Margaret (Peg) Vigars Wilke died peacefully at her home in Claremont, California on Saturday, October 17. A resident of Pilgrim Place community in Claremont since 1989, she enjoyed a music concert on campus the day before her passing. Matriarch of a large family, artist, therapist and early fighter for civil rights, economic justice and women’s rights, she was wife and helpmate of the late Reverend Harold Wilke, himself a disability rights pioneer and activist involved in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Peg was 93.
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To read this article, visit
www.stauros.org/notebooks/articledetail.php?id=12. Harold Wilke was a forefather of United Church of Christ Disabilities Ministries.

Strengthen and Make Whole the Body of Christ by Empowering Children With Disabilities

Can the church from the beginning of life be that place where justice is practiced, surrounding children with disabilities with the breadth and strength of such a network of support that it is simply empowering for life? I am convinced the answer is “yes.”
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“No Steps to Heaven” begins:

The scene is upper Manhattan, Broadway at Reinhold Niebuhr Place, Union Theological Seminary. Union’s president, Donald Shriver, walks jauntily down the steps to the bustling street and sits down in a wheelchair brought for the experiment, thus putting himself in the place of a student with a handicap. Gazing up from his wheelchair at that imposing entrance and those five insurmountable steps, he says, “OK, carry me in,” Read the rest of this entry…

Written by Harold H. Wilke

“We have a history of keeping people ‘out of sight, out of mind.’”

“Even more people are becoming alienated, and ever more of them are coming out into the open.”

“They are part of our society, not apart from it. More sharply than ever before, the idea of “mainstreaming” — keeping persons who differ from the norm within the main current of social life — is becoming a part of Western thinking.

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A Memorial to Dr. Wilke from UCC DM
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Author: ALBERT A. HERZOG, JR.
This synposis was prepared by David E. Denham.
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The UCC DM Journey - (11/02/2006)

A History of the United Church of Christ Disabilities Ministries presented by David Denham, UCC DM Consultant at the UCC DM Annual Board Meeting
Thursday, March 16, 2006

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“We don’t think our way into new ways of acting; we act our way into new ways of thinking.” – Harold Wilke (1914-2003)

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The Rev Russell C. Schmidt, Mr. John Selmar and Dr. Harold H. Wilke received awards from the United Church of Christ.
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1999 Annual Meeting

NCPWD, ALIVE AND WELL AT GENERAL SYNOD (GS) 22

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