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Domov / Albumi / Los Angeles, Fall 1985 23
Datum objave / 2016 / januar
- ADAPT (212)
This story is a continuation of the article in ADAPT 213, and the text is included there in its entirety for easier reading. - ADAPT (211)
This article starts on ADAPT 217 and continues on ADAPT 210 where it ends before the end of the story. The text is included in 217 in its entirety for easier reading. Photo: A man, Bob Kafka, sitting awkwardly, almost falling out of his manual wheelchair, apparently handcuffed behind his back. His legs are falling under the chair, and he is surrounded by four or more police officers. - ADAPT (210)
This story continues from the articles in ADAPT 217 and ADAPT 211. The text is included in ADAPT 217 for easier reading. Three photos. Photo 1: At the bottom of an escalator a mass of people in wheelchairs gathered together, Julie Farrar in the center, holding a picket sign: “APTA DESTROYED 504”. Photo 2: A man, Chris Hronis, lying on his side on the floor, handcuffed behind his back, surrounded by four or more police standing over him. Photo 3: Through the window of a van you see two man, Chris Hronis in back and Bob Kafka in front of him, sitting in wheelchairs. Both are handcuffed behind their backs. - ADAPT (209)
Photo by Tom Olin Los Angeles, 1985: Hands handcuffed with a wheelchair wheel in the background. "People who advocate freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Frederick Douglass, 1817 - 1896 "We will not let any barrier keep us from the equality that is rightfully ours." Mike Auberger Co-founder, ADAPT ADAPT no steps logo 1478 Stayton Rd. Cumberland Furnace, TN 37051 - ADAPT (208)
The San Diego Union March 2, 1986, page A3 The West [section of newspaper] Drawing of Mr Louv's head: White, youngish, short dark hair parted on side and glasses. [Headline] Transportation news for handicapped ‘a nightmare’ By Richard Louv The WHEELCHAIRS are rolling. On Jan. 16, in Dallas, handicapped demonstrators decrying "taxation without transportation," chained themselves to public buses, forcing traffic detours for nearly six hours. In downtown Los Angeles, last Oct 7, more than 200 people in wheelchairs rolled down the middle of Wilshire Boulevard to protest the policies of the American Public Transit Association. In San Antonio last April, 60 handicapped people staged a four-hour protest at the city's public transit offices, causing 90 nervous bus company employees to lock themselves in their offices for an hour until the transit association agreed to meet the demonstrators. And on Feb. 13, Houston police arrested eight demonstrators in wheelchairs and carted them off to jail in lift-equipped police vans. Their sentencing is tomorrow. and a representative of the Denver-based American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit told me that if the protesters “spend weeks in jail, it will be like when Martin Luther King went to jail in Birmingham. People will realize we're not just out playing in the street" What's going on here? The disabled~rights movement isn't new, of course. It began in Berkeley in the late 60s, and ultimately resulted in a government shift from segregating handicapped people to "mainstreaming" them into the rest of society. According to Cyndi Jones, publisher of San Diego-based Mainstream, a national magazine for the “able-disabled," some of the first generation leaders "got co-opted by government jobs, and frustration for the rest of us has been growing." A raft of laws were passed during the 1970s, but the laws. says Jones. still haven't been fully implemented. “The Rehabilitation Act promised disabled people equal access to public transportation facilities and education and employment. In education. the news has been good, but transportation is a nightmare." IN 1981, CONTENDING THAT putting lifts on buses was an unrealistic expense, the American Public Transit Association sued the federal government and won. Most cities stopped deploying the mechanical lifts that enable people using wheelchairs, walkers and crutches to board buses. The favored transportation method, at least among municipal officials, became small, subsidized "dial-a-ride" vans. "That's like putting us back in segregated schools," says Jones. The disability groups have a number of other complaints, some of them affecting many more people — lack of housing, attended care, airplane facilities. But what it has come down to is the symbol of lifts. While some disabled people are satisfied with the dial-a-ride approach, Jones says "taking a van service can cost you $60 to get to work and back. You have to call and reserve a ride — sometimes days in advance, and these services can't always guarantee a specific arrival time or even take you home. As a result, a lot of us can't afford to work, or we just stay home." California still requires lifts on all new buses, but Jones contends that the transit companies can develop some creative delaying tactics. Roger Snoble, the San Diego Transit Corp.'s general manager, agrees with her. "Some cities," he says, "don't care whether the lifts work once they put them on. They just let them go, and then say the lifts don't work." Jones, by the way, gives relatively high marks to San Diego's bus system; not so to the trolley. which she calls “miserable for handicapped people." As she sees it, a new generation of leaders in the disabled~rights movement is just now coming of age. They have some powerful opponents —— with