Unit 11 · Other Institutions, Same State

In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln signed a law that let a school in Washington, D.C., grant college degrees. The school became Gallaudet University, named for Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He had helped open the first lasting American school for deaf students, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817.

By the late 1800s, many state schools for the deaf had teams. So did Gallaudet. Players and coaches talked in sign language. Deaf schools played hearing schools in their towns, so their teams were part of local sport from early on.

A well known story says the football huddle began at Gallaudet in the 1890s. In it, quarterback Paul Hubbard pulled his team into a circle so other deaf teams could not read their signs. The story is told by the university itself, but written records from the time are thin. Historians treat it as a tradition, not a proven first.

In August 1924 athletes from several European countries met in Paris for the International Silent Games. The organizer was Eugène Rubens-Alcais, a deaf Frenchman who led a French deaf sports federation. The Summer Olympics had been held in Paris a few weeks earlier that same summer.

At the end of the games, leaders founded a governing body. Its French name was the Comité International des Sports des Sourds, or CISS. Today it is called the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf. Deaf people have led it from the start, which makes it one of the oldest sport bodies run by disabled people themselves.

The games have been held about every four years since, apart from the World War II years. Winter games were added in 1949. In 2001 the name Deaflympics was adopted. To enter, an athlete must have a hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in the better ear, and hearing aids are taken off during competition.

William Hoy lost his hearing as a young child in Ohio. He attended the Ohio School for the Deaf. He played in the major leagues from 1888 to 1902 for several teams. In 1901 he played for the Chicago White Stockings of the new American League, the team that became the White Sox.

In his time, newspapers called him Dummy Hoy. The word was a common, hurtful label for deaf people then. Many writers today use his given name, William, or his nickname Hoy. He was known as a fast runner and a steady outfielder. He communicated with teammates through signs.

A famous story says umpires began using hand signals for balls and strikes because of Hoy. Historians of baseball find no clear record to prove it, and umpire signals may have spread from several sources. The story is best labeled a legend. The record that is certain is his long career in the majors.

Ludwig Guttmann was a Jewish neurologist, a doctor of the brain and nerves, in Germany. He fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in Britain. In 1944 he opened a spinal injuries center at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, northwest of London. Many patients were soldiers with injuries to the spinal cord.

At the time, many people with spinal cord injuries died within a few years. Guttmann changed care with turning, skin care and early activity. He used sport as part of rehabilitation, which means rebuilding strength and skills after an injury. Patients played wheelchair polo, archery and basketball.

On July 29, 1948, the London Olympics opened. The same day, Guttmann held the first Stoke Mandeville Games, an archery contest for 16 wheelchair athletes, 14 men and 2 women. In 1952 a team of Dutch veterans came, and the event became international. Guttmann hoped such games would one day stand beside the Olympics.

After World War II, thousands of American veterans came home with spinal cord injuries. In veterans’ hospitals, some began playing basketball from wheelchairs around 1946. Teams formed in California, New England and the Midwest. One California team, the Flying Wheels, toured the country and drew crowds.

Timothy Nugent directed a new program for students with disabilities at the University of Illinois. It started in 1948 at a branch campus in Galesburg. In April 1949 Nugent hosted the first National Wheelchair Basketball Tournament there. Teams from several states took part.

At that tournament, the teams founded the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, or NWBA. It wrote rules, kept standings and held a national championship every year. It was a governing body like any other sport league. It made wheelchair basketball one of the oldest organized disability team sports in the United States.

In 1949 Nugent’s program moved from Galesburg to the main University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign. Students who used wheelchairs lived, studied and played sports there. Nugent pushed the university to add ramps and curb cuts, the sloped cuts in a curb that let a wheelchair roll from sidewalk to street.

The program’s teams became famous. The Gizz Kids played wheelchair basketball and later other wheelchair sports. The university also ran buses that could carry wheelchair users around campus. Students with disabilities formed their own groups and helped run the programs.

The Illinois program showed that access is a matter of buildings and rules, not only of individual bodies. A student cannot play in a gym he cannot enter. Later national laws on access, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, required the kinds of changes Illinois had tried decades before.

In September 1960, the Summer Olympics were held in Rome. Right after them, Guttmann’s international wheelchair games were held in Rome too. About 400 athletes from 23 countries took part. Today the International Paralympic Committee counts Rome 1960 as the first Paralympic Games.

All athletes in Rome used wheelchairs. Events included archery, swimming, fencing, table tennis and wheelchair basketball. Athletes with other impairments, such as blind athletes and amputees, were added to the games in 1976. The first Winter Paralympics were held in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, in 1976.

The word Paralympic was first used for the wheelchair games. Later it was explained as meaning beside, or parallel to, the Olympics. That meaning fits Guttmann’s hope from 1948. Tokyo hosted both the Olympics and the Paralympics in 1964, and many later hosts did the same.

