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Happy 75th birthday, Ralph Munro: New exhibit features longtime statesman
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Five-term Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro turns 75 on Monday, June 25, a milestone in a life of accomplishments that transcend his well-deserved political renown.
A longtime advocate for humanitarian and environmental causes, Munro played a pioneering role in the disability rights movement. Inspired by a developmentally disabled boy, Munro became an advocate for the discounted and invisible people shunned by society.
In 1968, Gov. Dan Evans appointed Munro, who was 25, to oversee a committee to promote volunteerism.
Evans soon named Munro to his staff, and spent a day in a wheelchair to boost Munro’s crusade for the state’s first accessibility requirements. Munro helped expand anti-discrimination protections and led a $25 million campaign to build group homes and job-training sites. He published the first Braille voter’s pamphlet. The boy he befriended is now a man who lives in a nice house and has a job, a testament to how options and services for people with disabilities have improved. They're shown together in the picture at the top of this post.
If people would just go down to their local school and offer to volunteer, Munro says, “they’d find a hell of a lot more fulfillment than they’d find in the spa at Palm Springs.”
Fifty of Munro's 75 years have been devoted to promoting volunteerism and participatory democracy. In what passes for “retirement,” he is as active as ever.
Munro’s pro
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file is part of Legacy Washington’s new project, “1968: The Year that Rocked Washington.” Change was in the air. Everywhere. From Saigon to Seattle, Paris to Pasco. On college campuses, the campaign trail, and evergreen peaks, Washingtonians were spurred to action.
It was the year when Vietnam, civil rights, women’s liberation, and conservation coalesced—the year when tragedy led the 6 o’clock news with numbing regularity. Nearly 50 million Baby Boomers were coming of age. The draft call for 1968 was 302,000, up 72,000 from the prior year. 1968 changed us in ways still rippling through our society a half-century later.
Over the next two months, the Legacy Washington website will roll out a series of online stories that also will be spotlighted at an exhibit set to open at the Washington State Capitol on Sept. 13, 2018. Other Washingtonians being profiled for the project include legendary disc jockey Pat O’Day, Seattle civic activist Jim Ellis, former congressman Norm Dicks, conservationist Polly Dyer, civil rights activist Dr. Maxine Mimms and the late Arthur Fletcher, who in 1968 nearly became the state’s first black statewide elected official.
Munro’s profile is featured at https://www.sos.wa.gov/legacy/sixty-eight/.
Thank you to the sponsors of Legacy Washington's 1968 Exhibit: Capitol City Press, The McGregor Company, University of Washington and Association of Washington Businesses. Thank you also to the sponsor's of Legacy Washington's Ralph Munro profile: Northwest Center, The Arc of Washington State, and Western Washington University.
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Secretary of State
Steve Hobbs
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