NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/handicap/5468

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Subject: Blind Loyalty - the article
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Index Number: 23469

                          BLIND LOYALTY
                        BY AMY CUNNINGHAM
                 Baltimore Magazine, July, 1992

 A refurbished South Baltimore warehouse is headquarters for this
country's most vocal blind rights activist.  But does Kenneth
Jernigan's all-or-nothing approach go too far?

     THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL BLIND MAN IN AMERICA IS AS COURTLY
and courteous as a wine steward today, hardly seeming the
paranoid demagogue his critics say he is.
     Like any shrewd PR man, however, Kenneth Jernigan, 65,
chooses not to answer questions directly, preferring to get
folksy and tell stories instead.  Soon he is leaning back in the
desk chair of his National Federation of the Blind office,
rubbing the smooth Burmese jade ring he wears on his left hand
and recounting what it felt like to be a blind youth in Tennessee
during the Great Depression. The shiny plaques on the walls
honoring his work suddenly seem the by-products of a life spent
compensating for the sadness he knew as a boy.
     A stout man with a balding crown that swoops over his closed
eyes like an awning, Jernigan has been emancipating blind people
since the early 1950's. The organization he heads is the
country's most vocal blind advocacy group, boasting a membership
of fifty thousand and, since 1978, an address in a sprawling
refurbished warehouse in South Baltimore.  His success in
organizing blind people to fight for equal opportunity has earned
him three honorary doctorates, a distinguished service award from
President Bush, two appearances on The Today Show, and the status
of a saint among countless of the 750,000 legally blind
Americans. "Jernigan was ahead in understanding that the disabled
need to be empowered, and that handouts have the power to
enslave," says justin Dart, President Bush's wheelchair-bound
chief adviser on disability issues.  "In that alone, he has made
a great contribution."
     But Kenneth Jernigan is not beloved by everybody.  To
government agencies, private companies, and individuals who have
wound up on the wrong end of a Jernigan-led crusade, he is an
unreasonable zealot.  More telling is the enmity he's inspired
among many blind activists and educators by spending hundreds of
thousands of NFB dollars to sue its own regional affiliates so he
and his handpicked board can control the nation's blind agenda.
     "It's unfortunate how much time and energy we spend undoing
NFB damage," says Oral Miller, the blind executive director of
the rival American Council of the Blind, based in Washington,
D.C.
     Adds Robert Acosta, a blind high school teacher who was
expelled with thirty-five hundred other California NFB members in
1979, "Under Jernigan, the NFB has become a tantrum
organization."
     One clue to Jernigan's inflammatory nature is embedded in an
essay he wrote several years ago.  In it, he describes how, as a
frightened 6-year-old during his first week of classes at a
Nashville school for the blind, he weathered the daily beatings
of a 9-year-old blind bully.  Not one to stay frightened,Jernigan
assembled a band of similarly aggrieved blind boys to beat up the
bully as a team. "Just to make certain," Jernigan writes, "we
kept at it for a while until there was absolutely no doubt that
we hadn't lost the fight."
     Jernigan has referred to this parable as his "first lesson
in the worthwhileness of collective action." Anyone who has
experienced firsthand the wrath of Kenneth Jernigan and his
followers would no doubt shudder at the admission.
     KENNETH JERNIGAN WAS ONE of this country's first, and
certainly loudest, disability rights activists to combat the
psychological hardship suffered by the blind.  He and his
organization worked to convince hundreds of thousands of blind
people that getting around needn't be the hard part of their
handicap.  With the right training and aided by technology, their
physical limitations could be reduced to mainly a nuisance. The
emotional servitude to which they were subjugated by a cruel or
unthinking society was far more damaging.
