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홈 / 앨범 / Wade Blank - Founder of Atlantis Co-Founder of ADAPT 89
- ADAPT (1833)
[Headline] RELIGION AND THE DISABLED .. . LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE DISABLED MOVEMENT by Rev. Wade Blank In the 1950's and 1960's, as the Black communities organized for freedom, we saw many church leaders become heavily involved In the civil rights issue. The core of the civil rights movement was the Black church, and as time went on, more and more white churches joined the struggle. While the oppression of the Black communities was economic, political, and social, and the goals of the movement were integration, and equality in American society, the rationale for this work for justice was based on theological thinking. The Creator had made all people equal, and there-fore love for each other among all humanity would bring about a community of justice and liberty for all. This was the message of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., which so stirred the country and the world, and it was this theological basis that gave momentum to the anti-war effort during Viet Nam in the 1960's and early 1970's. If the message of Dr. King and the church was so compelling on issues of justice and equality for people of color, then is the message not just as imperative now for the disability rights movement? Why have we not adopted the theological springboard for our civil rights movement"? There are several reasons: 1) All liberation movements evolve as people in history seek justice. This is called "salvation history" in which all humanity seeks equality and justice. This yearning that evolves into struggle is just now beginning to stir in the souls of people with disabilities. 2) People who are disabled are just now beginning to understand that the physical characteristics of disability are not more different that the fact of colored skin — a physical characteristic that locked millions of people out of society. The physical functioning, appearance, or difference should not determine if s/he receives justice and equality. In order for the disability rights movement to become powerful the disabled per-son must "own" his/her disability, as Black people own their Black skin. "This is what I am. I am proud of what I am. I need and demand what other members of my society have. The barriers erected against me in my own community are not the fault of my disability. They were built by others in their ignorance, prejudice, and paternalism." Until that perception becomes reality, we will not have the power of our own convictions to change anything! 3) Once the righteousness of our position is held in our guts — steadfast and unwavering it will begin to transmit itself to the larger society and church leadership will begin to deal with the issues. The church is getting a paternalistic message from the disability movement at this time. Church people honestly believe that all we want are ramps into churches! They don't understand that we are working for empowerment. Therefore, the liberation theology that the church applies to other oppressed groups is not realized for people with disabilities. It is up to us to make our position clear. While we are talking about access, we also demand the right to ride all public transportation, the right to keep our own children, the right to join our neighbors at the polling place, the right to an equal education, the right to eat in public places — entering through the front door with our friends and families, not around back by the garbage cans. These issues are identical to those the Black liberation movement addressed there is no difference and the church must hear that message! American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) has received substantial support from the Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans because we have taken the time to extensively explain our issues to them. If we are to be successful in all communities, every member of the disabled community must see him/herself as a worker in a true liberation movement —steadfast and unwavering—able to triumph over every argument used against us — from "God's will!", through cost effectiveness, special treatment, architectural integrity, tradition, fear and loathing, holding firm until we, too, shall overcome. WE WILL RIDE NEW WORLD / MARCH 1988 - ADAPT (1827)
- ADAPT (1792)
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[This page continues the article from Image 1793. Full text is available on 1793 for easier reading.] - ADAPT (1788)
[Headline] Blank opened many doors for people in wheelchairs The nation has lost a tireless advocate for human rights with the untimely death of Wade Blank, the Denver activist whose work helped to spark the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Blank, 52, who drowned this week while trying to rescue his 8-year-old son from heavy surf off Baja California, had spent the past 20 years working to make public facilities more accessible to people in wheelchairs and to help the developmentally disabled lead more independent lives. A former Presbyterian minister, he co-founded the Atlantis Community in Denver in the mid-1970s and later organized wheelchair protests that forced the Regional Transportation District to install lifts on all its buses. His latest work had been aimed at getting Congress to recognize home health care as a basic right and to provide attendants who would enable the handicapped to live by themselves instead of in nursing homes. Blank, who was able-bodied, always insisted that society should adapt to the needs of the disabled, rather than vice versa. For that, he will always have a place of honor in the hearts of those who understand the true meaning of the words freedom and equality. - ADAPT (1825)