By the 1980s, several groups ran disability sport. There were separate bodies for wheelchair athletes, blind athletes, amputees and athletes with cerebral palsy. Each had its own rules. In 1988 Seoul held the Paralympics in the same venues it had used for the Olympics.

On September 22, 1989, the International Paralympic Committee, or IPC, was founded in Düsseldorf, Germany. It became the single governing body for the Paralympic Games. Its headquarters is in Bonn. It works with national Paralympic committees in each country.

In 2001 the IPC and the International Olympic Committee signed an agreement. It said a city chosen for the Olympics would also host the Paralympics. Beijing in 2008 was the first host picked under that rule. In the United States, the Olympic committee added Paralympic to its name in 2019.

Early wheelchair games grouped athletes by the level of their spinal cord injury. Doctors did the sorting. That worked for one kind of injury. It did not work well once blind athletes, amputees and athletes with cerebral palsy joined.

Over the 1980s and 1990s, many sports moved to functional classification. That means grouping athletes by what their bodies can do in that sport, not only by a diagnosis. A swimmer and a sprinter with the same impairment may be placed in different classes in their sports.

In 2007 the IPC adopted an Athlete Classification Code, and it has been revised since. The code says who can be a classifier, how athletes are tested and how they can appeal. Each sport class has a short label, like T54 in wheelchair track racing. Arguments about fairness in classes are still part of the Paralympic movement.

In 1962 Eunice Kennedy Shriver held a summer day camp at her home in Maryland. It was for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, which means differences in learning and thinking skills. It showed that campers could take part in sports and games when given the chance.

In Chicago, a Park District teacher named Anne McGlone Burke planned a citywide track meet for athletes with intellectual disabilities. The Chicago Park District worked with the Kennedy Foundation. On July 20, 1968, the first International Special Olympics Summer Games opened at Soldier Field. About 1,000 athletes from the United States and Canada came.

Special Olympics grew into a worldwide organization. It uses divisioning, which groups athletes by ability, age and sex so that contests are close. It also holds year-round training, not only one event. Anne Burke later became a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

In 1973 Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act. Its Section 504 says programs that receive federal money may not shut people out because of disability. Public schools receive federal money, so the rule covers school sports too. In 1975 a federal law guaranteed a free public education for children with disabilities.

In 1990 the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, reached further. It covered public places and many private businesses, including stadiums and gyms. New buildings had to be accessible. Arenas had to offer wheelchair seating spread through the building.

In January 2013 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to schools. It said students with disabilities must get an equal chance to try out for teams. Schools should make reasonable changes when they do not change the nature of the sport. Where needed, schools should consider separate or allied teams.

For much of the 1900s, many charities raised money with a poster child. The poster showed a disabled child and asked the public for pity and gifts. Television telethons did the same, often for many hours. The money helped research and care, but the pictures showed disabled people as people to feel sorry for.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the disability rights movement pushed back. Activists held protests and sit-ins for laws like Section 504. They used the slogan Nothing About Us Without Us. It means disabled people should help make the decisions that affect them.

Disability sport bodies share that idea. Athletes sit on athlete councils in the IPC and in national committees. Results are kept as official records, like any other sport. United States law brought Paralympic athletes into the national Olympic committee’s work in 1998, through the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.

In 1785 Congress passed the Land Ordinance. It set a plan to survey land west of the original states into square townships, each six miles on a side. Each township was cut into 36 sections of one square mile. Illinois land was later surveyed on this grid.

The ordinance reserved section 16 of every township for public schools. Towns could sell or rent that land and use the money for schools. Illinois became a state in 1818. Its early school funds came in part from these school lands.

This choice linked public land to public schooling from the start. Many later school buildings, playgrounds and athletic fields stand on land a public body owns for the public. When a school district builds a field, it follows that old idea that land can serve every child.

In 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago. It was a settlement house, a center where reformers lived among working families and offered classes and services. The neighborhood was crowded with immigrants from Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe and other places.

Children there had few safe places to play. Streets were busy with wagons, and yards were small. In the 1890s Hull House opened a playground and a gymnasium. Its leaders argued that play space was a public need, like clean water or schools.

Reformers in Chicago and other cities formed a playground movement. They asked city governments, not only charities, to pay for play spaces. In 1906 the Playground Association of America was founded, with Jane Addams among its leaders. Their argument helped move play from private gifts to public budgets.

Chicago once had many separate park boards. One was the South Park Commission. In the early 1900s, voters approved money for small neighborhood parks in crowded areas. The commission hired the Olmsted Brothers to design the parks. D. H. Burnham and Company designed the buildings.

In 1905 the first ten of these parks opened. Sherman Park, Davis Square and Armour Square were among them. Each had a field house. A field house held a gym, locker rooms and showers, a library branch and meeting rooms. Outdoors there were ball fields, a swimming pool and playgrounds.

The field house was a new kind of public room. It mixed sport, bathing, reading and clubs in one building. City leaders and visitors from other cities came to study the plan. President Theodore Roosevelt praised the small parks as a notable civic achievement.

By the early 1930s, Chicago had 22 separate park districts. Each had its own board, staff and taxes. The Great Depression left many of them short of money. Some could not pay their debts or keep parks open.

In 1934 voters approved combining them into one body, the Chicago Park District. The mayor appoints its board, with the approval of the City Council. The new district took over parks, beaches, field houses and pools across the city. It also received federal help through New Deal work programs, which built and repaired many park buildings.

The Park District also owns Soldier Field, the lakefront stadium that opened in 1924. It has hosted college football, the first Special Olympics games in 1968 and, since 1971, the Chicago Bears. A stadium owned by a park district is a public room, even when a private team uses it most.

Illinois law lets communities form park districts. A park district is a separate unit of local government, apart from the city and the school district. Voters in the area approve it. They then elect its board of commissioners.

A park district can levy a property tax, borrow money for buildings and buy land. It runs parks, pools, ice rinks, golf courses and recreation centers. Illinois has hundreds of park districts. Many suburbs and small towns have one.

Park districts and school districts often sign joint-use agreements. The school may use a district pool for swim meets. The park district may use a school gym for evening leagues. The agreement says who pays for staff, cleaning and repairs. Keys, schedules and insurance are all written down.

During and after World War I, many Black families moved from the South to Chicago. This was part of the Great Migration. They found jobs, but housing and public spaces were often split by race. There was no written law for Chicago beaches, but custom and threats drew lines.

On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, was swimming off the beach near 29th Street. His raft drifted across the unmarked line. A white man threw rocks at him, and he drowned. A police officer refused to arrest the man. Fights broke out on the beach.

The violence spread across the city for about a week. Thirty-eight people died, 23 Black and 15 white, and hundreds were hurt. A state commission later studied the causes. Its 1922 report, The Negro in Chicago, pointed to housing, jobs and the unequal use of parks and beaches.

Decades after 1919, some Chicago beaches still felt closed to Black residents. In 1960 and 1961, groups of Black and white protesters held wade-ins at Rainbow Beach on the South Side. They walked into the water together to claim the beach for everyone. They met angry crowds, and police were called to protect them.

Other gaps were about money. Parks in some neighborhoods got newer buildings, more programs and more staff than others. In 1983 the U.S. Department of Justice sued the Chicago Park District, saying Black and Latino neighborhoods received fewer services.

The case ended in a consent decree, a court-approved agreement. The Park District agreed to spread programs, staff and repairs more fairly across the city. A federal court watched over the agreement for years. Fairness now had to be measured and reported, not only promised.

In the late 1800s, high school teams often used players who were not really students. Some were older men or paid ringers. Schools argued over rules from game to game. Principals wanted schools, not outside clubs, to control school sport.

In 1900 Illinois principals founded the Illinois High School Association, or IHSA. Member schools agreed to follow shared rules on who could play. A player had to be an enrolled student making progress in classes. The IHSA’s office is in Bloomington.

The IHSA is not a state agency. It is a private, not-for-profit association of member schools, both public and private. Today more than 800 high schools belong. It runs state series and championships in many boys and girls sports and in activities such as speech and music.

The IHSA’s rules are written in its constitution and bylaws. The constitution sets up the association and its board. Bylaws are the detailed rules, such as on eligibility, transfers and the number of contests allowed in a season.

Anyone at a member school can propose a change through the principal. Proposals go to town hall meetings held around the state each fall. A Legislative Commission of school representatives reviews them. Proposals it advances go on a ballot, and member school principals vote.

A separate Board of Directors, elected from school leaders, runs the association between votes. It hears appeals and hires the executive director. This design makes the IHSA a kind of small government. Its members are schools, and each school has a vote.

The IHSA did not start with every sport. It added state championships one by one. Boys tennis crowned its first state champion in 1912. Boys wrestling held its first state finals in 1937. Each new tournament meant new rules, officials and a place in the handbook.

Girls had to wait much longer. Most IHSA girls championships began in the 1970s, after Title IX became federal law in 1972. Some came much later. Girls wrestling held its first IHSA state finals in 2022, at the end of the 2021–22 season.

A championship is an institution, not just a game. It needs a bracket, seeding rules, host sites and paid officials. When the IHSA adds a sport, schools start teams because a state title now exists. The dates of first championships trace who was invited into school sport, and when.

Illinois law requires public schools to offer physical education. For many years the School Code called for daily physical education for students in kindergarten through grade 12. Illinois was known as one of the few states with such a broad daily rule. Later laws let some students be excused, such as students in certain sports or classes.

A rule for daily classes needs a room. That helps explain why Illinois school buildings from the 1900s onward nearly always include a gymnasium. Districts paid for gyms with local taxes and bonds approved by voters.

The gym built for classes then became the home of school teams and community events. Graduations, elections and assemblies were often held there. So one law about classes shaped the buildings in almost every Illinois town. It also gave park districts rooms to share after school.