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Home / Albums / Keywords Wade Blank
+ civil rights 23
ADAPT (1795)
Mainstream Magazine, April 1993 issue [This article continues in ADAPT 1974, but is included here in its entirety for easier reading.] Photo: Wade Blank, in sneakers, jeans and an ADAPT T-shirt over a long sleeved shirt, walks with other ADAPTers in a march down a city street. Beside him is George Roberts, behind George is Diane Coleman and behind her is Anita Cameron. Behind Wade's left side is Chris Hronis, and behind him Bill Henning carries a banner. Caption for picture reads: Wade Blank takes to the streets of San Francisco with ADAPT in October 1992 Title: Wade Blank, 1940 to 1993 Co founder of Adapt [sic] Pursued A Vision Of Justice For People With Disabilities By Laura Hershey When a college friend dared Wade Blank to march with Martin Luther King. Jr. in Selma, Alabama. Wade didn't know what to expect. However, the experience imbued him with a vision of civil rights which he would never forget. Later. working in the youth wing of a nursing home, he understood clearly that the same issues, freedom. equality, and justice, were at stake for people with severe disabilities. Throughout his life, Wade Blank strove to obtain independent living opportunities and equal access for people who had lone been denied these basic civil rights. Wade died at age 52 on Feb. l5. I993. in a swimming accident in Todos Santos, Mexico, where he was vacationing with his family. He was trying to save his 8 year old son. Lincoln. An undertow made the rescue impossible; both Wade and Lincoln drowned. Wade is survived by his wife, Mollie; his daughter. Caitlin, 6; and his adopted daughter, Heather, 22, who has a disability. All members of the Blank family were actively involved in the disability rights movements that Wade helped launch. On Feb. 2l. a memorial service drew 1,100 people to Denver's Radisson Hotel. the site of the first national protest by American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, or ADAPT. the grass roots, direct action disability rights movement Wade co-founded. Wade and Lincoln were remembered as spirited, loving people committed to social change. A neighbor remembered Wade helping her fix a broken lock late one night; she recalled Lincoln leading other children in a rousing chant during a make-believe demonstration on his front porch. Wade's colleague Shel Trapp quipped. “lf Heaven is inaccessible. God is in big trouble." Wade believed in the leadership potential of even the most severely disabled activists. He pushed his followers to take charge of the movement, even when it would have been easier to dominate it himself. His ability to alternate between a directive role and a supportive role from manager to attendant. from mentor to messenger kept Wade close to his people. lt also had a tactical value: At a 1991 demonstration in Colorado. police were vainly searching for someone to hold responsible for several dozen unstoppable wheelchair wielding protesters. An officer asked Wade. “Are you in charge here?" "No." Wade answered. “I just help people go to the bathroom." Drawing on his background as a pastor of a diverse and active parish, Wade taught the value of community. He brought people together across disabilities, classes, races, ideologies and other differences. ln ADAPT. Wade created a true community. welcoming anyone committed to the movement's vision of justice. During national actions, people from across the country exchange experiences and expertise. offer each other encouragement and strength, meet friends and even start romances. Just getting to the sites of national protests requires enormous energy expenditures and a myriad of logistical details for people with disabilities, many of whom use wheelchairs. On long. grueling caravan drives across country. Wade met those needs with humor and gentleness. He drove tirelessly, navigated, did attendant care, pumped gas, made fast food runs, hauled suitcases and battery chargers, repaired wheelchairs, even brought coffee to everyone’s rooms in the mornings. When we grew exhausted and short-tempered. he buoyed us with affectionate teasing and terrible, recycled puns. He kept the troops moving, both on the road and during protests. with encouragement, bad jokes. and calm confidence. Protests will be tougher without Wade's bold creativity, irrepressible sense of humor, and reassuring presence. But the movement won’t die with Wade. He knew that. “King‘s organization’s mistake was that they hung it all around his neck,” he told an interviewer last November. “What happened to the movement? It lost its definition. King gave it its definition. If I would get knocked off tomorrow or die of a heart attack, it wouldn’t slow us down a bit. We know what we’re about, and the movement would go on with the same intensity.” In 1971, Rev. Wade Blank arrived in Denver after 10 years of preaching and organizing in the Midwest. He had graduate degrees in divinity and was an ordained Presbyterian minister. But his radical activities had gotten him in trouble with the church authorities and he had been fired from his parish. His experiences had included hosting meetings of the Kent State chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); helping Vietnam War draftees flee to Canada; and organizing African American youths to demand community water and sewage