Down the Road from Woodstock, This Camp Started the Disability Rights Revolution

Apr. 1 2020, Updated 2:42 a.m. ET

We may just all use some gentle in these darkish occasions, and thankfully Netflix's latest documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, delivers. The movie, which premiered at Sundance in 2020, provides a hopeful and inspirational two hours.

Crip Camp first arrived on our radar once we heard it introduced as part of Barack and Michelle Obama's Netflix programming collaboration, and it arrives to the streaming platform on March 25.

The documentary tells the tale of New York's Camp Jened and the incapacity motion it impressed a number of the younger individuals who spent their summers there.

So, what happened at Camp Jened, and why and when did it close?

What happened at Camp Jened?

As Crip Camp co-director and former camper Jim LeBrecht explains in the movie, Camp Jened used to be "a summer camp for the handicapped run by hippies." Tucked some hours north of New York in the Catskills, it supplied an empowering house the place teens may get away their day-to-day lives and in any case be noticed past their disabilities.

"At [Jened], everybody had something going on with their body," Jim recalls of the camp that ran from the Fifties through the Nineteen Seventies. "It just wasn't a big deal." Later, the ones former campers went on to switch the arena and discovered themselves at the leading edge of the incapacity rights motion. "The wild thing," says Jim, "is that this camp changed the world. And nobody knows its story." 

Camps like Jened helped a complete technology pave the way in which for the way forward for other people with disabilities. "We were still in the Age of Aquarius and seeing all these different liberation movements going on," Jim recalls at every other point, "we would talk about the world around us, and conversations would start about our liberation, and what we can't do and why, and 'What can we do about it?'"

Crip Camp follows one of the crucial youngsters who went to Jened within the early Nineteen Seventies into their subsequent years, and is narrated in part by means of Jim. Another Jened alum, who later become a camp counselor and options prominently was once Judy Heumann. She would cross directly to become a major determine within the battle for incapacity rights, back in the days of the Carter administration.

Why did Camp Jened close?

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Judy described the disability revolution brewing at Jened as "a group of people there at the camp who were going to be going to college, and we were discussing, 'What was our future gonna look like?' We began to think about not only what could be, but what we had a responsibility to help make happen."

While Crip Camp follows teenagers who attended the Hunter, NY camp within the early 1970's, the summer camp actually ran from the 1950s until 1977. According to its website,  Jened was created via the households of youngsters with cerebral palsy. It then closed in 1977 due to monetary difficulties, only to reopen once more in a brand new location in Rock Hill, NY.

After operating for another 25+ years, they needed to close in the summer of 2009 for excellent "due to financial circumstances," according to a statement by means of the Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State. In 2017, the city of Rock Hill bought the camp from the Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York for $1.5 million with plans to develop into the 175-acre belongings right into a town park.

As of November 2019, the "recreational development" seems to be underway.

Stream Crip Camp on Netflix these days to learn extra about Camp Jened's history, as well as the people it influenced who would go on to write down their very own.

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