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Начало / Альбомы / Wade Blank - Founder of Atlantis Co-Founder of ADAPT 89
- ADAPT (1803)
Page 8 Apri11988 [Headline] Religion and the disabled [Subheading] Disability + Power Civil, human rights by Rev. Wade Blank This article is about power, a word that has many negative connotations about it. While we admire people who have power, and people who use power, we still fear getting and using power for ourselves. We believe the meek shall inherit the earth," it is better "to be seen and not heard," [boxed text] These people gained power by acting, by laying aside social etiquette and taking action in their self interest; they gained power by taking risks. [text resumes] and being liked means not being too outspoken. Not only do we have some fear of power; we have great difficulty applying the term to people with disabilities, because our society does not recognize the possibility of a disabled per-son having power or being powerful. Our feeble attempts at gaining power are done in more accepted and passive ways of urging the vote, writing our congressperson or going to meetings. If the disability movement really wants power so it can address its oppression, then it needs to learn how to get power and how to use it. In Denver, there are twenty thousand people who use wheel-chairs for mobility. In 1978, the city of Denver had no wheel-chair accessible buses on its mainline system. That meant that there were twenty thousand people in wheelchairs that were not permitted on buses. To change that situation obviously required power and a lot of it. You could go to all the meetings you wanted, write all the letters you could write, but the situation wouldn't change. A group of twenty five disabled people got together and pledged to each other their willingness to take personal risk and personal action that would change the situation. First, the actions they would take would educate the public about their need for public transportation. Secondly, they would disrupt the able-bodied to the extent that it would get media coverage and to the extent that civil disobedience would occur and people would be arrested. In July of 1978, 25 people surrounded two buses at a main intersection of Denver and held the buses for two days. The police didn't arrest anyone because they were afraid of a bad public image. That action started a year of civil disobedience by those 25 people who did actions every three or four weeks. Today all 700 buses in Denver have wheelchair lifts. A re-markable demonstration of power! Twenty five people, willing to act, changed the situation for 20,000 people. These people gained power by acting, by laying aside social etiquette and taking action in their self interest; they gained power by taking risks. Once they showed them-selves and others how serious they were, and once people understood that these people with disabilities would be back over and over again until they got what they wanted, these once powerless people gained power, and to this day have maintained it. For the disability movement to succeed, every community in the United States needs disabled people willing to act in their own self interest to gain power. Only with power will all the issues affecting disabled people be won. That power network is now developing but we have a long way to go! We Will Ride, We Will Be Free! - ADAPT (1802)
- ADAPT (1797)
- ADAPT (1823)
- ADAPT (1813)
SALT OF THE EARTH People who are good & thirsty for justice [Headline] Rev. Wade Blank [Subheading] Michael Ervin interviews Rev. Wade Blank Wade Blank is co-founder of the Atlantis Community for people with disabilities in Denver, Colorado. Working in a nursing home, Blank, an ordained Presbyterian minister, became out-raged by the way residents there were treated like children with no control over their lives. Since the early 1970s, he and the Atlantis Community have helped hundreds of clients move into independent, integrated housing throughout Denver. Atlantis has also revitalized the disability-rights movement nationally by launching American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). That organization has led campaigns of civil disobedience to force city transportation boards to ensure access for persons with disabilities to public transportation. The demands of ADAPT became federal law as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. "That a group of powerless people can change their government is the greatest compliment to democracy," says Blank. "It's what we learned in civics. Most people believe government is not changeable. We believe it is." I grew up in Canton, Ohio. The joke around the house when I decided to go into the ministry was that the Vietnam War was God's way of calling me into the church. I was a classic WA$P conservative. I was going to be a country preacher But then at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago they gave me the intellectual education to critique my own ignorance about theology. Mix that with the black militant historians who were coming on the scene. I went to Selma because I had a black friend in the seminary who dared me. I