systems in conservative Twinsburg Heights, OH. Wade was burned out and not sure what he wanted to do next. He ended up at Denver’s Heritage House nursing home, where he tried to make institutional life bearable for young disabled people. He quickly realized that such confinement could never be acceptable. He was fired from his job, but stayed in touch with several of the young residents. Eventually he helped 11 of them move into their own apartments. At first, Wade himself provided all his clients’ attendant care, until finally the State of Colorado agreed to fund home health care services for people living independently. This was the beginning of the Atlantis Community (named for a forgotten continent), today a thriving independent living center in Denver. Even in their newly won freedom, the Atlantis founders discovered barriers to independence all around them. Public buses were inaccessible, so the community members became activists. One July 5, 1978, with Wade’s support and guidance, 19 disabled people blocked buses overnight in the busy intersection at Colfax and Broadway to demonstrate their demand for lifts on buses. Protests continued until, in June 1983, Denver committed itself to a fully accessible bus system. Last summer, the city laid a plaque at the Colfax-Broadway intersection, engraved with the 19 activists’ names. Characteristically downplaying his own key role in the demonstration, Wade asked that his name not appear on the plaque. Wade once described his role this way: “That’s what my job is, to assist my people in gaining the power to make change." Throughout his years of service to “my people,” Wade worked to build strength and leadership among disability activists. Emboldened by success, the Denver activists carried their demands for bus access to the entire nation. Wade‘s vigorous encouragement and organizing skills had helped to transform a group of powerless nursing home "patients" into a band of effective revolutionaries. Now that same savvy spirit found a warm reception among disabled people who were tired of segregation and exclusion. A new movement was born, with the fitting acronym ADAPT, or American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation. The first national ADAPT protest took place at the Radisson in October, 1983. The nation's transit officials were meeting at the hotel when disabled protesters blocked every entrance. Similar demonstrations throughout the country, involving the blocking of hotels, office buildings, and buses, focused public attention on the fact that access to transportation was a basic civil right denied to people with disabilities. Subsequent protests refined ADAPT ’s brand of protest. With his 1960s civil rights experience, Wade taught his followers how to stage protests that were non violent but direct and confrontational. In the hands of people with severe disabilities, these tactics were astonishingly effective. ADAPT activists baffled police officers, and filled jail cells, in dozens of cities. The public, and ultimately the powers that be, had to respond. The idea of people with severe disabilities, and their allies (including Wade), risking arrest again and again some as many as 20 or 30 times proved not only impressive, but persuasive. After nearly a decade of such protests, ADAPT achieved its goals for the nation’s transit systems. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) included mandates for bus and rail services. All new bus purchases must now be lift equipped, just as Wade and his cohorts had demanded. But before it passed, the ADA became stalled in the U.S. Senate and was in danger of being defeated or weakened by amendments. Wade organized a “Wheels of Justice” campaign that included three days of marching, demonstrating, and civil disobedience. Some 150 people were arrested in the Capitol rotunda. Within a few weeks, the ADA passed the full Senate, and was signed into law by President Bush on July 26, 1990. But Wade and ADAPT spent little time celebrating. They knew there was still much to be done. With over a million people still languishing in nursing homes, ADAPT immediately launched its new campaign, demanding the shifting of federal Medicare/Medicaid funds from nursing homes to in home attendant services that would allow people disabled by birth, accident, illness, or age to live independently. The meaning of the acronym, ADAPT, did just that it adapted. The letters now stand for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today. The old battle cry, “We Will Ride!,“ was replaced with a new one: “Free Our People NOW!” In a recent interview, Wade said, “My whole commitment in life is to eradicate those nursing homes, to destroy them, bring them down. We will.” He didn’t live to see that goal realized, but he shared that vision with hundreds of others. In the process he helped create a movement that will continue the fight to “Free Our People.” Laura Hershey, freelance writer and poet, is an ADAPT activist. Inserted in box: A memorial will be held May 9, I993 at the Lincoln Memorial as part of an ADAPT action in Washington DC. Contributions may be sent to The Family of Wade Blank Memorial Fund at The First National Bank of Denver, 300 S. Federal Blvd., Denver, CO 80206. A trust fund has also been established in the name of Wade Blank. Contributions can be sent to Atlantis/ADAPT c/o Evan Kemp, 2500 Q St. N.W I21, Washington, DC 20007.