- ADAPT (1819)
- ADAPT (1804)
Rocky Mountain News Mon., Aud. 3, 1992 [Headline] Ex-minister gets radical for disabled Wade Blank was talking to George Roberts, remembering the days before Roberts got arrested. Blank is co-director of Atlantis Community, which fights for rights for the handicapped. Roberts has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair-and is an inspector for Atlantis. The two met 21 years ago, when Blank was an orderly in the nursing home where Roberts thought he would spend the rest of his life. "I remember back when I first met you, I didn't think I'd ever get in trouble. I've been arrested 32 times in protests since then," Roberts said. "George," Blank said, "I always did have faith in you." Last week, Denver installed a plaque on the 14th anniversary of a demonstration by Atlantis members, demanding wheelchair access on all RTD buses. It also marked the day the second stage of the American Disabilities Act went into effect, prohibiting employers from discriminating against the handicapped. Blank, 51, grew up in Canton, Ohio, went to an all-white high school and college, and supported Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. A black college roommate dared him to go to Selma, Ala., to march with Martin Luther King Jr. Blank became pastor of a church in Kent, Ohio, which became an underground meeting place for the Students for a Democratic Society. After he Kent State killings, he went back to McCormick Theological Seminary and got a masters degree. He moved to Denver and worked as an orderly in a nursing house Roberts had a job counting fish hooks for 10 [cents] an hour. Someone was stealing televisions, so Blank asked him to be a night watchman. A couple of nights later, Roberts pinned the burglar against a wall with his wheelchair. Blank helped residents of nursing homes find apartments and co-founded Atlantis to help them. Atlantis helped fight for the disabilities act. It also has organized sit-ins around the country, disrupting meetings and closing down government buildings. "You'll find that my bitterest enemies are disabled people, because I'm able-bodied and I'm so radical," he said. "I fight the notion they should just be Jerry's kids. I want them to have control." Roberts is married and owns a home. "I couldn't have done it without Wade and Atlantis," he said. "Yes," Blank said. "You could have. You just might not have known it." [image] [image caption] Blank - ADAPT (1817)
"...on Christmas Eve the following year, I had a black woman who was very pregnant and a white guy, and we rented a burro from the zoo or something, and we went to a Holiday Inn on Christmas and said they'd just travelled a great distance and needed a place to sleep, and we had the Associated Press there and the UPI. They went all over the United States, that one theatrical comment of black and white, and that was the extent of it. It's very powerful stuff, but it blew my image as a Presbyterian minister to the max. I've got great pictures of that couple standing there signing in. To the credit of the manager, he let them in, sent up a bottle of champagne, and the Holiday Inn named him as manager of the year, so everybody won, because he was so quick on his feet..." Wade Blank, 1992 - ADAPT (1821)
- ADAPT (1779)
[This page continues the article from Image 1784. Full text is available on 1784 for easier reading.] - ADAPT (1806)
Metro Page 6-Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo. Sunday March 14, 1982 [Headline] Radical fights battles for handicapped By Jerry Brown News Staff "This is what political organizing is all about," said Wade Blank as he mopped the kitchen floor in the home of a severely disabled client at the Atlantis Community for the handicapped. "The secret to political organizing is providing services," he added while cleaning, dressing, feeding and collecting dirty laundry for Francis Peyrose. He is one of about 65 handicapped people who receives care from Atlantis at least twice daily at home. "Most organizers don't realize that. A lot of my organizing friends give me a hard time for spending my time like this," said Blank. Blank is co-founder and co-director of Atlantis, an organization dedicated to teaching handicapped people how to live outside the institutional confines of nursing homes and how to expand their civil rights. He is best known in Denver for leading a series of highly publicized demonstrations against the Regional Transportation District for not providing better service to the handicapped. He and his followers blocked a bus for a day in 1978 and this year staged a sit-in at RTC headquarters. Blank was born Dec. 4, 1940, grew up in Canton, Ohio-"Football Hall of Fame country." He lettered in football (didn't everybody?"), attended Muskingum College ("a small Christian college for small Christians" and became a Presbyterian minister and political