advance Civil Rights legislation. Frystak notes that while considering women in legal case studies as role models and leaders, historians can find in the manuscript collections for biracial organizations (such as, the NAACP, CORE, the YWCA of New Orleans, and League of Women Voters), scores of early examples of Civil Rights activism by women, which reduces the necessity for oral history.
Evans and Frystaks discussions of intergenerational mentorship led to divergent viewpoints on the role that sexism should play in the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement. Frystak identified Sara Evans as the most noteworthy proponent of focusing on sexism in Civil Rights scholarship as she argues that women experienced exclusion and limited participation of traditionally male-headed Civil Rights groups. Evans researched and wrote during Second Wave Feminism, and published in 1979; she placed her use of mentorship within the intergenerational roots of the Womens Liberation Movement in Freedom Summer. The SNCC Position Paper is crucial to Evanss argument, as it directly linked the Civil Rights Movement to Womens Liberation and provided eleven examples of womens relegation to menial work, from clerical tasks to cleaning, teaching, and barring from decision-making. Guided by this crucial source, Evans emphasized the historical significance of gender-segregated labor in the movement. Evanss focus on how Freedom Summer failed as a model for egalitarianism and democratic governance is crucial to the ways movement women recognized their exclusion from publicly representing SNCC in the media or the likelihood that they would teach, type, or sweep. These vestiges of outside societys gender-racial hierarchy influenced procedure within SNCC and helped women recognize their collective oppression in an environment that provided language to articulate their grievances. Comparing the assumption of male superiority to racial paternalism, Evans concludes, the analogy with black oppression worked once again. As prophesized by Hayden and King, the Civil Rights Movement would begin a plodding dialogue around gender in which women would gradually come to understand that this is no more a mans world than it is a white world.
Frystak found the Evans focus on gender oppression within the movement to be heavy-handed and minimally productive. It is important to note, however, that since the SNCC Position Paper was created in Mississippi, Frystaks geographically limited Louisiana study allowed her to exclude it from her sources. Frystak opposes Evans analysis, which stressed internal movement sexism. Frystaks project used Louisiana to extend the chronology of the Civil Rights Movement by showing that women had always been leaders and the dominant force in Civil Rights as early as the 1920s. She aligned her research with sociologist M. Bahati Kuumba, whose 2001 study Gender and Social Movements argued that movement cultures are a societal mirror that reflects a gendered division of labor [where] women and men are not only assigned different roles and responsibilities, [but] these positionings are valued differently and placed in rank order. Frystak recognized that the Civil Rights Movement was gendered terrain, which resulted in inequality between men and women in recruitment and work placement. By contrast, Evans focused on the insular world of women activists in which the majority of females operated. Frystak argues that the most important mentors for women activists were their mothers. Loosely aligning herself with Payne, Frystak insists that with each generation, socially aware families raised incrementally more defiant women. This led to an overall shift in tone by women in the 1960s. Frystak suggests that due to family mentorswomen who had been involved in union and club organizingthese activists had been raised by strong, independent women who taught them and encouraged them to question the racial status quo while helping their daughters be less encumbered by their place in a traditionally narrowly defined gender framework.
Like Frystak, Danielle L. McGuires At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2010), expanded the chronology of womens Civil Rights activism through an alternative understanding of leadership and family mentors. McGuire rewrote Rosa Parkss political life, highlighting the militancy she and husband Raymond Parks exercised as early as 1932, when they held secret, armed meetings in Montgomery to raise money for the Scottsboro Boys defense fund. As McGuire reveals, from 1943 onward Parks also had the job of investigating and publicizing rape cases while serving as the NAACP Montgomery branch secretary. Using Parks as an access point, McGuires significant intervention shows how sexualized violence and interracial rape were tools of racial oppression and a rallying point for activists. Surprisingly, previous studies have seldom examined or emphasized the role that sexual violence played in the history of womens involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. McGuire argues that between 1940 and 1975, sex became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. At the Dark End of the Street extends the timeline of the Civil Rights narrative to 1940 by arguing that all of the major boycotts, sit-ins, and Civil Rights campaignsincluding Little Rock, Macon, Birmingham, Selma, and othershad roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.” McGuire focuses on the 3 September 1944 gang rape of Recy Taylor; the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the 2 May 1959 gang rape of Floridian Betty Jean Owens; the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case; and the 1975 trial of Joan Little. Using these events, McGuire indicates how family mentors stemming back to Reconstruction taught offspring to reclaim control over their physical bodies by using oral public testimony (both in and out of court) as a form of direct non-violent action against white supremacy. In the 1940s, this tradition became an institutionalized facet of the Civil Rights Movement.