ADAPT (717)
Chicago Tribune, Thursday May 14, 1992 [This article continues in ADAPT 712 but the entire text has been included here for easier reading.] Photo by Eduardo Contreras: A man (Randy Horton) in a denim jacket kneels on the bottom step of an escalator with his arms spread from one handrail to the other. Someone stands on the escalator facing him. Behind him are a group of other protesters in wheelchairs filling the area. The group includes: Steve Verriden, San Antonio Funtes, Chris Hronis and others. Caption reads: Randy Horton (on knees) blocks John Meagher on a State of Illinois Center escalator. Title: Disabled protesters take hard line by Christine Hawes and Rob Kawath Rolling his wheelchair around the cavernous State of Illinois Center, shouting for his rights, Ken Heard recalled how he used to spend his days in a Syracuse, N.Y., nursing home where doctors controlled his life. They would tell him when he could get up in the morning, when he could go to sleep, what he could eat. They would feed him pills, but they wouldn’t tell him what they were for. It was as if he had no mind of his own. “l saw people tied down in their beds, said Heard, who has severe cerebral palsy. "And I saw people die in there." It took some time, a marriage that got him out of the nursing home and a raging desire for independence, but today Heard has regained the power to think for himself. He now earns his own income, rents and fumishes his own apartment and even takes vacations in Las Vegas. His joumey to self-sufficiency began when he heard about an activist group now called American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today. On Wednesday, about 200 ADAPT protesters in wheelchairs disrupted operations at the State of Illinois Center, 100 W. Randolph St., blocking exits and occasionally fighting with building patrons and workers as police stood by, arresting no one. Elaborate security measures the state had put in place Monday to keep the 16-floor, 3,000-employee building functioning broke down while state and Chicago police squabbled over who was responsible for arresting protesters deemed to have gone too far. But the scene of disabled men and women dragging themselves up escalators, surging into the building lobby and clutching the legs of people trying to walk past is just another picture in the well-publicized story of a group of vociferous activists savvy in street action. “One of the strongest points of their civil disobedience is making themselves look as pathetic as possible,” said one Chicago-area official at an agency that has been a target of ADAPT. The official, who asked that his name be withheld, said, “They are excellent media users, and they are very successful at putting spotlights on issues that most people probably wouldn’t normally pay attention to.” ADAPT has taken its dedication to a fever pitch, too fevered for some, and like many new protest `groups`—including the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT -UP) for gay rights, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for animal rights and Earth First for the ecology—is using dramatic, sensational tactics for their cause, to allow any nursing home residents the ability to live on their own. And though some may question their efforts, none can doubt they have impact. One woman who said she was grabbed, tripped and bitten during Wednesday’s melee confessed a few hours later, “I can’t help but feel guilty.” During Heard’s 10-year stay in the nursing home, he met some ADAPT members from Denver and listened to them tell of how they took sledgehammers to Denver's street curbs as a way of objecting to inaccessible sidewalks. Now Heard is a political organizer for ADAPT, in town with 350 other protesters. And though members are no longer taking sledgehammers to cement, they are steering wheelchairs into intersections, chaining themselves to buildings and crawling along dirty streets to get over curbs too high for wheelchairs. For the past two years, ADAPT has been staging demonstrations every six months in support of reallocating one-fourth of the country’s Medicaid funds that now go to nursing homes to in-home health care, and to make it easier for disabled people like Heard to escape their “prisons.” This week in Chicago, protests have played out at the quarters of everyone ADAPT perceives as the health-care power brokers: the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the American Medical Association and the offices of Gov. Jim Edgar. ADAPT claims that having personal, in-home attendants for the disabled costs $900 a month less in state funds than keeping them in nursing homes and other institutions. Illinois officials say the difference is only $600. But aside from financial concerns, ADAPT members say they’re fighting against inhumane restraint