Frederick Fay, 1944–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

Frederick Fay was just 16 when a backyard trapeze accident left him a quadriplegic. He refused to let the devastating injury slow him down. Within days of leaving the hospital, he had rigged a way to do his trigonometry homework while lying on his back. The next year, Fay founded a support group for people with spinal cord injuries. That turned out to be the beginning of Fay’s 50 years of activism on behalf of disabled Americans.

After graduating from the University of Illinois with a psychology degree, Fay did rehabilitation research at Tufts University, said The Washington Post. But his main job was battling discrimination. Fay was “one of the first people to envision disability rights as a civil-rights issue,” said filmmaker Eric Neudel. He became a national voice in demanding full access to buildings and a chance for an independent life for the disabled, counseling presidential candidates and promoting the Americans With Disabilities Act.

And Fay did all that while “flat on his back,” said the Los Angeles Times. An inoperable spinal cyst rendered him prostrate for the past 30 years, yet he managed with “an ingenious command center at home,” complete with ceiling-mounted computer monitors, remote-controlled windows, and strategically placed mirrors that allowed him, among other accomplishments, to become a fierce Scrabble competitor. “You have the freedom inside your head to decide who you are going to be and how you are going to react to the funny, strange, pitying attitudes other people have,” Fay said in a recent video. “You’ll always have that freedom, no matter what else.”