saw these blond women in miniskirts yelling "nigger-lover." It didn't fit my stereotype of blond women in mini-skirts. I was feeling boxed in by life. Everybody was going to fight this war in Vietnam, and that was neat and tidy. Blacks had their place, and that was neat and tidy. I had the same feelings of in-adequacy everybody else did. Suddenly, there's someone saying, "Maybe you're not inadequate. Maybe the system makes you feel inadequate." When we started Atlantis, I saw it as fitting in with all that. Dr. Martin Luther King said the joy of the struggle was in the struggle. This was the struggle. The mission of Jesus was to stir up the status quo and make people whole. That's what this movement is all about. It's about taking someone with cerebral palsy and saying, "You are a total person in society, and if people don't believe that, they're going to before we're done with them." By 1966 I was ordained and had taken a rural parish in Ohio. I lasted about a year and a half before the lid blew. I opened a coffee house with a rock band. But the parents had their kids boycott it. So it fell flat. The next call I took was in Akron at an all-white church. I got tight with the black clergy down the street. We would bring the black Baptist choir into our church and send our choir there. Then the Kent State stuff started. I offered some alternative services, and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members started coming. We opened a storefront called Alice's Restaurant where we sold books and did draft counseling. We started running people into Canada. These were guys being drafted. Their numbers had come up. I would leave my Volkswagen full of gas and leave the key under the mat. If the car ever got caught, I would claim it was stolen. One day when I got to my office, two guys were going through my desk. Turns out they were FBI. They called all the members of my church. After the shootings at Kent State I had 35 members left. So it closed. I went back to the seminary and got my master's degree. Then my wife and I decided to drop out. We put names of cities in a hat and picked Denver. I got a job at $1.90 an hour as an orderly at a nursing home. After a year I quit. But the nursing-home owner hired me back as a recruiter. Can you imagine me coming to your house and selling you on living in a nursing home? I had community meetings and saw some of the deep, deep places some people from state institutions were coming from. They weren't educated, they didn't have any self-esteem, they didn't know their parents. I put that into political jargon. I said, "The problem is you're stuck here. The problem is whether you have any rights as a person." They began to grab onto that. Anything that went wrong, their rebuttal was, "I have rights." They challenged me on why I was enforcing curfew, why I was making people go to workshop. I had to put up or shut up, so I sided with the residents. I was on my way out by then. I went on leave, and when I came back, everyone's radios were confiscated. Electric wheelchairs were taken away. They were going to control the peasants. The only thing the residents had to fall back on was what I taught them about demonstrations and activism. So they started refusing to eat, refusing to do anything. The nursing-home director drove out one night, and he was kicking doors open, shining a flashlight in their faces, insulting and intimidating people. So we started moving people out. I got eight slum apartments renovated. Everyone thought we were stark raving mad. I used to go to the grocery store for them. They didn't have a way to get there. That opened the whole can of worms about public transit In 1978 we held a press conference and announced the time had come for people in wheelchairs to be able to board buses. We blocked buses overnight. We slept in the street. We had the keys to two buses and demanded the general manager come down and get the keys. We made him walk a gauntlet of wheelchairs. We announced we would hold protests once a month until all buses were accessible. During the process we proposed an elected transit board. When the state legislature approved an elected board, the very first action of that board was to make buses accessible. Just as the Selma march led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the many marches we've done led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That a group of powerless people can change their government is the greatest compliment to democracy. Most people believe government is not changeable. We believe it is. Now we want to take on the nursing-home industry, one of our most oppres-sive systems. It's a $52 billion industry. We want to defund it and create serv-ices that allow disabled and elderly people to live at home and participate in society. We need to use that money to liberate people. It would be redirected into a national attendant-services program. It would guarantee a person from the moment of their disability a right to attendant services. If a person has a physical need, right now we're meeting that need in an institutionalized environment. We want it met in a humanizing environment. The religious community is in a dilemma over the disability-rights movement. It approaches it as a do-good situation, which makes it automatically paternalistic. People prefer to see it as an access issue rather than an empowerment movement. If you give access to something irrelevant, what's the difference? Give access to something empowering. The church is all about empowering people from a spiritual and a physical point of view. There needs to be a lot of thinking about what the lame person outside the gates of Jerusalem really represents. Do you put money in his tin cup, or was Jesus asking people to go beyond that? ■ [image] drawing of Wade Blank next to three wheelchairs - ADAPT (1812)