and abuse in nursing homes. Their strategy is to make the able-bodied feel as uncomfortable and limited as they themselves do—and to grab as much media time as possible. Television cameras were there Wednesday when bands of wheelchair users mobbed workers trying to use an escalator in the State of Illinois Center. And they were there Tuesday when protesters crawled out of their wheelchairs, across Grand Avenue and over foot-high curbs outside of the American Medical Association’s national headquarters. “This makes us visible," said Jean Stewart, a 42-year-old novelist from New York, who has used a wheelchair since she lost her hip muscle because of a tumor about 17 years ago. “And it enables us to get our message across. It’s not a publicity stunt, it’s education.” The group’s history is rife with attention-grabbing acts of protest after talks with officials were unsuccessful and full of what they feel is noteworthy success. The end result of the Denver protests, said Wade Blank, a founding member of the group, was one of the most accessible cities for disabled people in this country. Three years ago, a handful of ADAPT members were arrested for blocking a Chicago Transit Authority bus with their motorized wheelchairs. But two results of those efforts, they feel, were CTA purchase of buses with wheelchair lifts and even the passage of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. ADAPT members say they are disrupting business as usual because they are shut out of offices where politicians and association presidents could be sitting down to discuss the issue. And they are trapping members of the public to demonstrate how they feel trapped and restrained. “For so long the issues surrounding disability have remained invisible,” said Stephanie Thomas, who lost her ability to walk when she was run over by a tractor 17 years ago. “So we have to do some extraordinary things to make people pay attention.” Wednesday’s protest, which came after U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur refused to order a lessening of security measures at the state’s Chicago headquarters, left police and Department of Central Management Services security officers snapping only at each other, even after the protest turned ugly. “I have to get to an appointment!" yelled one middle-age man as he wrestled on the ground with two protesters who had grabbed his legs and, in the process, had been pulled out of their wheelchairs. “This is what it feels like to be trapped in a nursing home!” yelled one protester. The man finally struggled free and hustled out of the building while Chicago and Central Management Services police watched from only a few feet away. “We’re sorely disappointed with the Chicago Police Department,” said Central Management Services Director Stephen Schnorf. “Certainly they provided better protection to the other buildings where there were protests this week.” But Chicago Police Cmdr. Michael Malone said the state was in control and his officers were just there to back them up. He said the state was misrepresenting the agreement between the two departments. And all that consternation was caused by a group that claims to be loosely organized and barely funded ADAPT, which has about 5,000 members nationwide, has very little formal correspondence, aside from a newspaper called Incitement and a rare memo, Blank said members keep in touch through word of mouth more than anything, and most of them support their travels through small fundraisers. But though the group says most of its day-to-day procedures are hardly sophisticated, ADAPT leaders are extremely skilled in using the media, say some who have watched the group’s protests first-hand. Sonya Snyder, public relations director at a Florida hotel where ADAPT demonstrated against the American Health Care Association last October, said the protesters only became rambunctious when television cameras appeared. “For most of the time, the police and the protesters would share sandwiches,” Snyder said. “But when the media came, down went the sandwiches and up went the protest.” And Janice Wolfe, a spokeswoman for the health care association, said the group’s efforts are “frustrating and misdirected. Their efforts could be better spent on individuals who are in power to do something.” ADAPT members view their protests as grand displays of strength, not pitiful appeals. They speak of their demonstration plans as though they are plotting battle strategy, using words like “identified enemy,” “privileged information” and "top secret." They pattern their protests after the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and compare themselves to the black leaders of that era “This is just like Martin Luther King,” ADAPT member Bernard Baker from Atlanta “We’re fired up, and we can’t take it anymore."