     Jernigan has attacked rehabilitation services that shunt
blind people into careers as basket weavers or piano tuners;
parents, such as his own well-meaning folks, who tell their blind
children, "now, you know there are just some things you can't
do"; blind people themselves who are in denial, who insist on
holding newspapers up to their faces in a vain attempt to conform
to society.  He's pressed hard in state legislatures for funding
to encourage Braille literacy.  Years before "politically
correct" became popular buzzwords and the landmark Americans with
Disability Act of 1991 was enacted into law, Jernigan awoke
people to the stigmatization inherent in excluding the blind from
sitting in the emergency exit aisles of airplanes and from
serving on juries.
     Under his leadership (though he officially retired as NFB
president in 1986, assuming the title of "executive director,"
everyone associated with the organization still recognizes him as
the boss), the NFB has emerged as a diligent watchdog
organization, the blind equivalent of Greenpeace or Act Up. Last
fall, the ABC situation comedy Good and Evil, starring Teri Garr,
made the mistake of featuring a blind character who wrecked a
laboratory and groped at a woman's crotch.  The NFB immediately
called for a boycott of the show's sponsors, threatening to stage
a Lipton "tea party" in New York harbor, before that company
pulled its commercial spots.  NFB staffers and volunteers
picketed ABC headquarters and regional affiliates, tapping their
white NFB-monogrammed canes on the sidewalks and chanting, "Hey-
de-hey, Hi-dee-ho, Good and Evil's got to go!" Though the show's
ratings already had been lackluster, the ugly publicity shortened
the patience of network executives, and they pulled the plug on
the program after just four weeks.
     Few people sensitive to the needs of blind people would
question the worthiness of Jernigan's causes.  The argument comes
in as the demands of a blind minority are balanced against those
of the general public.  In a society with limited resources,
certain compromises must be made.  Of course, what strikes one
person as a reasonable compromise may strike another as
unacceptably stigmatizing.
     For instance, Jernigan has clashed with more conservative
organizations, such as the American Council of the Blind, that
are run by both blind and sighted people.  Such groups may
support blind children using their residual vision for as long as
they can, before switching to print magnification equipment and
finally Braille. Jernigan argues that every legally blind child
should have access to Braille instruction and textbooks. Jernigan
also faces opposition from young, liberal blind activists who say
that the NFB should expend less resources on traditional "rights"
issues such as airline seats and more on combating blind
unemployment.
     Disagreement along such lines is not so surprising. What
distinguishes the NFB is how personal the arguments become. "With
Jernigan, it's always all or nothing," says former NFB member
Robert Acosta.  A slightly divergent view on Braille literacy,
for example, might draw a stinging rebuke in the Braille
Monitor, a monthly newsletter edited by Jernigan, or, worse,
expulsion from the NFB. Sometimes entire affiliates have been
kicked out. If they haven't gone peaceably, Jernigan has been
quick to sue with little heed to legal expense. When going up
against a rival organization or agency, Jernigan might take the
fight directly to the ramparts, showing up at its meetings with a
vocal band of followers.
     "Jernigan is a genius. He's literate, inspiring; he has done
a great service to blind people," says Jamal Mazrui, a
prominent young, black Massachusetts NFB member expelled in 1990.
"At the same time, he believes he has a historical responsibility
for assuring the destiny of blind people, and that his view is
the only one.  If people get in the way, he must get rid of
them."
     Toeing the NFB line is not always easy because Jernigan's
views are not always consistent.  He opposes textured tape along
subway platforms and half-price bus fares on the grounds that
they're condescending, yet he argues that Social Security
disability benefits should be allocated to all blind people
regardless of income.  He encourages the blind to travel
independently and rely on public transportation, but he
frequently is assisted by his sighted staff.
     Considering the inconsistencies, the demand for unwavering
loyalty, the harsh punishments for heresy, critics contend that
the NFB has become prisoner of a cult of personality--Kenneth
Jernigan's personality.