[This page continues the article from Image 1813. Full text is available on 1813 for easier reading.] - ADAPT (1837)
[image] [image caption] Wade was always ready to lend a hand. Photo Tom Olin - ADAPT (1793)
ACCESS USA N E W S TM [Headline] Tragedy takes life of disability rights leader [Subheading] ADAPT co-founder Wade Blank drowns trying to save son Gary Bosworth It is surprising how seemingly senseless acts of fate can shakeup ones neat, tidy world. That happened to me with an event that shook the disability community to its very soul. Everything around me seemed to be progressing around me in a steady fashion. My hometown of Desert Hot Springs and the Desert Hot Springs Breakfast Rotary had received a joint award of appreciation from the State of California for their joint co-operation on providing access to persons with disabilities in Desert Hot Springs. A London magazine called asking for photos I took in San Francisco at an ADAPT national action, for use in a story they were publishing about the disability rights movement and the politics of the Clinton administration. There was the surprise phone call from Austria from a dear friend telling me she had decided to come for a visit this summer. To cap off the week, over the week-nd I received the latest copy of Access USA News, which listed the top news events of 1992 affecting persons with disabilities. The top three/four listed were all events I considered myself lucky even to be involved in at the scene, with fellow activists from ADAPT. The world around me seemed in order. The worst problem I was facing was trying to find a speaker for the corn-ing Breakfast Rotary meeting. Suddenly, the deck of cards crumbled. That Mon-day evening I received word of the unthinkable. Reverend Wade Blank, founder/leader/guiding light of Atlantis Community and ADAPT was dead. Wade, 52, was killed in a valiant, but futile attempt to save his 8-year-old son Lincoln from drowning in rough seas off a beach at Todos Santos, Mexico, on February 15,1993. Wade, his wife Molly, and their two children were vacationing. Lincoln got caught in an undertow. Wade swam out to save him but they both drowned. Immediately the phone lines across the country lit up as the horrible, unspeakable news spread to every corner of the dis-ability community. Everybody had known many close friends that had died before in the movement, so death was no stranger in our community, but Wade's death was in-comprehensible. So much of what we have can be traced directly to the personal efforts and convictions started by Wade. in 1974, Wade, [boxed text] In Wade's eyes the disability rights movement really symbolized the ultimate in civil rights movements [text resumes] with a small group of nursing home survivors started the second independent living center for persons with disabilities the world. Named for the fabled lost continent, Atlantis Community was for the rebirth of the lost lives of adults with disabilities neglected and discarded by society. Nobody was too disabled to join Atlantis. In a precedent setting $32 million lawsuit by Wade and those survivors against the nursing home that had incarcerated them, it was finally established that even nursing home residents had some civil rights. When public transit refused them, ADAPT, the activist arm of Atlantis was formed. Wade called on his experience of working with Martin Luther King Jr. during the 60's in the south, and the turbulent years of Kent State, where he was pastor of a local church, for his inner guidance. A two-prong offensive was started in both the federal courts and what became the highly honed IN-THEIR-FACE style of non-violent civil disobedience ADAPT became famous for in their dozen year battle that worked towards public transit accessibility and the ultimate passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act - something unthinkable to even the most far reaching idealist just few short years earlier. Wade saw in the disability movement something unique, the grand equalizer - DISABILITY. Becoming disabled could happen to anybody, at anytime without warning. Disability did not play favorites No matter a person's social standing, culture, race, religion, wealth, politics, intelligence, gender, sexual preference, morality, age, whatever; disability could come crash-ing down destroying one's neat little world. In Wade's eyes, the disability rights movement really symbolized the ultimate in civil rights movements. It pained him that the