McGuire retells the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a campaign for womens dignity; one successfully implemented by women organizers who had been active since the 1940s and had long experienced brutality and racialized sexual violence. McGuire argues that activists who cut their political teeth defending black women like Recy Taylor who were raped by white men in Alabama in the 1940s brought their experiences and organizational insight to other struggles for dignity and justice in the 1950s and 1960s. Leaders like E.D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, and JoAnn Robinson responded to Recys rape by forming the Committee for Equal Justice later reincarnated as the Montgomery Improvement Association); thus they became pillars of the modern Civil Rights Movement. It is curious, given McGuires profoundly useful argument centered around sex, that she portrayed the Montgomery boycott as a movement for dignity due to the perpetual humiliation and intimidation women experienced on transportation. The scores of interracial rapes she chronicles in Alabama (with the exception of Taylors) occurred while women were walking, which gives even more impetus to reclaim public transportation.
McGuires focus on sexuality and the intergenerational transference of oral history reanimates Paynes research on Greenwood and Frystaks argument about mothers roles in creating a culture of dissent in McGuires chapter A Black Womans Body Was Never Hers Alone, derived from the motto instilled in Fannie Lou Hamer by family mentors. Hamer, a vocal Mississippi freedom fighter, was the recipient of embodied knowledge passed down from enslaved female ancestors via her grandmother, Liza Bramlett. Bramlett gave birth to twenty-three children; twenty were the product of interracial rape.
Hamers mother carried a concealed gun while in the cotton fields to defend both herself and her children from sexually aggressive white men. Although her ancestors did not get vindication, the act of testifying and storytelling forced the recognition of their personhood in a political economy devised to treat women as profitable objects of exchange. Hamer emulated her foremothers and did not shy away from detailing the sexual aspects of her beating, which she told on national television during the 1964 Democratic National Convention. As she was childless, she handed down her stories to movement children she mentored, activists who in turn helped her use testimony in the Civil Rights Movement to counter white supremacistsnarratives of miscegenation, put segregationists on the defensive, and [which finally] helped convince President Lyndon B. Johnson to use the power of the federal government to protect civil rights activists. Ransbys portrayal of Ella Bakers upbringing reveals how elders who had lived during the Reconstruction era used testimony and the transference of storytelling to train grandchildren involved with the Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, McGuire uses Hammers devastating sterilization in 1961 (a practice so common that blacks often called it a Mississippi appendectomy), sexual harassment, and the childhood rape of Endesha Ida Mae Holland (a SNCC worker in Greenwood mentored by both Hamer and Bob Moses), to show how racialized sexual violence infused both Sunflower County and Greenwood, Mississippis Civil Rights organizing. In rural Mississippis dangerous sexually environment, white men used rape and lynching to both physically and psychologically torment men and women. McGuire shows that in addition to Paynes discoveries about womens social networks, racialized and class-based conceptions of gender itself could be a motivating factor for the amount of women between the ages of 30 and 50 who joined the movement, as they were habitually vulnerable to sexual exploitation and were discouraged by men. Black women were subject to a form of violence predicated on racialized understandings of gender and hyper-sexuality, to which their classlargely as uneducated sharecroppers and domesticsleft them chronically exposed. McGuires work reveals s that many of the women who participated in the early Civil Rights Movement recognized that they could testify and speak out on behalf of men who were subjected to racial violence on the pretense of sexual aggression.
In her assertion that one of the culminating achievements of Civil Rights Movement and the intergenerational tradition of testimony amongst black women was the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case, McGuire provides a major turning point for Civil Rights historiography focused on genderand for Civil Rights historiography as a whole. The case decriminalized interracial marriage, as it uncoupled institutionalized sexual policing and terror from racial inequality. By identifying this pivotal decision as the concluding chapter in her study of the Movement, McGuire extends the classic milestones of Civil Rights beyond the 1965 National Voting Rights Act. This bookending also rightfully brings the historiography of anti-miscegenation laws closer to the core of Civil Rights historiography. At the Dark End of the Streetargues that sex composed the crux of the Souths gender-racial hierarchy, and that segregation functioned to prevent interracial marriage between white women and black men. Although McGuire does not directly mention this, Martha Hodes, Peggy Pascoe, Renee Romano, and Fay Botham have all argued to varying degrees that fear of amalgamation was consistently mobilized as a political tool in moments of post-emancipation racial progress; advances in the black freedom struggle or individuals economic mobility were often conflated with black male sexual prowess. Romano argued that the fear of interracial marriage steadily increased throughout the first half of the twentieth century, peaking with the desegregation of schools; this contention intersects with McGuires argument in Chapter 7 that southern politicians during the 1950s and 1960s increasingly used the rhetoric of miscegenation to bring white supremacists to the polls. McGuire reiterates that social equality became a euphemism for interracial sexuality, especially during Freedom Summer and the campaign for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The historiography of women in the Civil Rights between 1979 and 2010 has radically proven sociologists’ assertion that looking at women and gender in the Civil Rights Movement would be fertile. While not only producing an abundance of new primary sources in the form of oral history, adding new stories, relationships, and organizational tactics, they provide insight into how men and women experienced the Movement differently, and backdates the Civil Rights Movements origination, largely due to womens leadership efforts. At a minimal, this historiography forces us to recognize the extent to which grassroots female organizing that dates back to the Progressive Era, or arguably Reconstruction, continually challenged ideas about race, gender, and sex handed down from the nineteenth century and the legacy of slavery and emancipation. By looking at intergenerational mentorships, historians gained an understanding of how Suffrage and other women centered movements shaped the ways Civil Rights activists organized and set goalssuch as the use of family structures, boycotts, non-violent resistance, and a continued focus on voters registration. Movement Mamas played a pivotal part in sustaining the oral culture of resistance, cultivating intergenerational mentorships, preserving the tradition of testimony and serving as brave role models while participating in court case studies that laid the legal framework necessary for desegregation. Their participation in and establishment of organizational infrastructures such as the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC proved to be a vital foundation for the post-Brown era of nonviolent resistance. Historians have shown that there is a continued tension between writing about the brutality and oppression women experienced within the movement while arguing for their autonomous strength and leadership. A more nuanced and contextualized explanation for womens (initial) acceptance of Movement roles that did not tend to occupy strategic planning or leadership positions will be helpful. Historians need to integrate the historiography of sexuality, especially the history of anti-miscegenation between Reconstruction and 1967 with Civil Rights Movement scholarship to appreciate the highly sexualized nature of Jim Crow segregation that shaped black womens motivations for activism and the racial ideologies that fueled racial violence. Finally, historians need to challenge their geographic scope by trying to think about how women leaders were working within a local wing of the Civil Rights Movement situated within the international Cold War, anti-colonial, and counter culture movements.


Design is powerful. The ways that buildings, products, processes, and even services are designed can include or exclude people. This toolkit offers suggestions for rethinking approaches to design and providing services in ways that are more inclusive.
In this toolkit, we identify:
- Common barriers to accessing mental health services
- Ways to improve access through:
- Design solutions
- Use of technology
As you explore these resources, consider this definition of disability that emerges from a social justice perspective of disability and access:
In this toolkit, we use the term disability to describe this shared experience of exclusion. This experience is common to people with a wide variety of bodily conditions. People who are deaf, blind, who use wheelchairs and other mobility devices, people with intellectual disabilities, chronic illnesses, dyslexia, and speech-related conditions all share the common experience of being disabled by the design and perspectives of society.
When we see disability in this way, we recognize that, as people who design and deliver services and processes, we can be a part of the problem of exclusion or a part of the solution of inclusion.
We hope that this toolkit will provide you with the resources you need to create more inclusive mental health services.
Barriers are often placed on disabled people due to the misinformation and misperceptions about disability held by those around them. As a result of these problematic perspectives, disabled people experience what is called ableism. Ableism is a type of prejudice and discrimination directed toward people with disabilities. It includes attitudes, beliefs, and practices that demonstrate a preference for being nondisabled. Some of the ways this manifests itself are described below.
- Lack of knowledge of civil rights laws: Some service providers may view providing services to disabled people as a charitable act, rather than recognizing that access to the same services that other people take for granted is a civil right—a matter of social justice.
- Inaccurate assumptions: Many people tend to make assumptions about what a person can or cannot do based on physical characteristics. These assumptions often lead people to act in ways that do not respect the person's autonomy. For example, a therapist may rely on family members or other service providers for information rather than communicating directly with the person seeking services. Or a service provider may make decisions for the person to "protect" them rather than providing the person with options.
- Placing too much value on being non-disabled: People often think that being non-disabled is the preferred state over being disabled (i.e. walking is better than using a chair, speaking is better than ASL, etc). This perspective results in a focus on "fixing" the person rather than on removing the barriers that exist around them.
- Mis-location of the barrier: People often assume that the bodily difference is a barrier, rather than recognizing that the problem is that processes, products and services are not designed with that difference in mind.
- Unconscious or implicit bias: Biases that lie outside awareness are likely to impact interactions and treatment decisions.