     This impression is reinforced at the NFB's annual
convention.  Addressing an auditorium full of followers, as they
sit with their guide dogs and NFB canes, wearing NFB tie tacks
and NFB buttons, Jernigan imbues the struggle for blind equality
with the fervor of a holy war.  "My brothers and sisters, the
future is ours," he intones.  "Come! Join me on the barricades,
and we will make it come true."
     THESE ARE SOME OF THE MORE interesting work rules at the
National Center for the Blind, NFB's headquarters, located in a
handsomely refurbished brick warehouse facing Riverside Park:
     The six blind and thirty-four sighted employees must comport
themselves like foot soldiers in a national movement, which means
they must address their male superiors as "Sir" and never call
staffers--male or female--by their first names.  It's either Mr.,
Mrs., or Miss.  Everyone refers to Jernigan as "Dr.," even though
all his doctorates were honorary.
     Staffers must be at their desks at 8 a.m., when one of the
male administrators dutifully takes attendance.
     No employee is allowed in the "citizens' lunchroom" between
the hours of 8 and 9 a.m. and after lunch.  This keeps staff
members from developing unbusinesslike, chatty relationships.
Lunch periods and clean-up duties are assigned.
     If employees spill anything on the office carpets, they are
fined $10 and denied beverage "carrying privileges" for thirty
days.  If an employee bumps into a co-worker and either one of
them spills a drink, they are both penalized.
     Staffers are instructed to keep their files and office doors
locked when they're not in, even if they're just visiting the
rest room.  Employees are warned that the brass Medco keys they
receive when hired are worth two weeks' pay.  If they lose them,
they pay for them.
     The 206,000-square-foot, fortress-like center is a point of
pride for NFB members.  With its impressive Braille library,
recording studio, state-of-the-art Braille technology room, and
overnight accommodations for as many as fifty people attending
NFB training seminars, the center is impeccably equipped.  Last
year, 1.75 million products such as white NFB canes, talking
wristwatches, and Dr.Jernigan's favorite rice cooker--all very
reasonably priced--were shipped to mail-order customers around
the world from the center's clearinghouse in the basement. The
center's total annual operating budget is approximately $8
million.
     The Old Linen Mill building cost the NFB only $532,000 when
Jernigan signed the deed in 1978.  Workmen threw out the pigeons,
completely gutted the structure, and rebuilt it, covering the
interior walls with heavy walnut-toned paneling. Because security
is an important concern of all blind people--and Jernigan in
particular--some street-side windows were painted black, and a
barbed-wire fence was installed in back of the building.
     Despite the strict rules and Kremlin-like feel of some of
the spaces, there's a familial atmosphere to headquarters. Blind
staffers walk briskly down the long hallways with the help of
their NFB canes, greeting each other warmly. The cause unites
them all. Plus, for some employees, work and family relationships
conveniently overlap.  Marc Maurer, NFB's blind current president
and a longtime Jernigan protege, married to the full-time
volunteer who directs community relations. Jernigan's third wife,
Mary Ellen, who is sighted and about twenty years younger than
her husband, works part-time as Jernigan's personal assistant.
She too calls him "Dr." His son-in-law directs program
operations; his legally blind daughter is the organization's
volunteer chef, and Jernigan himself helps out in the kitchen
with a variety of Southern dishes, including a quite famous
cornbread.
     Since moving to Baltimore in 1978, Jernigan, Maurer, their
families, and a handful of other staffers transplanted here from
the old headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, have enjoyed relative
anonymity.  Whenever Jernigan is asked why he moved the
organization's headquarters, he emphasizes that he wanted an East
Coast base and was attracted by the low cost of living in
Baltimore.  But there's more to the story than that.
     Like beleaguered immigrants searching for the Promised Land,
they all moved to Baltimore to escape the hounding of newspaper
reporters asking about Jernigan's fear of race riots, about the
supposed stockpile of firearms nobody ever could find, and about
those office windows he allegedly had bullet-proofed.
     NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED that Jernigan would someday be
known for his positive thinking. In his youth, he was angry and
bitter about his blindness, caused by congenital optic atrophy.
"He once told me," says John Taylor, a blind grade-school
classmate and former NFB president, "that if there were a
surgical procedure that would give him a 1 percent chance of
seeing and a 99 percent chance of dying, he would take it."
     By the time he was a teenager, however, Jernigan's blindness
motivated him to outperform his peers.  Unable to work in the
Tennessee fields, he took to making furniture out of wooden
spools and car steering wheels.  As an under-graduate at
Tennessee Technological University, he excelled in debating and
ran a vending business on campus. Then, after getting a master's
in English from Peabody College in Nashville, he taught at the
same school for the blind where he'd subdued that blind bully.
     Jernigan dove into blind state politics.  His national break
came when the NFB held its annual convention in Nashville in
1952.  The distinguished Dr.jacobus tenbroek, NFB's founding
president and chairman of the speech department of the University
of California at Berkeley, liked the young man's pluck.
     By 1958, with tenbroek's help, jernigan was elected NFB vice
president and, more significantly, chosen to direct a three-
member commission in charge of Iowa's only blind rehabilitation
center.  When Jernigan took over, the Iowa commission had a
rehabilitation budget of only $50,000 and one of the worst
reputations in the country. But Jernigan and tenbroek saw the
facility as a potential laboratory where blind instructors could
develop and test rehabilitation techniques in the spirit of NFB's
uplifting philosophy.
     Thus began "the Iowa Experience," an incredible success by
anyone's standards. Blind students at the Iowa commission learned
to travel independently, water-ski, rebuild car engines, barbecue
hot dogs on coals that they lit, and operate buzz saws, arc
welders, and rifles.
     Jernigan traveled the state, cultivating contacts with Lions
Club members and politicians to get the Iowa commission properly
funded.  Pushy and arrogant, he nevertheless was highly
effective. In the twenty years Jernigan presided over the
facility, the staff grew to a hundred and the budget blossomed to
$3 million.
     In the meantime, the National Federation of the Blind was
beginning to divide into factions.  Some approved of tenbroek's
leadership, some didn't--and some were uncomfortable that the
aggressive, young Jernigan seemed to be in line for his job.
     In 1961, the NFB experienced what members came to call its
"Civil War."  Jernigan and tenbroek crafted new by-laws that
state affiliates were required to sign.  One new tenet was a vow
not to attack the organization or its leaders in public. Fifteen
states refused to sign and had their charters immediately revoked
by the national board--establishing a pattern that gathered steam
throughout the 1970s and '80s.
     Of the seven state blind organizations that linked up to
found the National Federation in 1940, none remain, all
casualties of internal power struggles.  The fifteen chapters
kicked out in 1961 went on to form the nucleus of the rival
American Council of the Blind.  The ACB says that 20 percent of
its twenty-two thousand members today are former NFB members who
either jumped ship or were forced overboard for failing to meet
the NFB's standards of loyalty.
     After tenbroek's death in 1968, Jernigan was elected NFB
president, and the NFB headquarters was moved from California
into a former hotel building in Des Moines just a few blocks away
from the Iowa commission. With his Brooks Brothers suits, neatly
folded pocket handkerchiefs, and stirring oratory, Jernigan
brought grandeur and mystique to the position. The NFB annual
convention of 1968 was the most spectacular ever.
     Jernigan had always considered the conventions, held every
year, during the July 4 weekend, a valuable form of
rehabilitation in and of themselves, a were    place where the
newly blind could meet the experienced blind and realize there
was life after losing their eyesight. Jernigan transformed this
existing forum into a near-religious experience. He encouraged
group sing-alongs (a favorite was "I've Been Working in the
Workshop," sung to the tune of "I've Been Working on the
Railroad") and spirited audience clapping and chanting during the
speeches. Each time the membership assembled, a tin was passed
and conventioneers were exhorted to empty their pockets for the
cause.  Several of Jernigan's politically prominent poker-playing
buddies lent luster to the 1968 event with their appearances,
including Iowa Governor Harold Hughes.