disability movement throughout the decades has steadfastly been shunned and ignored by every other civil rights movement. The ultimate slap in the face came when Rosa Parks, of the AfroAmerican civil rights movement, cancelled a paid speaking engagement with ADAPT because of ADAPT being too controversial. However, Wade turned even that into an asset of organizing. If the disability community was to get civil rights, they must fight for it them-selves, in the trenches, no matter what the cost. The letter of rejection from Ms. Parks hangs on the wall of ADAPT's national headquarters as a constant reminder—this is our fight alone. [image] [image caption] Wade Blank and his son Lincoln (left) joined ADAPT co-founder, Mike Auberger (far right), at the dedication of the monument honoring the disability rights movement. The dedication was on the second anniversary of the signing of the ADA, July 26, 1992. [text resumes] Always mindful of the importance of self-determination, Wade was proud that over 75% of the employees of Atlantis Community have a severe disability, including every major leadership position. Every regional ADAPT activist leader also has a severe disability. Wade, like all the other great leaders, never asked anyone to do something he was not willing to do himself. He spent an untold number of days in jail, alongside his wheelchair warriors of ADAPT, sometimes over 100 people at a time Wade declined personal publicity himself, preferring the larger message of injustice being told by persons with disabilities themselves. Justin Dart, Chairperson of former President Bush's Commission on Employment of Persons with Disabilities would many times refer fondly of the 'army of ADAPTas being the truepatriots of the dis-ability movement just like the early patriots who threw tea into the Boston Harbor'. Last year, Wade traveled to Czechoslovakia, at a joint invitation of the Czech government and the Bush Administration to help them in the drafting of their brand new democratic constitution, so that the rights of persons with disabilities would be included. As powerful as these accomplishments are, they do not tell the whole story. Wade was a gentle soul who always had time for anybody, anytime of the day or night. We were all members of his family. We must remember not only the larger things, but also the seemingly small things that gave glimpses to the inner soul of the person we all loved. In Orlando, Wade was arrested in the middle of a radio inter-view, as he was being taken to the paddy wagon, one of his wheelchair warriors furiously wheeled next to him holding a cellular phone to his head so Wade could continue the on-the-air interview all the way to the paddy wagon. That day, 73 wheelchair warriors were arrested fighting against the inhumanity of incarceration in nursing homes, when attendant services are cheaper and more humane. Several were taken to jail in the back of moving vans commandeered by police. During an action against the Social Security Administration national head-quarters in Baltimore, three persons in wheelchairs instinctively peeled off and captured a public bus that wandered a little too close to the protest. Wade ran over to get them to release the public bus, since they were not the target of the day's actions. Coming back to the rest of the protest he calmly said with a touch of humor "buses are like (all habits) once you have one bus you can't stop". There were the times, out of no-where, I would suddenly get a phone call from Wade saying he had just run across something I had written and he had to call to tell me his thoughts on the article. During an action in San Francisco, when he was told the police were setting over a fleet of paratransit vehicles to do mass arrests, Wade responded with, "So-what do you expect us to do, make reservations (for transportation to jail)?" There were also the intimate times of those special ADAPT weddings Wade conducted at some of the national actions. It was a special way, special couples could share the [boxed text] Wade saw in the disability movement something unique, the grand equalizer --DISABILITY [text continues] joy of their love with the only family that understood-ADAPT. One wedding took place just hours after everybody, including the couple to be married, were released from jail. There are the images of Wade the gentle soul, together with fellow fighter, wife, and pillar of strength Molly Blank, and their children on the protest trails with their extended family of ADAPT. Everybody was important; everybody was equal in the end. The national offices of Atlantis Community & ADAPT was really one big massive room with no walls to create artificial barriers within the movement. The lack of walls symbolized Wade's view on life, civil rights, and equality of all people. He gave meaning to the saying, 'DISABILITY PRIDE.' In his memory, ADAPT shall never forget Wade as the fight for freedom continues with even more vigor and sense of purpose than ever before. [image] [no image caption] [Subheading] Wade Blank Memorial Fund A memorial fund has been established in Wade Blank's honor to continue the fight of defending disability rights. Contributions to the WADE BLANK MEMORIAL FUND can be sent to: WADE BLANK MEMORIAL FUND FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DENVER 300 SOUTH FEDERAL BOULEVARD DENVER, CO 80206 [boxed text] Tribute to Wade Blank at Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. set for May 9th Before he died, Wade planned a series of demonstrations for personal assistance services to be held in Washington, DC, on May 9th, 10th, and 11th. These will go forward in his honor. There will be a tribute to him on Sunday, May 9th, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. [ADAPT logo] Join together in memory of Wade-on May 9th, today, tomorrow, as long as life remains-to continue his struggle for a truly humane society. [boxed text ends] - ADAPT (1815)