ADAPT (635)
Different TIMES, September 24, 1990, p. 6 ADAPT fights for attendant services (Reprinted with permission from the Disability Rag; Box 145; Louisville, KY 40201.) [This story continues on 623 but the text is included here in full, for ease of reading.] “People with disabilities have the civil and human right to dependable attendant services that meet our daily needs in the location and manner of our choice." This simple declaration, made in Denver this summer, signaled the offensive being launched by ADAPT against “the nursing home lobby feeding off peoples' lives." It's ironic, says ADAPT member Mark Johnson. "Here we've finally got our rights now, in a law, and here you have more and more severely disabled people wanting to kill themselves—literally kill themselves—because they're being forced into nursing homes." “That Ken Bergstedt in Nevada [who petitioned the court in May to disconnect his respirator] is literally saying, “l'll end my life before I'll go in a nursing home," Johnson said. “What do you expect when people only have institutionalization to look forward to?" adds actress Nancy Becker Kennedy, one of the group that conducted a hunger strike in Los Angeles in July to protest the cut of California’s In Home Supportive Services. “Their attempts to stay in their homes are thwarted." lt’s the same with Georgia's highly publicized Larry McAfee, who was just put into a “group home," says ADAPT. Even after all the publicity, the State of Georgia will not put any money into funding attendant services in one's own home. And ADAPT is fed up. Recalling the phrase the transit industry used to argue that each city should decide whether or not to put lifts on buses, ADAPT calls the patchwork system of funding in-home services “the old ‘local option’ stuff all over again." “We're sick of it,"says Johnson. There needs to be a national commitment. In California, activists battled for several months to restore their In Home Support Services program which had been entirely cut from the state budget—and succeeded only in restoring it to its former level, which allows a disabled person to hire an attendant only at minimum wage and for no more than eight hours a day. People who need an attendant around the clock, like Ken Bergstedt, have little hope of avoiding a nursing home even in California, often cited as the state with the best attendant services program in the nation. Yet such battles sap the energy of disability activists for the larger fight for a national commitment. ADAPT has modified its former name, “American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation" to “American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today" to reflect its new focus. ADAPT says attendant services are a right. The group wants the program it's calling for to make attendant services available "based on functional need" rather than “whether a person can work or not." They don't want "employability" to be a "condition for getting services. And they don't want eligibility based on any specific disability, as it is in many states now. They want it to be available “to people of all ages, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with back-up emergency services."They stress they're not asking for “someone to hold your hand" but are speaking of the realistic needs of people like McAfee, Rick Tauscher, and Bergstedt who need an attendant available around the clock. They also say a program that allows the disabled person maximum control over an attendant is mandatory. Maybe a disabled person won’t want that control; maybe they'll want someone else to handle the paperwork and hiring decisions. That should be the disabled person‘s option, they say. There’s a quality-control issue here, they insist; they want to make sure disabled people get quality care but are allowed maximum say over personal services they receive—which is all too often not the case today as home "health" agencies muscle their way into the home "care" field. They‘re sick of the word “care.” They want a program that doesn’t keep anyone from services because they make too much money; they're willing, they say, to deal with a sliding scale for fees for such a program; but they want it available to anyone who needs it—regardless of income. It's a right, and cost is simply not an issue, they say. Keeping disabled people in institutions is ludicrously more expensive than providing in-home services in this country today. They blame that lack for the problems Larry MeAfee's constantly found himself in; they blame the nursing home industry for siphoning off the money that could go to fund such services. And they charge that home health agencies are nothing more than “the new nursing homes." Home health agencies “take people on Medicare and give them services and then bill them for $60 a pop," says ADAPT organizer Wade Blank. “Then when their Medicare coverage runs out after six months, they drop ‘em." The group says it’s also targeting “the big insurance companies like Prudential" and health maintenance organizations, who they say have a vested interest in keeping the system like it is. “We're