Marcia Lynn “Marca” Bristo
When she was 23, Marcia Lynn “Marca” Bristo, a nurse in Chicago, was sitting with a friend on the concrete steps of the city’s lakeshore. Her friend’s dog accidentally knocked a prized pair of Ms. Bristo’s shoes into the water and, without a second thought, she dived into the water to retrieve them. Striking her head, she broke her neck and was paralyzed from the chest down. In that instant, Ms. Bristo’s life changed forever in ways she could never have anticipated. She lost her job and her health insurance. She could no longer use public transportation and had no access to many public places.
But rather than dwell on her misfortune, she became a vocal advocate for people with disabilities, spending her life working to change public perceptions and restrictive rules in a world that had traditionally ignored the needs of the disabled. Her success in reshaping Chicago’s policies for the disabled formed the basis for national and international legislation. Ms. Bristo, in her motorized wheelchair, traveled widely to promote her expansive vision for independent living.
In 1980, she founded Access Living, a Chicago nonprofit organization that promoted independent living for the disabled. Access Living reshaped Chicago’s landscape for the disabled and became a model for cities across the country. Subsequently, Ms. Bristo founded the National Council on Independent Living, which she led for many years. She was a key player in writing and gaining passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which outlawed discrimination against the nearly 50 million Americans with disabilities. “She reframed the disability experience as a civil rights issue, as opposed to a medical issue,” said Edward M. Kennedy Jr., who lost a leg to cancer in 1973, when he was 12. “She was one of the pioneers trying to change the way people with disabilities thought about our circumstances. She talked about what she called ‘the internalization of oppression’ that existed in other civil rights struggles.”
In 1994, President Clinton appointed her to head the National Council on Disability. She served in that role until 2002. Ms. Bristo was elected president of the United States International Council on Disabilities in 2014 and traveled around the world to promote efforts on behalf of the disabled.
Her career as an advocate for the disabled lasted more than four decades. Over the years she received many awards acknowledging her influential contributions to this area of civil rights liberation. Her political passion reflected her own life philosophy; she refused to allow her disability to constrain her. She was married for 32 years to J. Robert Kettlewell and they had two children. She became a grandmother shortly before her death from cancer in 2019.