- ADAPT (1784)
[Headline] When "Rights" Clash [Subheading] How does an industry association cope with the constitutionally protected rights of an activist organization that opposes it? APTA has wrested with ADAPT about accessibility for six years. By Bill Paul [boxed text] An APTA task force has developed a draft policy recommending that APTA adopt a policy of full wheelchair accessibility for all buses and railcars. The recommendation also urges the federal government to implement a national policy toward that end. A working paper outlining the draft recommendation is now being debated. It has become a familiar scene. The American Public Transit Association sponsors a trade show, or an educational or business conference. Transit professionals travel in from distant points to register for the members-only conference. Meanwhile, outside the conference hotel, usually on opening day and then for a day or two afterwards, a small group of wheelchair-bound protesters, typically numbering between 50 and 150 people, mount a demonstration. Nearly all of them too have come from distant points. They gather their wheelchairs around the hotel entrance, or roll into the path of a passing public transit bus forcing it to a halt. Soon the now-familiar chant begins" "We shall ride!" We shall ride! We shall ride!" Protested by the First Amendment [image] [image caption] Wade Blank walks behind a group of his ADAPT supporters in front of the Omni International Hotel in St. Louis during APTA Eastern Conference in May. The demonstrations have become commonplace at APTA meetings. [text resumes] right to free speech, the protesters, members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT), are demonstrating in favor of full accessibility of every federally funded transit bus and transit station. Often, the demonstrations turn violent with arrests following. Since these protests began six years ago, 381 arrests of ADAPT demonstrators have been made. ADAPT began demonstrating against APTA in 1982 after the association filed a lawsuit three years earlier in federal district court to rescind a DOT regulation to comply with the Section 504 regulations. The DOT regulation was issued by then-Secretary Brock Adams, and would have mandated all federally funded transit buses and rail transit stations to be wheelchair accessible. APTA's lawsuit eventually prevailed, incurring the association the enmity of ADAPT. In the aftermath of the lawsuit, APTA's position on accessibility has focused on the right of each transit system to develop its own solution rather than the federal government mandating a solution. Its policy statement declares: "APTA agrees with Congress, the Administration, the courts, local officials and many disabled persons that each community should continue to be permitted to determine the best means of meeting this obligation by tailoring service to the diverse needs, circumstances, and desires of the local community." In 1983 ADAPT presented APTA with a resolution asking association members to vote on the issue of full accessibility. APTA declined. Indeed, that vote has yet to be taken in a general session, a matter that rankles ADAPT. However, as we'll see, an association task force has re-evaluated APTA's position on September/October 1988 METRO Magazine 79 - ADAPT (1830)
[image] [image caption] News photo by Linda McConnell [Headline] Meeting of the minds Wade Blank, director of Atlantis Community for the handicapped, addresses a meeting of Social Security representatives and Disabled American Workers Security. Blank said the meeting Tuesday was a good start but only a beginning toward solving the problems of people whose disability payments have been cut off. Social Security representatives promised to look into a dozen cutoff cases. - ADAPT (1771)
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"...I'll never forget the first day of work. The black community just hated me. I walked in the door and Luke White, who was the assistant director there, sent me out with a real old lady on the staff named Mims, and she was about a 68-year-old black woman, and I spent the entire day visiting other old black women in the community, and talked about knitting and stuff. When I came back, Luke was just laughing because he was going to show "whitey." He really stuck it to me. That was his was of getting to me..." -Wade Blank, 1992, about Twinsburg, Ohio