some powerful statistics. Jim Mills, chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, has pointed out that in Los Angeles the average cost per ride of the various dial-a-ride systems “is $6.22, while the costs associated with a one-way trip on a bus for a person in a wheelchair is $300." And in a recent interview, Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm told me, "I think it is a myopic use of capital to try to put a lift on every bus in America. It costs the St. Louis bus system $700 per ride to maintain lifts." But Roger Snoble says it costs San Diego far less — $166 per ride (as of a year ago, "the last time we checked, and we expect the cost to continue to decline because of dramatically improving technology." And when I mentioned Lamm's figures to Dennis Cannon, the chief federal watchdog for the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Transit Compliance Board, he said, “Lamm's figures are at least six or seven years old, and wrong. These same figures get used a lot by lift opponents, but they're based on one of the very first generations of lifts, which were poorly administered and poorly installed by St. Louis during one the worst winters in Missouri history." He points out that Seattle, with one of the best bus systems in the nation, has managed to get the per-ride costs down to $5 or $10, depending on the amount of ridership. And Denver has decreased its lift failures from 25 a day to five within the last year. WITH ADVANCES LIKE this, combined with the increasing demands from disabled groups, a number of cities have decided that the lifts make economic sense — maybe not in this decade, but soon. "What's about to hit is a wave of people who expect to have equal access, the children of the mainstreaming movement," says Jones. During the past decade, government and society encouraged disabled people to work independently, and now that generation will be at bus stops and trolley stations all over the country, waiting to go to work. With them will be aging baby boomers, a giant crop of potentially disabled seniors. "Only one~third of the disabled population is employed. but two-thirds of disabled people are not receiving any kind of benefits," says Andrea Farbman, a spokeswoman for the National Council on the Handicapped. “Still. we're spending huge amounts of money keeping people unemployed — $60 billion dollars a year, but only $2 billion going to rehabilitation and special education." One rough estimate, says Farbman, is that 200,000 handicapped people would enter the work force if the travel barriers were eliminated. adding as much as $1 billion in annual earnings to the economy. The tragedy is this: While politicians wrangle over the costs of bus lifts, nobody has studied how much money could be saved in government benefits, and how much could be gained through taxes and added national productivity if more handicapped Americans were employed. - ADAPT (207)
Los Angeles Herald 10/7/85 Two photos on right side of page. Top PHOTO: Looking down from above at a busy street corner, with a curb cut. A bus stopped at the curb is completely surrounded by dozens of protesters in wheelchairs and some standing. Several have signs and they go from the front, along the outside of the bus and out behind off the edge of the picture. The second lane is empty of cars, and the third lane is stacked with cars. On the sidewalk beside a big building is another large group of the protesters, most with signs. A couple of people are moving between the two groups. Lower PHOTO: A man (Bill Bolte) in a motorized wheelchair wearing a tall cowboy hat and a sign around his neck, glasses and a salt and pepper beard, is flanked by a police officer on each side. They lean forward, one is driving the chair, the other resting his hand on the armrest. Behind them a mass of people is just visible. Photo caption: Wheelchair-riding demonstrators demanding special lifts on public buses fill the streets around the Bonaventure Hotel, above, while one of them. Bill Bolte, below, is arrested. [Headline] Wheelchair-bound demonstrators tie up mass transit meeting By Philipp Gollner Herald staff writer 10/7/85 Eight wheelchair-bound protesters were arrested yesterday while close to 200 others jammed the lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel downtown to demand greater access for the disabled to public transportation. The demonstrators, members of about 15 disabled-rights advocacy groups from around the country, are demanding a federal law that would order all public transit operators to install automatic wheelchair lifts in buses. Such a law existed as part of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, but was successfully challenged in court six years ago by the American Public Transit Association, a trade group representing more than 400 transit districts nationwide. The association began its four-day annual convention yesterday at the Bonaventure, and protesters picked the occasion to voice their demands. “We're going to show the American (Public) Transit Association that we don't take crap and we're going to let them know that we are not passive crips," protester Bill Bolte, who has been on crutches or confined to a wheelchair for 52 of his 54 years, told demonstrators at the start of yesterday's protest. The demonstrators rode their wheelchairs down Wilshire Boulevard from MacArthur Park to the Bonaventure, where they hoped to talk to association executive vice president Jack R. Gilstrap and