- Assuming the bodily difference is the presenting problem: Disabled people often have the experience of working with a therapist who focuses on the bodily difference as the problem, rather than recognizing that it is merely an aspect of the person and that the person is experiencing the same kinds of problems that other people face.
Communication includes both face-to-face interactions as well as other ways that information is shared. The ADA specifically addresses communication and requires that communication with people with disabilities be equally effective to that with nondisabled people. Some of the barriers to effective communication are described below.
- Inaccessible websites: Mental health agency websites may be inaccessible to people who use various types of assistive technologies. Videos posted on websites may not be captioned or audio described.
- Inaccessible printed information: The typical intake process usually requires reading and signing forms. Most mental health agencies do not have these forms in a format that is accessible for people who are blind or those with dyslexia.
- Lack of knowledge of video or message relay services: A mental health agency receiving a call from a Deaf person via video or message relay may not be familiar with the process and thus may not respond effectively.
- Lack of readiness to provide access services: Deaf people are often denied services by mental health agencies because the agency staff do not realize it is their responsibility to provide sign language interpreters (or other kinds of access services). When there is recognition of their responsibility, the staff still may not have readily available a way to acquire such services upon request, resulting in delays in scheduling an appointment for the Deaf person.
- Training in highly verbal therapeutic approaches: Most therapists engage in traditional talk therapy and may not have training that supports their ability to adapt their communication strategies or approaches as needed.
- Lack of knowledge of accommodation strategies: Most mental health providers do not have training in or exposure to the kinds of accommodations that might remove barriers to access.
- Inaccessibility of supplemental materials: Therapists often assign outside work such as reading or watching videos. These materials may not be available in accessible formats.
- Ineffective and inaccessible evaluation and diagnostic tools: Disabled people often experience misdiagnosis due to the limitations of diagnostic tools. They are often not designed to be accessible and/or are normed in ways that make the results inaccurate for some people.
In this section on physical barriers we refer to barriers resulting from the design of buildings, parking areas, sidewalks and other aspects of the built environment.
- Lack of access to nearby public transportation: For some, public transportation is the only accessible transportation available. When services are difficult to reach with public transportation, this can present a barrier.
- Inaccessible offices: Buildings housing mental health and related services may not be accessible to people using wheelchairs or other mobility devices. Restrooms are often not accessible.
- Inaccessible office layout: Even when buildings themselves are built to meet ADA standards, individual therapists' offices may be configured in a way that makes it difficult or awkward for people who are wheelchair users to get in and out or position themselves in a comfortable way with the office space.
- Inaccessible residential service facilities and housing: Programs that provide residential treatment are sometimes located in facilities that are not accessible to people who are wheelchair users or mobility devices.
The focus of this section is on how policies or typical procedures may result in lack of access.
- Policies that exclude: Some mental health providers mistakenly assume that they can deny services to disabled people due to the lack of expertise of staff, lack of funds for providing accommodations, or inaccessibility of their facility.
- Lack of policies in place to facilitate access: People with disabilities may experience delays because those taking their requests for appointments are unaware of the process for providing access.
- Lack of flexibility in appointment times and length: Since accommodated communication may take longer, it stands to reason that a longer appointment time would provide equal access to the therapeutic services, yet this flexibility is not always extended.
- Lack of opportunity to connect with peers in group or psychosocial programs: In many therapeutic programs, interaction with and learning from peers is a major component of the therapeutic process. If accommodations are only provided during formal sessions, participants may miss out on critical aspects of the program.
- Lack of access to community support programs: Many therapists refer people to community programs such as 12-step programs or grief support groups. These programs often are housed in inaccessible locations, do not provide accommodations, and those participating in and facilitating the programs may be prone to similar biases as discussed above.
Creating an inclusive environment means that, to the extent possible, service providers take a proactive approach to providing access. This section will focus on changes that can be made proactively to remove the barriers identified in the previous section.
- Disabled people deserve our pity.
- People with disabilities are needy and require more time and attention than others.
- Accommodations are expensive.
- Disabled people are inspirational.
Some people also tend to ascribe other stereotypes, making assumptions that all people with a specific condition are likely to be similar. Another societal response to disability is to doubt the existence of certain conditions, especially those that are not apparent such as a learning disability.
It's important that mental health providers confront the biases that arise from growing up in a society where these perceptions are dominant.
The ideas in the videos below challenge dominant perceptions of disability:
It is also critical that all staff are aware that disabled people have a right to access services under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The following resources provide guidance on ensuring services are accessible:
- Accessible Health Care [New Window]
- Additional ADA Resources [New Window]
- National Deaf Center: Mental Health Services Tip Sheet (PDF) [New Window]
Consider inviting disability activists to present at your in-service training. When available, attend sessions that challenge perceptions of disability at professional conferences.
