First Disability Discrimination

Jan 26, 2024

"Last night, I got an Uber ride. After the driver was on their way, they sent me a text message telling me that they're deaf and to keep that in mind. He picked me up, and I headed home. On the way, I googled how to say "Thank you very much" in sign language. When we got to my house, and he pulled over, he turned back to look at me, and I signed, "Thank you very much." and he started crying. He shook my hand firmly with two hands, wiped the tears from his eyes and signed back "Thank you" several times. Something simple that I did meant a lot to someone else. It was a good day," wrote Actor Harrison Ford on his Facebook Fan page in 2015.

“How many disability discrimination cases do you have in your entire life?”

I don’t know the exact number of what I had, but I have not forgotten my first one!

It was the car insurance company that revoked my policy after finding out that I was deaf.

It could be either 1966 or 67. In my freshman year (1964-65) at Ohio University in Athens, my dorm roommate (and my high school classmate), Loren James, and I realized we had no chance of finding a way to get home to Dayton for a weekend, so we took a gamble by hitchhiking home. It caused my father to be furious, so he decided to help me by buying an unused car.

Can you drive if you're deaf — Courtesy Photo: AllDeaf.com

One or two years later, I came home from college and received terrible news from my mother. It was about the revocation.

Our family’s car insurance agent was Bradley Stiver. He told my parents that he admitted that he did not disclose my deafness to his company because he loved my family. (He was our neighbor across our backyard when I grew up in Farmersville, Ohio, with a population of 767 (1960 census.) He was a basketball star for the winning team of Farmersville High School, where my dad taught a vocational agriculture program.)

Bradley had two choices: removing me or losing his business. You could know his decision.

My mom got quick thinking and contacted the father of my deaf classmate at my school for Oral Deaf in Dayton since he happened to be a Dayton policeman. The latter gave her the name of the insurance company. Quickly, I got a new policy. Since then, I have no more problem.

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I have theorized that Bradley’s insurance company was unfamiliar with the works of Sherman Glenn Finesilver, a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado (1971 to 1994.) When he was a traffic court judge in the 1960s, Judge Finesilver studied the legal rights of the deaf and developed model safety programs for deaf drivers. He also published articles on deaf drivers for popular journals and conducted defensive driving workshops for them nationwide.

“There is a wide divergence of opinion in the (insurance) industry as to court and jury treatment of deaf drivers in the event of liability litigation. Some experienced insurance executives are of the opinion that bias and prejudice against deaf drivers in litigation is more imagined than real and that there are no appreciable differences in the amount of court judgments against deaf drivers. It should be emphasized that statistical data and information covering the deaf driver is scarce in the industry. Many companies say they follow underwriting patterns and policies established many years ago. It may well be that many of these policies have no basis in fact or relationship to actual driver records or accident involvements of deaf drivers,” presented Sherman G. Finesilver while delivering "Should the Deaf Be Licensed to Drive?" at the National Symposium on the Deaf: Driving and Employability in Washington DC in 1962.

In 1970, Finesilver received an honorary doctorate of law from Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., for his championship of the rights of the Deaf. In the following year, he was appointed by President Richard Nixon to be a federal judge.