visit convention exhibits. But police blocked elevators and escalators leading to the convention floor, and after about 40 minutes, officers began handcuffing protesters who refused to disperse from fire exits of the second-story lobby where they had assembled. As police carried a wheelchair-bound demonstrator from the lobby, a sympathizer shouted: “Why don't you handcuff his legs? He might run away.” Six wheelchair-bound protesters blocked the path of a departing Airport Express bus that they said was not equipped with a lift. The bus was able to leave after police lifted the protesters and their wheelchairs onto the sidewalk. Inside the hotel, startled guests looked on as protesters chanted “we will ride" and “Gilstrap, Gilstap, where are you?" Seven of the eight protesters who were arrested were driven by specially-equipped vans to the county‘s Central Jail, where they were booked for failure to disperse and interfering with police. One female protester was taken to Sybil Brand institute for Women. All eight were being held last night on $500 bail each. “We certainly aren't unsympathetic to the people involved, but we are responsible for enforcing the law,” Deputy Police Chief Clyde Cronkhite, commander of operations at Central Bureau, told reporters following the arrests. in addition to demanding wheelchair lifts in all public buses, demonstrators at yesterday's protest demanded that the association fire its president, Gilstrap, and pass a resolution pledging commitment to restoring wheelchair access legislation. Albert Engelken. the association's deputy executive director, told reporters yesterday that "Mr. Gilstrap has no intention of resigning" and that there are no plans to vote on any resolutions proposed by the protest groups. Engelken said the group opposes federal wheelchair access laws mainly for what he called "geographical and climatic reasons." The lifts are cumbersome in snow and on curved roads. he said. In addition, it would cost transit districts nearly $270 per disabled passenger boarding if such legislation were implemented, he said. Usha Viswanathan, spokeswoman for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, said the district spends between $15,000 and $20,000 for each automatic lift that it buys. Viswanathan said 1,891 of 2,445 active RTD buses are equipped with lifts. Engelken said the association prefers decisions over access legislation to be made at the local level. But demonstrators at yesterday's protest believe that federal legislation is needed to guarantee the civil rights of the disabled. They argue that current policies violate their constitutional right to equal protection of the laws. "The small things in life that non-disabled people take for granted we have to work harder for," Christina Keeffer. who suffers from cerebral palsy, said. "l'm 42 now and I don’t want to wait until I'm 75 to get the changes." - ADAPT (206)
Village Voice, March 4, 1986, p.27 [Headline] NAT HENTOFF: America’s Apartheid [This was part of a series of articles Mr. Hentoff wrote for the Village Voice on disability issues and people with disabilities in our society.] PHOTO in center of page, Photo credit Michael Rondou / Press - Telegram: A slight man (Bobby Hartwell) in a somewhat rickety manual wheelchair sits in front of a large city bus [number 4405]. Through the windsheild a very beefy uniformed man, perhaps the driver, stands arms resting in front of him. Behind and to the side of this first bus is a group of three police men standing and conferring. Behind them a couple of other wheelchair riders are blocking a second bus. Behind that bus a third is barely visable. Text box above the photo: “Anatomy is not destiny and never has been.” The photo caption: A demonstrator holds a bus hostage In Long Beach, California: Because of the way the bus is built, the demonstrator can't get on. [Italicized] A “caste” of. . . persons has been created [in America]. Members suffer a stigma of abnormality, inferiority, and dependency, are provided with separate facilities and programs, and are encouraged to interact only with others of the same caste. [Italicized ends] —Robert Funk, Director/Attorney, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Inc. [Italicized] Black people started a movement when they were forced to sit in the backs of buses. We're not even allowed on the buses. [Italicized ends] – Julie Haraskin, during a nonviolent direct-action demonstration in Los Angeles by ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) Barry Giddings is a citizen of the United States who lives in Philadelphia. In 1981, he was shot in the neck and became a quadriplegic. The only way he can get around is in a wheelchair. Until December 10, 1985, he and his brother lived in his mother's home. On that day, Mrs. Giddings and her family were evicted. She went to Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services to get shelter for herself and her sons. Mrs. Giddings was told that she and her nondisabled son would be provided shelter, but Barry Giddings would have to provide for himself. Why? Because he was disabled. The apparatchiks tried to make Mrs. Giddings understand that they had no choice in this matter. Taking care of her disabled son's needs, they explained, would cost more money than was being spent on the average homeless soul in the city's shelters. Then there were the costs of additional insurance premiums to cover the city if this quadriplegic were taken in. Then where should he go? Was this