Arkansas mental health providers are invited to contact the staff of the University of Arkansas - Partners for Inclusive Communities to present an in-service workshop. Contact information is available at the bottom of this page.
As mentioned above, communication refers to face-to-face interactions as well as all of the other ways that information is exchanged. The ADA requires that businesses provide equally effective communication to people with vision, hearing and speech disabilities. In this section, we start with how people might learn about your services and then move into communication that occurs once services are initiated. Before people can access your services, they need to locate and learn about them. This may happen by calling the office or going to your website. To provide proactive access by phone and website, there are several things to consider.
Access by Phone
Deaf and hard of hearing people and people with speech-related conditions may use a telecommunications relay service to contact you by phone. The caller calls the relay service to request that the call be made. The communication assistant calls the other party and relays the message between the two parties. There are four types of relay services:
- Text-to-Voice Relay Service (TRS): The caller calls a service using a TTY and types a message. The communication assistant (CA) reads the message to the other party and types what is spoken back to the caller.
- Video Relay Service (VRS): A deaf caller who is an American Sign Language (ASL) user calls the relay service using a computer or video conferencing equipment. A sign language interpreter makes the call to the other party and voices what the deaf caller signs. The interpreter then signs back to the deaf caller what the speaker says.
- Voice Carry Over (VCO): Callers who are deaf or hard of hearing but prefer to use their own voice can make the call and speak directly to the other party. What the other party says is typed and sent via text by the CA.
- Speech-to-Speech Relay Service (STS Relay): The CAs providing this service are skilled in understanding people with speech-related conditions, listening to their message and re-voicing it for the other party.
A deaf or hard of hearing person may also make a call using an interpreter that is in the same room with them. And a person with a speech-related disability may also call directly.
It's important that those who answer the phones:
- Understand that they may receive calls from these relay services and that they should not rush to hang up if there is a slight delay in response while the CA waits for the caller's response.
- Recognize that speaking to the communication assistant does not violate confidentiality or HIPPA laws. The CA is bound by strict confidentiality rules.
- Speak directly to the person who is calling rather than saying "tell her..."
- Be prepared to respond to callers that may be difficult to understand and take the time necessary to understand the caller.
More often, people who want to know about your services are likely to search the Internet and find your website. There are aspects of website design than can render the site inaccessible. Here are just a few things to consider to make sure your website is accessible.
- Make sure that the site can be navigated using the keyboard alone (without a mouse).
- Provide alternative text descriptions for images on the site.
- Make sure that any documents provided on your website are accessible.
- If you provide educational or orientation videos, make sure they are captioned and provide a transcript.
Learn more about web accessibility:
When someone initiates mental health services, there are typically several forms that are processed. One way to provide proactive access is to make sure that the commonly used forms, brochures and information sheets are available in accessible digital format. This will allow people who are blind, have low vision, or have learning disabilities to access these materials using assistive technology.
Learn more about making your documents accessible:
Readiness to Provide Access Services
In order to avoid delays that may result when someone requests a sign language interpreter or other communication access services, it is important to have contact information for qualified service providers ready and available to appointment schedulers. These individuals also need to be made aware of and comfortable with the process of requesting and scheduling these service providers.
In Arkansas, there are three interpreter referral agencies* that coordinate access services:
- Communication Plus: 501-224-2521
- Communicating Hands: 501-374-5293
- Sign Language Interpreter Network of Northwest Arkansas: 479-268-2417 or email@example.com
If you are outside of Arkansas, you can find an interpreter referral agency in your area by using the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf Interpreter Agency/Referral Service search tool. If you are unable to locate a service using that tool, you may also contact your state school for the deaf or state vocational rehabilitation office. They will likely be able to connect you with an interpreter referral agency in your state.
*Our purpose is not to promote a specific business. If you know of other interpreter referral agencies within Arkansas, please send a message to Melanie Thornton at firstname.lastname@example.org.
When access is not achieved proactively through design of a product, process or service, individual accommodations provide an alternative means to achieve access. The ADA requires that businesses provide "reasonable modifications" and "auxiliary aids" when necessary so that everyone has an equal opportunity to benefit from services and participate in programs.