saying that ethically and morally, nursing homes are not the place to go," says Blank. “When I see my severely disabled friends, living in their own homes, when l visit them in their apartments, listen with them to records or order in a pizza—and then I see my friends living in nursing homes, wasting away, waiting to die, I get very, very angry,” said Southern California ADAPT member Lilibeth Navarro. A survey of ADAPT members through their newsletter, Incitement, led them to decide to shift the focus to attendant services, said Navarro. And they're emphatic about the term too. “It’s not ‘attendant care‘ anymore," said Blank. “Whenever anybody said ‘care’ everybody booed,“ he added. It is fitting that ADAPT, whose original members came from Denver‘s Atlantis Community, will focus on attendant services. It was that need which led to the start of Atlantis, a “community” of disabled people and attendants. Atlantis “has a neat system,"agrees Navarro, noting that the 24-hour rotary attendant services allows any Atlantis person to have an attendant available whenever it's needed. “We could call an attendant at 11:30 p.m. and have somebody here," she said. “People who are having trouble with attendants can call and get an emergency back-up." Navarro, like others, said she knew of people “who endured abuse because they were afraid to lose their attendant"—"because it's so hard to find somebody, and nobody to turn to in an emergency situation." She related the story of a man whose attendant simply walked out on him and left him, unable even to reach a phone, for four days. “If his father hadn't checked on him, he'd be dead." “Only a national attendant program," she stressed, “will free us from emotional slavery Nancy Becker Kennedy agreed with Navarro. “The linchpin for independent living is in-home attendant services. It’s humane; it gives us a future." The group has sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan demanding a meeting in Atlanta Oct. 1; they've given Sullivan until Aug. 15 to reply. ADAPT activists from around the nation will descend on Atlanta the first week of October to launch the fight. They’ll be calling for a quarter of the money now going to the nursing home industry to “go into a pot for attendant services." As usual, ADAPT doesn’t expect this to happen without a fight -- primarily from the “nursing home lobby.” “This October," says Blank, “we will serve notice on those groups who are the enemies of a national attendant services program." TEXT BOX: ADAPT will converge on Atlanta — home of Morehouse College, HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan’s alma mater — on Sept. 28 for week-long direct action protest and training. Nationally known organizer Shel Trapp will conduct the session Saturday, Sept. 29. For more information on travel and hotel arrangements, contact ADAPT in Denver at (303) 936-1110. — Reprinted with permission from the Disability Rag; Box 145; Louisville, KY 40201.
ADAPT (487)
The Handicapped Coloradan ADAPT wins transit access VlCTORY! Federal court orders all new buses to be equipped w|th wheelchair lifts APTA pressures DOT to appeal decision Feb. 13,1989. Call it V-D Day. Victory over the Department of Transportation (DOT). Or call it V-A Day. Victory over the American Public Transit Association (APTA). Because on that day in Philadelphia, within earshot of the Liberty Bell and walking distance of the hall in which the Declaration of Independence was forged, disabled Americans won not only the right but the means to ride mainline public transportation. On a 2-l vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that in the future every transit system in the nation that buys buses with assistance from the DOT must purchase only buses equipped with wheelchair lifts. That decision reverses a 1988 ruling by U.S. District Judge Harold Katz who upheld DOT’s policy of allowing transit systems the “local option" of providing public transit to people with disabilities through a paratransit system. APTA, which reaffirmed its support of local option at its last national convention, has urged DOT to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Such an appeal must be filed within 90 days, or by May 13, 1989. DOT already has filed for a rehearing, and the court is expected to announce by March 29 if they would be willing to reconsider the decision. Justices Carol Los Mansmann and A. Leon Higginbotham wrote the maiority opinion with Judge Morton Greenber dissenting. The case was brought to the Court of Appeals by a dozen disability rights organizations, led by the militant American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) and the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans of America. Timothy M. Cook, director of the newly formed National Disability Action Center, argued the case. It wasn't the first time wheelchair lifts have been in the courts. in 1979, the DOT, at the direction of President Jimmy Carter, ordered all transit systems to install lifts on new buses, but that mandate was struck down in federal court after an appeal by APTA. APTA’s insistence on local option led to the creation