[1] He spent eighteen months in hospitals and returned home paralyzed from the neck down except for two fingers on one hand and several toes.

Upon learning that Roberts had a severe disability, one of the UC Berkeley deans famously commented, "We've tried cripples before and it didn't work."

When his search for housing met resistance in part because of the 800-pound iron lung that he slept in at night, the director of the campus health service offered him a room in an empty wing of the Cowell Hospital.

His admission broke the ice for other students with severe disabilities, who joined him over the next few years at what evolved into the Cowell Residence Program.

They began calling themselves the "Rolling Quads" to the surprise of some non-disabled observers who had never before heard a positive expression of disability identity.

Roberts flew 3,000 miles, from California to Washington, D.C., with no respiratory support, to attend a conference at the start-up of the federal TRIO program through which the PDSP later secured funding.

The CIL provided a model for a new kind of community organization designed to address the needs and concerns of people with a wide range of disabilities.

In 1976, newly elected Governor Jerry Brown appointed Roberts Director of the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation—the same agency that had once labelled him too severely disabled to work.

When California politics again shifted to the right, he returned again to Berkeley, where he co-founded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon.

[9] For 28 days, activists occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building located in San Francisco.

These Centers for Independent Living established the National Council on Independent Living, which holds a meeting every summer in Washington, D.C. At the one held after his passing, on May 15, 1995, Roberts' empty wheelchair was towed by a volunteer as it symbolically led more than 500 advocates from around the country for the last time, on a memorial march from Upper Senate Park to a vigil in his honor in a Senate office building.

Speakers at this vigil included Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, Judith Heumann, and Paul Hearne.

Roberts is highlighted in Joseph Shapiro's 1993 book, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement.