In 1962, the University of California at Berkeley admitted Ed Roberts and arranged for him to live in the campus medical facility out of concern for his polio-related condition. He had almost no functional movement and was dependent on a respirator. A year before, Ed had been rejected by the California state vocational rehabilitation department as too severely disabled and considered "unemployable."

Ed organized other students with disabilities in a group called "The Rolling Quads." Together, they started a self-determination movement which would radicalize perceptions of people with disabilities and how they perceived themselves. Stating that he was tired of well-meaning non-cripples with their stereotypes of what he could or could not do in deciding his life choices, Ed explained his desire for "cripple power," where the disabled would direct their own programs and be able to train other disabled persons to direct new programs. He insisted that achieving independence was not a functional limitation or medical issue but rather a sociological, political, and civil rights one.

In 1972, Ed and others established a community-based self-help program called the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (CIL). The fundamental philosophy of the Berkeley CIL--dignity, consumer direction, peer support, and civil rights advocacy--sparked an independent living movement that has since resulted in nearly 500 CILs throughout the country. The term center for independent living is now commonly understood to mean a consumer-controlled, community-based, cross-disability, nonresidential private nonprofit agency that is designed and operated within a local community by individuals with disabilities and provides an array of independent living services.

The independent living movement pushed for the "de-medicalization" of disability by shifting from a controlling medical model to an approach of individual empowerment and responsibility for identifying and fulfilling one's own needs. There was growing awareness that environmental and attitudinal issues produced the greatest challenges and barriers to the independence and full participation of people with disabilities, more so than their physical and mental conditions. Solution efforts focused not on people with disabilities but on altering and remedying societal and environmental barriers.

People with disabilities began to view themselves as capable, self-directed, and with opportunity, as opposed to being afflicted, less than normal, victims of external barriers, objects of charity, and passive beneficiaries of governmental support. Evolving society began to view disability as a natural and common human experience, not a tragedy.

As an ironical footnote, in 1975 California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Ed Roberts as the state director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, which originally had refused to serve him as being too severely disabled ever to work.

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