     "I was a lost soul.  I couldn't accept I was blind.  But the
NFB turned me around," says Craig Kiser. Before attending the '68
convention and classes at the Iowa commission, Kiser says, he'd
dropped out of high school because retinitis pigmentosa had made
it impossible to read.  Today, he is an attorney who recently ran
for Florida comptroller.
     IN THE EARLY 1970S, NFB MEMBERS adulation of Kenneth
Jernigan continued to grow.  "In the old days, when Jernigan
started drinking carrot juice, we all drank carrot juice," says
ex-NFB member Robert Acosta, with a chuckle.  "Then when he
started drinking milk, we all drank milk."                  Other
personal habits mimicked by his followers actually helped them
live fuller lives.  For example, many people switched from guide
dogs to canes, a less conspicuous way to get around favored by
Jernigan.  There was also Dr. Jernigan's famous recipe for corn
bread muffins.  A crucial step in the recipe was that the batter
had to be poured into piping hot muffin tins. Jernigan developed
a heat-resistant template to go over the tins, enabling him to
find the holes without scalding his fingers. Then he had the
template mass produced and sold for a nominal fee by the NFB.
     In 1971, Jernigan unsuccessfully lobbied the Iowa
Legislature to place the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School
under the Iowa commission's domain. On several counts the move
actually made sense, but it stirred gossip in the blind community
that Jernigan was trying to take over everything.  "I don't see
'God,'" purportedly joked one instructor when Jernigan failed to
show up for a meeting.
     In 1972, Jernigan raised more eyebrows with a power play on
the National Accreditation Council (NAC), an independent agency
that evaluates education facilities for the blind. Jernigan said
if the NFB couldn't control ten of the eighteen seats on the
NAC's board, his organization wouldn't participate in any NAC
policy-making.  The NAC rejected the ultimatum.  Again in
fairness to Jernigan, the accreditation body never has been the
most progressive force.  In the nearly twenty years since their
rebuff, however, Jernigan and the NFB have done everything they
can to discredit and bankrupt the NAC. One of their tactics has
been to rent hotel suites adjacent to NAC meetings and to disrupt
proceedings with songs and chants.
     All the same,Jernigan's controversial style remained a
subject only of interest to other blind people until 1973. That's
when eighteen plaintiffs sued Jernigan and the Iowa commission,
claiming he didn't give the same quality of rehab service to
blind Iowans who refused to join the NFB as to those who did.
While the lawsuit ultimately was thrown out of court, it did
garner him his first negative press clippings in The Des Moines
Register.
     Several years later, the Register was back on the trail of
its city's charismatic blind power broker.  Some articles
followed up on complaints by former NFB members that Jernigan and
his hand-picked board had carte blanche discretion over how the
organization's money was spent.  Other articles detailed how in
some fund-raising campaigns the cost of fund-raising ate up as
much as 85 cents of every $1 brought in; still more news stories
raised questions about the propriety of Jernigan's brief
involvement in a legitimate firm selling "blindness insurance."
Most embarrassing were the printed but never proven allegations
by former Iowa commission employees that Jernigan had been
paranoid about race riots since the era of social unrest in the
late '60s, and that he'd tried to turn the building into a
fortress stocked with hand grenades and automatic weapons and
protected by bulletproof windows. There was even mention of a
plan to install an anti-aircraft gun on the roof.
     In all, more than 150 unflattering articles about Jernigan,
the Iowa commission, and the NFB were printed in The Des Moines
Register between 1977 and '79.  It was a staggering, unrelenting
onslaught.  But Jernigan refused to go down without a fight.  He
repeatedly maintained that he was the victim of a smear campaign.
He devoted one entire issue of the Braille Monitor to repudiating
Register articles point by point, defending the NFB's financial
record, and asserting that the paper was relying on the hysteria
of disgruntled ex-employees and expelled NFB members.
