President Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, whose Section 504 became the first federal civil rights protection for disabled Americans.
On September 26, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 into law. Buried within its text was Section 504, a brief but revolutionary provision stating that no otherwise qualified individual with a disability could be excluded from, denied benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under any program receiving federal financial assistance.
This marked the first time in American history that federal law explicitly prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability, modeled on the civil rights protections previously established for race and sex. Judith Heumann, already a prominent activist through her lawsuit and teaching victory, played an instrumental advocacy role in pushing for the inclusion and eventual signing of this provision, having organized against Nixon's earlier veto of the bill in 1972.
Although historic, Section 504 remained largely symbolic without implementing regulations to give it legal force—a gap that would require years of additional activism, including the famous 1977 sit-ins, to close.
Nonetheless, its passage represented a watershed moment: the first legislative acknowledgment that disability discrimination was a civil rights issue deserving of federal remedy. It provided the essential legal foundation upon which the entire subsequent architecture of American disability rights law, including the ADA, would be built.