In Berkeley, California, Ed Roberts and a group of disability rights activists helped establish a movement that transformed opportunities for people with disabilities in the United States.

Born in 1939, Edward Verne Roberts contracted polio as a teenager and experienced significant paralysis. He used a wheelchair and, at times, an iron lung to assist his breathing. Despite barriers to higher education, Roberts enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962.

At Berkeley, Roberts and other students with disabilities developed a community of mutual support and advocacy. Their group, known as the Rolling Quads, challenged inaccessible buildings, discriminatory assumptions, and limitations on the independence of disabled students.

These efforts contributed to the creation of the university's Physically Disabled Students Program, which provided support such as wheelchair repair, personal assistance, and peer counseling.

As people with disabilities outside the university began requesting similar services, Roberts and fellow activists, including Hale Zukas and Jan McEwan Brown, recognized the need for a community-based organization.

In 1972, disabled students and community members founded the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley. Its guiding principle was that people with disabilities should control decisions affecting their own lives and have the same civil rights, opportunities, and choices as everyone else.

The center offered practical services and advocated for accessible housing, transportation, employment, education, and public spaces. Its approach emphasized peer support, self-determination, and full participation in community life rather than unnecessary institutionalization.

In 1975, the Center for Independent Living established its headquarters at 2539 Telegraph Avenue. The organization became an important force in disability rights advocacy, including efforts associated with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Ed Roberts later served as director of California's Department of Rehabilitation and helped establish the World Institute on Disability. He died in 1995, but his work continued to influence disability rights organizations throughout the country.

The Center for Independent Living eventually relocated to the Ed Roberts Campus at 3075 Adeline Street, near Berkeley's Ashby BART station. Designed for accessibility, the campus provides space for organizations continuing the movement's work.

Today, Ed Roberts and the Center for Independent Living are remembered for advancing disability rights, accessible communities, and the principle that disabled people should have authority over their own lives.