     At the height of the ruckus, a GOP U.S. Senate candidate had
his campaign momentarily side-tracked by reports of his ties to
Jernigan, Iowa's U.S. Attorney launched an investigation into the
blind leader, and FBI agents searched the Iowa commission's
premises for weapons and electronic listening devices. Jernigan's
foes were chagrined, however, when the search yielded only some
Civil Defense supplies and an elaborate office intercom system.
The U.S. Attorney soon dropped her probe.
     Jernigan, meanwhile, was complaining to colleagues that he
couldn't sleep. The stress of the ordeal took a toll on his
health.  "He kept talking about his triglycerides," recalls his
old grade-school chum John Taylor.  "We were all worried about
him."
     Finally,Jernigan installed Taylor as his replacement at the
Iowa commission, handed the NFB presidency over to another
associate, Ralph Sanders, and left Iowa for Maryland.
     FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, JERNIGAN is visibly uncomfortable
about reopening a chapter of his life he'd prefer to forget. "I
considered suing The Des Moines Register," he recalls.  "I talked
to lawyers, but they said since I was a state official, filing
suit wouldn't do me any good."
     Jernigan is safely seated in his own living room, having
just refastened all the locks and bolts on the gates and doors
leading to his Irvington home. This grand Victorian stucco is
listed in The  Historic Register as the "Schwartz
Mansion."Jernigan spent $72,000 for the house in 1979, and tens
of thousands more painstakingly restoring it. But the furnishings
are far from ostentatious. The living room is simply arranged
with an old Victrola bought by Jernigan's parents for $7 many
years ago, Baltimore promotional posters, a couch, and two tables
that he, himself, made.  The dining room, with its twenty-foot-
long table, is impressive, but more in the style of the NFB's
headquarters building than a stately mansion.
     The Jernigan's entertain frequently, serving drinks out of
"Kj" monogrammed highball glasses.  Unlike the political
luminaries Jernigan cultivated in Iowa, the guests in Baltimore
have been mostly other members of the local blind community,
although there was a coffee klatch in 1984 for then-Mayor William
Donald Schaefer, and a visit by former state Senator Harry "Soft
Shoes" McGuirk, who lived three blocks away.  "I was only there
once," McGuirk emphasized, a few weeks before he died in mid-
April.  "After dinner, Dr. Jernigan and his wife asked if I
wanted to stick around to see how blind people play poker.  I had
never seen Braille playing cards before."
     McGuirk had reasons for being a bit testy about his
relationship with Jernigan.  In contrast to his low profile
around town in recent years, when Jernigan first arrived, in
1978, he created a miniature "Iowa-like" splash, and Soft Shoes
was one of those who got wet.
     Within months of moving to Baltimore,Jernigan had reassumed
the NFB presidency.  He then pushed to introduce legislation in
Annapolis to create a Maryland Commission of the Blind to oversee
the state's existing blind agencies, He and his associates also
applied for a state bond issue to pay for the rehabilitation of
the NFB's new headquarters. On the surface, Jernigan's plans
seemed reasonable enough. Twenty-three senators attached their
names to the Maryland commission bill, with McGuirk as the lead
sponsor.
     Then in early 1979, rumors spread that the NFB wasn't just
interested in consolidating blind services in the state, but also
had a secret agenda to control every seat on the proposed
Maryland commission's board.  People found out that Jernigan was
the same person who'd created a huge sensation in Iowa.  Reprints
of past Des Moines Register articles made the rounds in
Annapolis.  The Maryland School for the Blind and other local
blind agencies mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign to stop
the NFB's legislation. Things got worse when the Baltimore Sun
reported that the NFB's chief legislative sponsor, McGuirk, had
made a broker's commission by selling a house to one of
Jernigan's top lieutenants.