man to be thrown out into the street to lie there until he died? Not our problem, said Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services. Lest you think that the decision to wholly abandon this disabled man was made by some low-level employee devoted to the increasingly popular notion that inconvenient people should be terminated, the person who sent Barry Giddings into the night was following the policy of Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services. A relative arranged to have Giddings taken into Jefferson Hospital for the night because the staff there, unlike the folks at Adult Services, could not bear leaving him without shelter. They put him in the emergency room. The next day, he was removed to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, although he did not require hospitalization. What he required, was a place to stay, and Magee Rehabilitation Hospital couldn’t keep him because providing shelter wasn't its' function. Barry Giddings, with the help of Stefan Presser, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, took the city of Philadelphia to court. The class action suit charged that the city policy discriminates against homeless people who are disabled, and thereby violates their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law as well as their rights under Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That statute forbids discrimination against the handicapped in any program receiving Federal funds, and Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services, as part of the Department of Human Services, does receive Federal money. The city of Philadelphia quickly caved in, placed Giddings in a temporary shelter and said it would find permanent housing for him and his mother. As Stefan Presser points out, a particularly shocking thing about the case was that although the city had been engaged in a vigorous campaign to get the homeless into shelters, it had this firm policy of shutting out the disabled among the homeless. "There's no telling," Presser told me, “how many disabled people have been turned away until we got the policy changed, and who knows what happened to them? Some of the organizations for the disabled inform me that from time to time they've had phone calls from people who have been refused shelter because they're not able-bodied, but when they got to the phone booth from which the call was made, there was no one there." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man could have a counterpart in the experiences of the nation's disabled for many, many years. As Robert Funk, Director of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund, wrote in 1981: “American society, under the guise of humanitarian efforts, has developed a record, with respect to treatment of disabled persons, that is a history of isolation and discrimination inflicted upon them because of their ‘handicaps.’ This history, manifested in the attitude of ‘out of sight, out of mind,' carried out through policies of custodialism, has resulted in an ostracized, invisible minority denied access to organized society." This year, in his part of a forthcoming book, Images of the Disabled/Disabling Images, Funk makes the corollary point—— and see if any of this applies to you ---- that "the general public does not associate the word 'discrimination' with the segregation and exclusion of disabled people. Most people assume that disabled people are excluded from school or segregated because they cannot learn or because they need special protection. So too, the absence of disabled coworkers is simply considered a confirmation of the obvious fact that disabled people can't work. These assumptions are deeply rooted in history. Historically, the inferior economic and social status of disabled people has been viewed as the inevitable consequence of tho physical and mental differences imposed by disability." I know a young woman whose disability is athetosis, a form of cerebral palsy, which affects her speech and the way she walks. She is a first-class writer --- a published writer --- and a graduate of Harvard Law School. Currently in Hartford, she specializes in state regulation of automobile and homeowners’ insurance. Her name is Lisa Blumberg and she wrote me recently: "If nondisabled adults spent more time talking to disabled adults, they would learn that anatomy is not destiny and never has been." But because many disabled adults are segregated from the rest of the population, misconceptions about them, along with ignorance of who they actually are, continue to create more discrimination. For instance. Michael Landwehr of the Council for Disability Rights in Chicago, born with spina bifida, was disabled during surgery when he was 12. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. Landwehr watched with great interest when in 1973 Congress enacted Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act forbidding discrimination against the disabled in any programs or activities that receive Federal funding. So what has Michael Landwehr's life been like since 1973? “I have been denied an apartment based on my disability," he says. “Last year I was uprooted from home when the commuter train I took to work refused to let me continue riding without an attendant. I was told I could not buy a ticket in the first-class section of an airliner unless I also purchased a ticket for an attendant. I have been denied jobs and promotions on the basis of my disability. Every day I am denied access to public transportation. [He is in A wheelchair.] “Hundreds of thousands of disabled persons remain incarcerated in nursing homes and institutions, isolated from every aspect of community life, denied their right to vote, denied the right to education and employment. Disabled people remain the most unemployed and underpaid group in the country. For every dollar earned by a nondisabled white male, a disabled white male earns 52 cents, a disabled minority male earns 25 cents, and a disabled minority woman earns 12 cents." But the disability rights movement is gathering momentum and has already brought about some changes. Accordingly, by the end of this decade, there is likely to be a stretching of public consciousness concerning this form of American apartheid that has largely been ignored during the rise of all the other movements for equal protection under the law-—blacks, women, Native Americans, homosexuals and lesbians, Hispanics, et al. Future columns will include an exploration of the nonviolent direct-action arm of the disability rights movement, which is currently the most vigorous continuation of the Martin Luther King-Saul Alinsky legacy. The series will also go into the history of legislation and court action concerning the disabled; the seemingly infinite ways in which the disabled are distorted, sentimentalized, and underestimated by the press, television, and films; a battery of very specific legislative recommendations by the disabled; and a good deal more. One of the underlying themes is a comment by Vassar Miller, who has published eight volumes of poetry, one of which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In her early sixties now, she was born with cerebral palsy. “What handicaps me far more than my physical condition," she says, “is the reaction society has to it. And, no less important, my reaction to society's reaction." Vassar Miller has edited a new book, Despite This Flesh (University of Texas Press), an extraordinarily illuminating collection of short stories and poems about the disabled. If public television had any imagination, a striking series could be made from Despite This Flesh. It ranges from pungent, poignant, and sharply funny evocations of childhood to a resoundingly erotic poem about a paralyzed man, "Seated Nude" by Richard Ronan. In her introduction, Vassar Miller tells of how, when she was a child, before there was ever such a thing as special education or mainstreaming, her stepmother “had tried to enroll me in a private school. ‘They just looked at me and started talking about God!‘" her stepmother said in dismayed tones when she came home. By the time the 1980s are over, a picket line of the disabled might elbow God aside and change the admissions policies of a school like that. The pressure is rising inside the disabled to break out of their caste, to be visible, to be part of whatever the hell's going on that they want to be part of. Consider ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit). In a number of cities around the country, its members have been demonstrating and getting arrested in protests against the lack of lifts on buses and the absence of ways of enabling the disabled to use other forms of public transportation. On October 6 in Los Angeles, a march of some 280 disabled ended at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, where the American Public Transit Association was holding a convention. This was the scene, as described in The Disability Rag (Box 145, Louisville, Kentucky): "Attempts by ADAPT members to descend to the main lobby of the Bonaventure on the one elevator connecting the lobby with the street level were met with police resistance. Security forces turned off the elevator and escalators. Police blocked doors to prevent other disabled people from entering the hotel. Chants of ‘We Will Ride!‘ filled the Bonaventure from protesters inside and out. A number of ADAPT marchers, determined that conventioneers would not be able to use the escalators either, tried to block the escalator entrances or to throw themselves down the steps....By Monday, the Bonaventure had become a police-held fortress.“ I bet you never thought disabled people could do anything like that. It's just the beginning. As an ADAPT organizer yelled at a crowd of the disabled in Los Angeles, “We've got to get over our slave mentality!" - ADAPT (205)
[Headline] NAT HENTOFF:“No Wonder God Punished Her by Making Her Blind!” Village Voice, March 18, 1986, page unknown. PHOTO in center of page. Photo credit, DAVID STONE/MAINSTREAM: MAGAZINE OF THE ABLE-DISABLED: A group of police officers in dark short sleeved uniforms standing and looking at one another. On the floor at their feet, a man in white clothes (Chris Hronis) lies on his side arms behind his back, apparently handcuffed. Through the legs of the officers you can see someone else (Edith Harris) sitting on the floor also apparently handcuffed. At the edges of the frame you can see a couple of people's faces and at the bottom, the back of someone's head. Above the picture is a text box that reads: "I am tired of being closed away." Photo Caption reads: Disabled activists commit civil disobedience in Las Angeles to make public transit accessible: “We will ride." [Italicized] New vocabulary must be developed. Racism and sexism are words known to every schoolchild, but there is no word to describe bigotry against persons with disabilities. [End italicized] – Lisa Blumberg, Hartford Courant, June 