follower of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. "In short," Blank said, "I was a classic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male bigot." But in the 1960s, Wade Blank became a radical-participating in civil rights demonstrations with Martin Luther King Jr., providing a meeting place for student racials from Kent State University at his church, which closed after the FBI began pressuring members of the congregation to find another place to worship, and helping draft resisters flee to Canada. Blank attributes his political metamorphosis to the 1963 assassination of Presi- [image] [image caption] Wade Blank helps dress Francis Peyrose, one of about 65 residents who receive daily care at Atlantis Community. News Photo by Jon Gordon. [text resumes] -dent Kennedy and the political taunts of a black roommate at McCormick Theological College in Chicago, where he studied for the ministry. The civil rights marches have ended, the Vietnam War is history and he no longer is an active minister. But Blank remains a radical. And he is leading his own civil rights movement-on behalf of the physically handicapped. Because of what he believes are significant political and social strides by Denver's handicapped community in recent years, Blank said Denver is rapidly becoming a mecca for the disabled. Denver has more handicapped people per capita than any city in the United States, he said, with an estimated 16,000 residents who are confined to wheelchairs. Blank moved to Denver in 1971 after taking a year off from his political and social battles to get a master's degree in the theology of rock music-a year he described as a "period of healing." But he considers his theological thesis on the "new prophets" of rock music-The Who, Jethro Tull, Jefferson Airplane, Sly And The Family Stone, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and The Grateful Dead-one of his crowning achievements. A copy of the thesis, written more than a decade ago, shares a spot in his personal scarpbook along with newspaper clippings of protest activities and political fights in which he has been involved. Blank said he was suffering from political burnout when he moved to Denver. He spent his first few months in Colorado giving lectures on rock music and "learning the community." He became an orderly in a nursing home, an experience that led the able-bodied Blank and Glen Kopp, who is disabled and confined to a wheelchair, to form Atlantis. Nursing homes are little more than concentration camps, Blank said. While working at Heritage House nursing home, which has a "youth wing" for the disabled, Blank and his staff began pushing such radical ideas as allowing their patients to have wine with their meals, set their own curfew hours and form a patient-run council that rated the performance of staff members. There were failure; efforts to give the patients the right to hire and fire their nursing home attendants were unsuccessful. The push for patient rights didn't sit well with owners of the nursing home, Blank said. The final straw, Blank said, was when he and his staff began working on plans to move some of the patients out of the nursing home into houses in the neighborhood The entire staff, except Blank, was fired, and "I was told I could stay only if I worked for the boss' son." Blank resigned from the nursing home and helped start Atlantis. The organization's dedication to getting [image] [image caption] Wade Blank as he appeared in the pre-radical days. [text resumes] handicapped people out of nursing homes often puts Blank at odds with nursing homes and the families of the handicapped people he seeks to help. Atlantis has ended up in court more than once and has won some notable legal battles along the way, Blank said. In 1977, for example, Atlantis won a court battle allowing two of its clients to keep their baby despite their disabilities. Atlantis twice has won court battles permitting its clients to continue living on their own, despite the objections of their families. Drawing on his earlier experience a a civil rights and anti-war activist, Blank also has led protests by the handicapped on a variety of issues. The series of demonstrations against RTC since 1978 to protest the lack of wheelchair-accesible service have gained the most publicity. Under Blank's leadership, Atlantis also has fought to give the handicapped: *Better educational opportunities. *More political power by getting them to the polls (and making polling places accessible to people in wheelchairs). *"The right to move up and down the streets" by persuading city officials to replace steep curbs with concrete ramps at many intersections. Although Blank has severed his ties with the church, he refuses to renounce his ordination. He sees his involvement with Atlantis as a natural extension of his earlier work as a church minister. But Blank also said he will stay at Atlantis only as long as he believes he can further the political rights of the handicapped. If the day comes, he said, when there are no more political battles to be fought for the handicapped, it will be time to find a new cause. [image that say Atlantis Community ] - ADAPT (1782)
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[This page continues the article from Image 1839. Full text is available on 1839 for easier reading.] - ADAPT (1798)