"Reasonable modification" and "auxiliary aids" can include:
- Provision of access services such as a sign language interpreter
- A modification of a typical process or procedure
- A modification of a format
- Use of communication tools and technologies to remove barriers to or enhance communication
We have created a separate section focused on use of technology. Here we focus on the first three categories of accommodations listed above. These suggestions are not meant to be exhaustive. Accommodations should not be viewed as a laundry list of options or as formulaic but as solutions that remove barriers to access. Often the best solutions are suggested by the individual or arise out of a creative, interactive process between a service provider and the disabled person.
- Sign Language Interpreters: People who are deaf or hard of hearing may use sign language as their preferred mode of communication. If the therapist is not fluent in sign language, a sign language interpreter facilitates access between the deaf or hard of hearing person and the therapist.
- Sign Language Interpreters-Tactile or Close Proximity: People who are DeafBlind may use sign language as their preferred mode of communication. If the therapist is not fluent in sign language, a sign language interpreter facilitates access between the DeafBlind person and the therapist, either by signing in the DeafBlind person's hands or sitting very close and signing in the case of someone with low vision.
- Oral Interpreters: Some people who are deaf communicate using speech and speech reading. When the deaf person has difficulty speech reading the therapist or other service provider, an oral interpreter may be provided to mouth the words that are being spoken in order to bridge that communication gap.
- Speech-to-Text Providers: A speech-to-text provider facilitates communication access by typing what the therapist says so that the deaf person can read the text.
- Re-voicers: When a client has a speech-related condition, and the therapist is unable to understand the person's speech, a person who is skilled at understanding that person's speech may re-voice what they say for the therapist. A re-voicer may also be used when a person is using a communication aid to communicate. In this case, the re-voicer speaks the message as the person expresses it using the technology.
Considerations for choosing sign language interpreters:
- Access service providers working in the mental health setting should have the highest level of credentials.
- Using a family member or non-certified person who is able to sign as an interpreter is unethical and in states that have licensure laws (like Arkansas), illegal.
- The interpreter referral agency can assist in making sure that the interpreter has the appropriate level of certification.
- Certified interpreters are bound by a code of professional conduct which includes a commitment to confidentiality.
- In the event that no interpreters are available in your area, there are also agencies that provide remote interpreting using video conferencing technology. This should be a back-up plan rather than the first choice.
Considerations when choosing other access service providers:
- The term speech-to-text services refers to three primary systems: Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), C-Print®, and TypeWell.
- Certification levels exist for CART providers.
- C-Print and Typewell providers complete a course that provides a certificate. Referral agencies will likely be able to ensure that the person has the skills necessary to perform the role for your agency.
- There is no certification for re-voicers. When hiring a re-voicer, getting the client's recommendations and/or checking references are ways to ensure the professionalism of the service provider.
- There is currently no pathway to certification on a national level for oral interpreters. Some may hold certifications from the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf from previous years. In some states credentials for oral interpreters are offered on the state level.
Using a communication access provider:
- Make sure the seating configuration works to facilitate good access.
- Speak naturally and directly to the person, not to the access provider.
- Remember that the role of the access provider is to facilitate communication, not to assist the person.
- Remember that the access provider will translate everything that is said when the deaf person is present.
- National Deaf Center: Sign Language Interpreters: An Introduction (PDF) [New Window]
- National Deaf Center: Hiring Qualified Interpreters (PDF) [New Window]
- National Deaf Center: Sign Language Interpreters: An Introduction (PDF) [New Window]
- National Deaf Center: Hiring Qualified Speech to Text Providers (PDF) [New Window]
- Increased appointment length: If communication between the therapist and the client takes longer than is typical, it follows that a longer appointment time than the usual 45 to 60 minutes may be necessary in order to provide an equitable experience.
- Meeting in an accessible location: If the mental health clinic is inaccessible, providing treatment services in another accessible location would be considered a reasonable accommodation. It's important to take into consideration that the location needs to provide the same level of respect for privacy as the office environment.
- Access to forms: When the forms that have to be completed by a new client, for example, present a barrier, a reasonable accommodation would be to provide access through the provision of a reader, the use of assistive technology, or a modification of the form to make it more accessible.
- Flexibility with and modification of therapeutic interventions: Occasionally the nature of a therapeutic intervention may present barriers. It will be important to think through the aspects of the therapeutic process and consider how to modify certain interventions or if there are others that would be more effective. For example, visualization activities where therapists use their voices to set a certain mood will be less effective with someone who doesn't hear the voice. Visualization activities can still be used, but they may need to be modified by teaching the strategy and allowing the person to do the visualization on their own or by using a relaxing video to set the tone between instructions.
- Ensuring supplemental materials are accessible: Before assigning readings or suggesting videos to watch, make sure they will be accessible to the client. If not, a reasonable accommodation would be to create an accessible version or to suggest a similar alternative that is accessible.