     The legislation died shortly thereafter, and Jernigan was
left to lick his wounds for the second time in less than two
years.  Given the baggage from Iowa, says former NFB president
Ralph Sanders, "I remember him talking at length about how we
should have known better."
     After his brief brush with controversy in Maryland, Jernigan
has spent most of the past decade working alongside the existing
players to bring progressive reform to the state. It's now
common, for example, for NFB representatives to champion the
cases of individual Baltimore-area blind children who seek
greater Braille instruction from their public schools.      The
NFB was a key force in lobbying for $6 million in state funding
for the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at Park
Avenue and Franklin Street. And, along the way, there have been
no wild news stories about weapons stashes or anti-aircraft guns.
For ten years, there have been virtually no stories in Baltimore
about Jernigan at all.
     Which doesn't mean Jernigan and the NFB
have maintained a low profile elsewhere. Some highlights:
     The NFB went through three law firms in five years suing its
thirty-five-hundred member California affiliate for its treasury
until the case finally was settled in 1983. "It makes sense for a
group like the ACLU to have high legal fees," says Sanders. "But
with the NFB, the question becomes, is it legitimate to defend
yourself and spend huge sums of money on internal, structural
questions?"
     In late 1990,Jernigan sent protege Marc Maurer to Boston to
expel NFB member jamal Mazrui. The 26-year-old graduate of
Harvard's Kennedy School had called on NFB board members that
summer to name blind unemployment its top priority. Failing to
win anything but a reprimand from Mazrui's state affiliate,
Jernigan and Maurer had Mazrui expelled by the national board in
Baltimore. Maurer then flew back to Boston to explain the action
to the disgruntled affiliate. Mazrui tried to get into the
meeting to defend himself but was kept out by a uniformed guard
paid by the NFB.
     On December 8 of that same year, a
half dozen NFB staffers and volunteers infiltrated a closed
meeting of the National Accreditation Council at Chicago's
Bismarck Hotel. Grant Mack, 71-year-old chairman of National
Industries for the Blind, asked NFB hecklers to leave. When they
refused, Mack angrily knocked a microphone out of the hand of a
demonstrator.  In the confusion, Mack was arrested by police and
charged with assault.  NFB activists took a photograph of Mack
and his guide dog crawling into the police paddy wagon--a photo
they then distributed to agencies and organizations that work
with the blind.
     The NFB declined to join the consortium of seventy-five of
the country's leading disability organizations that helped to
draft the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1991--legislation
that has been likened to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The
organization's only real contribution to the bill came at the
eleventh hour: an amendment that handicapped people cannot be
forced to accept special accommodations (at a hotel, for example)
if they don't want them.  The NFB then added it wouldn't
support the ADA if its amendment wasn't tacked onto the huge
package. Jernigan got his way but, as usual, left many people
mumbling in his wake.
     THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT represents a sad irony
in the career of Kenneth Jernigan. The bill has been hailed as
the most important event in the fight for disability rights, yet
one of the major leaders of the blind was barely involved.
     The sense, shared by critics and admirers alike, is that
years of internecine warfare finally may have rendered Jernigan
ineffective at a time when so many other parties were laying down
their arms and pulling together.  "If every disability group had
the NFB's perspective, you could never coalesce," says Paul
Marchand, chairman of the consortium of disability organizations
that drove the ADA home.
     For his part,Jernigan remains steadfastly upbeat.  A visit
to NFB headquarters in South Baltimore still finds him lording
over his domain, blasting announcements over the office intercom,
and walking the hallways with a prickly pride.         Jernigan
takes the long view of his career, seeing the good and evil
attributed to him against the broader backdrop of all rights
revolutions, in which today's hero is apt to be tomorrow's
villain and next year's martyr.
     "It's not popular to be in a civil rights
organization,"Jernigan says.  "How do you explain people's
feelings about Martin Luther King? Some people loved him. But
some people hated him enough to kill him."

     Amy Cunningham is a Washington, D. C., writer.