First Special Olympics - July 20, 1968

The First Special Olympics began on this day in 1868.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in History class. It's July. The
first International Special Olympics was held on this day in night.
At this point in history, it was very common for
people with disabilities to be housed in institutions, and a
lot of times these institutions had just appalling conditions. Even
if they were called a school, it wasn't really about

(00:25):
educating anyone. It was just about keeping people away from
the public eye. People who were kept at home also
tended to be kept out of sight from the rest
of the community and sometimes even secret. It was really
rare to see a person with any kind of visible
disability out in public, both because of all the social
stigma that surrounded the whole idea and because communities just

(00:49):
were not accessible. There were some people, though, that really
started working to change that. This included Unice Kennedy Shriver
and Anne macgon Burke. Shriver was the sister of John
f Robert f and Ted Kennedy, and they also had
another sister named Rosemary, who had an intellectual disability that
was treated with a lobotomy in one Today we know

(01:12):
that this was not an appropriate treatment for her at all,
but at the time the lobotomy was often recommended as
a treatment for a range of mental and cognitive issues. Shriver, though,
was the director of the Joseph P. Kennedy Junior Foundation,
and that was a foundation that began focusing more and
more of its efforts on people who had cognitive and

(01:34):
intellectual disabilities. She did a lot of work, and she
did a lot of advocacy with her brothers, who as politicians,
had the ability to pass laws that would help this situation.
She also just wanted to combat all of this social
stigma and the segregation and isolation of children with intellectual disabilities.
One of the things that she did was to establish

(01:54):
a summer camp in nineteen sixty two, and one of
the goals of this camp was to get a better
sense of what these children could do instead of focusing
on what they could not. This led to year round
athletics programs for young people with intellectual disabilities. While Shriver
is the person that is most often associated with the
founding of Special Olympics, Burke was highly instrumental in expanding

(02:18):
its scope and its scale. In March of nineteen eight,
Shriver and the Chicago Park District announced the first Olympic
Games for young people with intellectual disabilities. These first Games
were held at Soldier Field in Chicago on July nineteen
sixty eight. A thousand young athletes from the United States
and Canada competed, and they competed in more than two

(02:39):
hundred events. Special Olympics Incorporated was formed later on in
ninety eight, and today it's a global organization that holds
events all over the world and millions of young athletes
participate Today. There's some debate about the Special Olympics. The
field of education has moved toward trying to place children
into the least restrictive in vironment that still meets their needs,

(03:01):
so as often as possible, placing them in classrooms with
their non disabled peers instead of in classrooms that are
segregated from everyone else. So there's a lot of discussion
about whether it's really helpful to segregate children with intellectual
disabilities into their own separate event. There are a lot
of other specific criticisms as well, including whether today Special

(03:23):
Olympics perpetuates more stereotypes than it helps to dispel. However,
though it's clear that the Special Olympics and Unice Kennedy
Shriver's work outside of the Olympics were monumentally important and
starting to combat some of the stigma surrounding disability, and
this included advocacy that led to some of the first
laws that protected people with disabilities and helped guarantee them

(03:46):
equal access to facilities and education. Thanks so much to
eve's Jeff Cote for her research work on today's episode,
Antatara Harrison for her audio skills on all of these episodes.
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