24, I985 [Italicized]... it is absolutely essential to understand that the pain and "tragedy" of living with a disability in our culture, such as it is, derives primarily from the pain and humiliation of discrimination, oppression, and anti-disability attitudes, not from the disability itself. [End italicized] — Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, Carasa News, Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, June/July 1984 [Italicized] Public transportation is a tax-supported system. The handicapped pay taxes. It's as simple as that. How would the average taxpayer feel if he was denied access to a facility he paid for? [End italicized] – Wade Blank, a founder of and organizer for ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation), Denver Post, October 6, 1985 In the spring of 1982, a woman in a wheelchair went into a clothing store in the Bronx and was told by the guard that he was required by store policy to turn away people with wheelchairs. Shs wrote a letter of complaint to the head of the chain and received an apology, along with a $50 gift certificate. Off she went to cash in the certificate, and guess what happened? That's right. A guard turned her away from the store. The woman sued; the store settled the case by giving her a check for $10,300. I had been about to write that a disabled lawyer had handled her case, but he — Kipp Elliott Watson—corrected me. “I am a lawyer with a disability," he said. In Jim Johnson's "Shop 'Talk" column in the February 22, 1986, Editor & Publisher, there is a guide for copy editors and reporters concerning accuracy of language in stories about those with disabilities. It was put together by more than 50 national disability organizations. One illustration: “Perhaps the most offensive term to disabled people is ‘wheelchair-bound' or ‘confined to a wheelchair.’ Disabled people don't sleep in their wheelchairs, they sleep in bed. Call them 'wheelchair users.'" Also, "labeling of groups should be avoided. Say ‘people who are deaf' or 'people with arthritis’ rather than ‘the deaf' or ‘the arthritic.’ . . . One of the problems with eliminating insensitive terms is the, lack of a clear policy that reporters and editors can follow. A reporter cannot change a paper's policy by himself. The first time a reporter writes 'person who is arthritic,’ a copy editor is sure to change it to ‘an arthritic’ to save words.” And I would particularly recommend the next correction to the vast majority of the reporters and editorial writers who have covered Baby Doe cases: “Afflicted [unintelligible] a negative term that suggests hopelessness. Use disabled. Also to be avoided are deformed and invalid." The guide is especially useful because more and more of those with disabilities are going to be making news-in–lawsuits, individual acts of resistance against discrimination, and in collective demonstrations. For instance, in Los Angeles last October, during a nonviolent direct-action protest against the American Public Transit Association (which is resisting making all its buses accessible to the handicapped), there was this report by George Stein in the October 7 Los Angeles-Times: “During the procession, 131 wheelchairs, stretching more than a block, carried people with disabilities ranging from spina bifida, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy to snapped spinal cords, congenital defects and post-polio paralysis. “Many had the withered limbs and lack of body control that the more fortunate usually try not to stare at. “But not Sunday. Motorists slowed to watch the sight. Some honked in support. One of the demonstrators was Bob Kafka, a spokesman for ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) "This is beautiful,” Kafka said as he wheeled along “I am tired of being closed away." Carolyn Earl, who uses a wheelchair, tried to make a reservation at the Harrison Hotel in Oakland, California. The clerk wouldn't take an advance deposit. Suppose there's a fire, he said. The hotel would be liable. But call back, he said. She did. Ain't that a shame, there are no rooms with baths, and she'd asked for a room with a bath. Okay, the woman said, I’ll take a room without a bath. The clerk said that for her, there were no rooms, period. Just like it used to be with blacks and Jews. It happens, however, that according to Section 54.1 of California's Civil Code, it is as unlawful to discriminate in public accommodations against people with disabilities as it is to exclude racial and ethnic minorities. Carolyn Earl went to court. In December 1984, the hotel agreed to pay her damages and to sign an agreement pledging never again to refuse lodging to anyone who is disabled. In Louisville last fall, Steve and Nadine Jacobson, who are blind, were on trial. The charge: disorderly conduct. On July 7, they had been sitting in exit-row seats on United Airlines Flight 869 to Minneapolis, where they live. Airline personnel and security employees from Standford airport ordered the Jacobsons to get out of those seats. In the event of an emergency, the Jacobsons were told, they, being blind, could jeopardize their own safety and that of others. The rationale for the policy, it came out at the trial, was a “test” some time back during which – now get this – sighted people were blindfolded two hours before a mock evacuation and it turned out that these “blind” people had trouble opening emergency exit doors as well as dealing with other evacuation procedures. On the basis of a test