- Assessment and evaluation: The intersection of assessment and disability is a complex one that could require its own toolkit. In short, it's important to be aware that standardized assessments may not provide a valid picture of the person being tested if there are barriers inherent in the assessment's design. Some examples of typical barriers are:
- A timed assessment scores a young man lower because he doesn't finish when the slower completion rate is due to a motor-related condition.
- An assessment with elements that are purely visual and even when described verbally place a blind person at a disadvantage.
- An assessment that includes figures of speech that would not be familiar to someone for whom English is not their first language—as in the case of a native sign language user.
In such situations the evaluator will need to determine whether to provide an accommodation or eliminate the use of the instrument all together and identify alternative options.
Technology provides solutions to a multitude of persistent barriers to access and has changed the design landscape. To recognize the difference that technology makes, consider this question: What if Stephen Hawking had been born before the computer technology were available that gave him the tools to communicate and record his ideas?We have chosen to provide a separate section focused on technology because technological solutions can be both design solutions and accommodations and there is quite a bit to cover related to technology.
Generally, when discussing technology that removes barriers, the term assistive technology is used. Yet many of the technologies that accomplish the removal of barriers are used by non-disabled people as well. We also recognize that many mainstream technologies started out as access solutions before moving into the mainstream. Barrier removal, in fact, might be considered a propeller of innovation for technology. The line between what might be considered assistive technology and what is just technology is definitely not a solid line. We prefer, therefore, to simply address the topic of technology and how it can be used to solve access barriers.
We will focus our discussion of technology on items or products that can be used to remove or reduce barriers to face-to-face communication. We will include items that are high tech or low tech and in between.
The examples we provide are not intended to be exhaustive by any means. Where specific products are mentioned, it is not our intention to promote those products but to be concrete enough that the reader can find a product when needed.
Spoken language may present a barrier when communication is taking place between a therapist and someone who is D/deaf or hard of hearing, DeafBlind, and or who has a condition that affects auditory processing.
Possible solutions include:
- Amplifying or increasing clarity of speech
- Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs)
- Hearing Enhancement Apps
- Use of an alternate form of communication
- Two-Way Text Communication Devices and Apps
- Alternative Communication Apps and Devices
Note: None of the technology solutions described should be seen as alternatives to providing access services such as interpreters or CART providers when those are requested, but may be the preferred options for some and may be short-term solutions when access service providers are not available.
The term Assistive Listening System (ALS) refers to a variety of systems that are used to amplify sound and reduce barriers that result from distance and extraneous noise. These systems vary from large systems in an auditorium to more personalized units.This technology can be used in conjunction with or without a hearing aid. For most therapy situations, the three types of systems that might be considered are:
- FM Systems
- Infrared Systems (IR)
- Personal Amplifiers
With both FM and IR systems, the speaker wears a clip-on mic that is connected to a transmitter. The listener wears a receiver that translates the signal and delivers it by way of the person's hearing aid or headphones. FM systems are preferred in situations where there is greater distance between the speaker and the listener, when the speaker is moving around and when there may be objects between the speaker and the listener. Infrared systems are preferred in situations where privacy is of utmost concern (since the signal cannot pass through walls) and when there is a direct line of sight between the two transmitter and receiver.
When two people are communicating and can sit near each other, a personal amplifier may also be adequate. With these devices, the microphone and the receiver are both in the single device. The user points the microphone toward the speaker.
Hearing aids are expensive and not everyone who needs a hearing aid is able to afford one. For people in this situation, hearing enhancement apps can provide a helpful alternative. These apps are available on Android and iOS devices. The user will need to spend a few minutes going through a "hearing test" to get the settings correct. After that, with earbuds connected to the device, the speaker's voice is directed and amplified to the listener. One example of such an app is Petralex. It is available at no cost for both Android and iOS devices.
Two-Way Text Communication solutions provide options when spoken communication is a barrier both expressively and receptively. That is, both parties need to communicate via text. This would be most common when one person is D/deaf or hard of hearing and the other person does not know sign language. These technologies could also be classified as alternative communication but are separated out because of the fact that they resolve barriers to two-way communication. Writing notes back and forth would be considered a low tech solution when spoken language presents a barrier. With technology being more available, most people have put away the pen and paper begun to use computer and tablet technology to communicate. Here we introduce several two-way text solutions.
FireChat App: A free app available on both Android and iOS devices. It allows two people to chat with each other in the same room by setting up chat profiles and connecting without using personal email or social networking accounts. There are other similar apps that are available for iOS only or Android only. This was the only app we found that was available on both.
