Paul K. Longmore (July 10, 1946–August 9, 2010) was a professor of history, an author, and notable disability activist who taught at San Francisco State.[1]
Deprived of the use of his hands when he was seven-years-old due to polio, and requiring the use of a ventilator during the night and for part of the day to breathe,[2][3] he wrote his first book, The Invention of George Washington, by holding a pen in his mouth and punching the keyboard with it, a task which took a decade.
He later burned his own book (as recounted in Why I Burned My Book, and Other Essays in Disability) in front of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in 1988 in protest against restrictive Social Security policies which virtually precluded disabled professionals from earning a living and thus achieving or maintaining economic independence.[4] Some of the most restrictive of these disincentives (such as those which precluded earned income from book royalties, in his case)[5] were shortly thereafter reversed in a policy change which became known as the Longmore Amendment.[6]
A major figure in the establishment of disability as a field of academic study in its own right, an endeavor analogous to the establishment of race, class, gender, and queer studies of previous decades,[7] Longmore was a co-founder in 1996 of San Francisco State's Institute for Disability Studies, a program which he later directed and propagated to other colleges and universities. He was also a major campaigner against the assisted suicide movement in California,[8] and was the first professor to be awarded the Henry B. Betts Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD).[9]