that used fake blind people to find out how real blind people might act, the Federal Aviation Administration—long known for its stunning brilliance—issued an advisory circular suggesting to airlines that they keep blind folks out of those emergency exit rows. As they were trying to get the Jacobsons to move, United Airlines personnel kept insisting that a "Federal regulation" said they had to get out of those seats. The Jacobsons, however, had just come from a convention at which that very advisory circular had been discussed. They knew there was no rule. And so they sat. And sat. Irritated passengers offered to trade seats with them. Another yelled that the Jacobsons were holding everybody else up. "How can you be so selfish?" And another, speaking from the heart, pointed to Nadine Jacobson, and said to a neighbor: “No wonder God punished her by making her blind!" Eventually, the Jacobsons were removed from the plane and charged with disorderly conduct—not with violating the alleged “Federal regulation." At the trial, Steve Jacobson told the jury: “All through my life, there were things I was told I couldn't do because I was blind. In college, they said I couldn't take math." (Mr. Jacobson is a computer analyst for 3M.) He went on to say that he kept ignoring all the advice about all the things he couldn't do because he was blind. “I just had to go on," he said. Where he works, he was told not to use the escalator. He could get hurt. He uses the escalator. That day at the airport, “To move from my seat would reinforce all that I've worked not to have happen. To move would say to the other people on the plane that I am less capable than any sighted person to open that emergency door. And that isn't. the case. It just isn't.” As for Nadine Jacobson: “I was scared. I had never been arrested before. I felt really bad that people were angry and upset, and that the plane was being delayed." But still she wouldn't move. “Many times people make assumptions about what we [blind people] can do and can't do. I knew that if I moved from that seat, everyone would think that anyone else was more competent than me. It's an issue of self-respect. I'm a citizen of this country, and a blind person, and I feel I have a right to travel in this country, and if I get assigned a seat, I have a right to sit there." Would the jury have been convinced solely by what the Jacobsons said? I don't know. But I expect they listened with much interest to testimony by Mark D. Warriner of Frontier Airlines, who said his company had stopped discriminating against blind people as a result of a March 1985 evacuation drill by World Airways, which showed that blind people—real blind people—got out during an emergency faster than sighted passengers. The Jacobsons were acquitted. The verdict, said Nadine Jacobson, was “a step forward for blind people all over the country." Footnote: None of the police officers or the security personnel involved in arresting the Jacobsons would give them their names. Without the names, the Jacobsons could never identify them, ho-ho. But an attorney sitting in front of the Jacobsons on the plane handed them a piece of paper with one of the names, and that led to others being revealed. The stories about the Jacobsona and the woman trying to get a hotel room originally appeared in The Disability Rag in somewhat different form. There is nothing like that paper in the whole country. It covers the whole disability rights spectrum—from what‘s happening in the courts to the directions being taken by groups of nonviolent resisters. It publishes memoirs, jeremiads, parodies, and material for which there is no category. It is the liveliest publication I know. It has grace and beauty and fury. It costs $9 a year, from The Disability Rag, Box 145, Louisville, Kentucky 40201. You have a choice of print, cassette tape, or large-print edition. We shall be getting back to public transit, along with education, jobs, and stereotypes of people with disabilities in movies and television as well as in print. The importance of access to buses and other forms of transit has been distilled by Wade Blank of ADAPT: “Jobs and education don't mean much if you can't get a bus to take you there. Accessibility to public transportation—moving from one place to another—should be a right, not just a consumer service." Recently, Wade Blank was telling me how, because of ADAPT and the pressure it keeps putting on, 78 per cent of the buses in Denver, where ADAPT is based, are now accessible. Soon, with 200 new buses on order, all of them with lifts, people with disabilities will be able to ride 90 per cent of the Denver buses. Already, Blank said, this access means a lot. “I know a man with cerebral palsy," Blank continued. “He has no use of his legs or arms. He can't speak. But now, with the buses accessible, he can ride around and see the sights and come to our offices. He can move where and when he wants to in the Denver community." He's no longer closed away. In Dallas, Kataryn Thomas, 57, was arrested last month during an ADAPT demonstration against the recalcitrant Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority. She was born with spina bifida, uses a wheelchair, has worked as a receptionist, and when she was busted, a bright orange flag connected to the back of her chair fluttered in the breeze. The words on it were: “Free Spirit." “l don't have to climb any mountains," Kataryn Thomas told the Dallas Times Herald. “I just want to ride the public transit.”