Flipwriter AAC: Currently available only on iOS devices, this app sells for approximately $50. One user types a message and it is displayed both for the user and outward-facing for the other person. Tap the message, and it reads it aloud (Text-to-Speech). Tap a microphone and the other person can respond by voice. The app translates the speech to text (though accuracy will vary and always needs to be monitored). The app also allows the user to store commonly used phrases.
sComm Ubiduo: A high-end device, this product sells for $2000 and up. Two keyboards and screens are connected either wirelessly or wired and allow users to sit across from each other and type messages back and forth. The two pieces fit nicely together for traveling.
Laptop or computer: Another simple solution would be to simply sit together in front of a computer screen and take turns typing back and forth. Though, with this set up, seeing facial expressions is difficult.
Text-Based Systems: Text-based alternative communication applications may be on a computer, a stand-alone device or a tablet. Text input can be through a combination of typing and pointing to commonly used words and phrases. If typing or pointing with one's fingers is not possible, then a person may use alternative input devices such as an eye tracker, a mouth stick or a pointing device. Typically, the person inputs the phrase or sentence, then initiates the text-to-speech function so that the message is delivered by a synthesized voice.
If a client doesn't already have access to a device, there are many low-cost apps that could be used in a therapy session. A few examples of these apps are ClaroCom (iOS, free or $16.99 for pro version), Verbally (iOS, $99), and Speech Assistant (Android, free).
Picture-Based Systems: For children and adults who are not strong readers, a picture-based communication application may work best. These also may exist as a software application on a computer, a stand-alone device or an app on a tablet. A few examples include Avaz (iOS or Android, $40), Proloquo2Go (iOS, $250), and Sounding Board (iOS, free). The more sophisticated apps allow users to upload their own photos and images.
Story Board Apps: Visual storytelling applications provide a way to communicate about a series of events that have taken place. Pictello (iOS, $18) is one example of an app that could be used to create a description of an experience that happened outside the therapy session, for example.
Telehealth technology can provide access to mental health services for people who might face barriers with transportation or mobility, allowing them to connect to services remotely. At the same time, these technologies may also present barriers for others.
When the COVID-19 outbreak forced providers to move all mental health services online, it became clear that some people did not have access to a reliable internet connection or to a device to allow them to continue their therapy sessions online. This points to the reality of the digital divide that exists. This move to providing services remotely also resulted in barriers for some people with disabilities. Planning ahead and providing access services can reduce these barriers.
Choosing an Accessible Platform
These questions will help you determine what platform will be most accessible.
- Does the company that created the platform have information about accessibility?
- Do they provide keyboard shortcuts?
- Does the platform allow for captioning to be provided and/or includes a chat tool?
- Does the platform have a chat feature for communicating during the session?
- Does the platform allow for more than one video so that an interpreter can be added to the session?
- Is the platform simple and intuitive for the client to use?
Providing Communication Access
Providing ASL Interpreters
If a deaf client needs an interpreter, you will need to be able to provide access to an interpreter through the platform. If you have been using an interpreter for face to face sessions and change to providing therapy remotely, see if the interpreter you have been using can continue to provide services for you and your client. That will offer the best continuation of services. If for some reason the interpreter is not ablate do so, check with the interpreter referral agency you used to see if they have a recommendation. There are also companies that specialize in providing video remote interpreting (VRI) if your local providers do not have the equipment to do so.
While talking to a client through telehealth or video conferencing technology does not require a lot of bandwidth, following an interpreter does. A client who is Deaf will need to have a good stable internet connection to follow the interpreter. Interruptions to the video feed can disrupt communication.
Providing Access Through Captioning
A hard of hearing client who was able to speech read you in person may have more difficulty doing so when using this technology. Real-time captions may need to be provided even if they were not needed in person. Check with your local interpreter referral agency to see if they can provide real-time captioning. If not, again, there are companies that specialize in doing so. If you are using a platform that has a chat feature and it is only you and your client in the session, they client may prefer that you simply type your message to them in the chat box and they respond by speaking.
Providing Practice Sessions
Clients who are new to connecting online in this way may benefit from having a practice session before the actual session. You might want to consider, if possible, having a staff member set up a session with the client in advance so they know what to expect and can make sure everything is working properly. This could be helpful also to people who use assistive technology.
If you need additional information on this topic or would like to schedule training, please contact Melanie Thornton, Coordinator of Access and Equity Outreach at email@example.com for more information.
Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities National Training Center Learn Now Modules: The Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities National Training Center offers free easy-to-read online learning modules for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their family members, and their supporters, to learn more about mental health. There are also modules for mental health professionals, so they can better serve people with IDD.