Disabled-rights leader Frederick Fay dies

Frederick A. Fay, who was paralyzed in a backyard accident as a teenager, became one of the country's most prominent advocates for the rights of the disabled and was among the first to draw a connection between disabilities and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

He was 66 when he died Aug. 20 at his home in Concord, Mass. He had pulmonary failure, according to his brother.

From the age of 17, when he founded a counseling group for people with spinal cord injuries, Fay was a leading organizer of coalitions to battle discrimination against the disabled.

Fay was guided by the same principles that toppled racial barriers during the nation's civil rights struggles. He helped disabled Americans gain recognition as a minority that had long suffered from discrimination.

"He is one of the first people to envision disability rights as a civil rights issue," said filmmaker Eric Neudel, who recently completed a documentary, "Lives Worth Living," that features Fay's life story. It is scheduled to air on PBS on Oct. 27.

In his early 20s, Fay was part of a group seeking to make public buildings more accessible to the disabled, which helped lead to the federal Architectural Barriers Act of 1968. While Washington's Metro system was being built in the early 1970s, Fay coined the phrase "no taxation without transportation" to protest the lack of wheelchair-accessible elevators in the stations.

Fay was a primary advocate for two key provisions of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that effectively granted civil rights protection to the disabled by banning discrimination by any groups receiving federal funding.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Fay advised Democratic presidential candidates and rallied support for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibited discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations nationwide.

All of Fay's accomplishments in the final 30 years of his life came while he was flat on his back. By 1981, a two-foot-long cyst on his spinal column, called a syringomyelia, made it difficult for him to swallow and breathe unless he was supine.

As a onetime computer programmer for IBM, Fay was a proponent of technology to assist the disabled. He designed the motorized bed and a system of mirrors that enabled him to navigate around his house. He managed his vast communication network through a telephone mounted on his bed and a computer monitor that hung from the ceiling. He balanced the computer keyboard on his chest and viewed it in a mirror suspended above his bed -- reading the letters upside down and backward.

Frederick Allan Fay was born in Washington on Sept. 12, 1944, and grew up in Bethesda, Md. His father was an engineer; his mother from a well-to-do Washington family. He was on the high school rifle team and excelled in athletics. In 1961, at 16, he slipped from a trapeze in his family's backyard, fell 10 feet and landed on his forehead, breaking two vertebrae in his neck.