of ADAPT by a handful of militant wheelchair users in Denver, who set up pickets outside the Hilton Hotel headquarters of APTA's I983 national convention. At the insistence of Mayor Federico Pena, ADAPT was allowed to speak before the convention and no arrests were made. That was the last time either situation would exist. At every subsequent national convention or regional APTA meeting, wheelchair militants have shown up in force, blocking buses and hotel entrances until local police forces were forced to cart them away to jail. “Who would have thought a bunch of ragbag crips from Denver could have started something that would have grown this big?" asked ADAPT founder Wade Blank, co-director of the Atlantis Community, a local independent living agency. Both Blank and Cook cautioned that the war was not over yet, although both said they were pleased that the 73-page court opinion was filled with the language of the civil rights movement and would go a long way toward convincing those on the fence that their cause was just. The Court of Appeals opinion reads, in part: “We find the goal of eradicating the ‘invisibility of the handicapped‘ led Congress to enact measures to facilitate, if not immediate and complete mainstreaming of the handicapped, then affirmative and aggressive steps in that direction." The decision involves only new buses, as the justices argued that requiring systems to retrofit old buses would subject them to "undue burdens." Cook said after the decision was handed down that the "opinion is completely consistent with President Bush's call last week, in his speech before Congress, for Americans with disabilities to be ‘in the economic mainstream.‘ Nothing is more essential to meeting that goal than the provision of accessible public transportation." Mike Auberger of the Denver ADAPT chapter, who's been arrested in several cities while engaging in civil disobedience, agreed that accessible public transit is the key to enabling disabled people assume full citizenship. "People are dying out there," Auberger said. "Disabled people go into nursing homes because they don't have any options. I personally know people who have committed suicide because they don‘t have any options. Wheelchair lifts will give them that option." Auberger said that ADAPT doesn't plan to rest on its laurels. They'll be Reno April 7-ll for a regional APTA convention and back in Denver April 23-26 for the national meeting of the Urban Mass Transit Association (UMTA). “Our demand is simple," Auberger said. “We just want them to drop the appeal process and accept the decision." If they don't, Auberger promised that protesters would try to fill the jails one more time. To that end, ADAPT members intend to picket DOT offices in 12 cities on Good Friday, March 24, and ask staff members there to call the Presidiential assistant in charge of transportation matters and ask that the court decision not be appealed. "If they don't make the call, then we don't go," Auberger said. "I'm sure we'll take some heat because we're doing it on Good Friday," he said, explaining that he expects many offices to be shorthanded because of workers leaving early for the Easter weekend. "That should just add to the confusion."
ADAPT (423)
[Headline] "We Will Ride" [Subheading] Disabled Protesters Clash with Transit Authorities National Group Fights for Accessible Transit Disclosure Jan-Feb, 1989 [This article continues on ADAPT 420 but the entire text is included here for easier reading.] "These protests are the continuation of an ongoing assault," says Stephanie Thomas of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). In October, ADAPT disrupted the annual convention of the American Public Transit Authority (APTA) in Montreal with a series of protests. "We want all buses to be made accessible to disabled people," says Stephanie Thomas, who lives in Austin, Texas. "And we will continue these confrontations until that happens!" ADAPT is getting closer and closer to that goal. Last year, a task force created by APTA proposed lifts on all new buses. Nevertheless, at the Board of Directors' meeting in Montreal in October, APTA reaffirmed its current policy on transportation for disabled persons. In many cities, transportation for disabled persons means some kind of a pickup service. "It's a segregated system," says Stephanie Thomas, "and it never works out as well as it sounds. Riding public transportation is a civil right." For this civil right, ADAPT turns to civil disobedience. ADAPT has become such a force at APTA conventions that local police now prepare in advance for the group's demonstrations. In Montreal, police watched videos of ADAPT demonstrations in the U.S. and 100 police were put through a day-long training session on how to deal with the anticipated protests. But that didn't stop the ADAPT protesters, who continue to fight tenaciously for accessible transit. The four day series of actions in Montreal began on Sunday, October 1st. Despite a torrential downpour and near freezing temperatures, 120 members of ADAPT marched down Boulevard Rene Levesque to the Hotel Queen Elizabeth, APTA's 1988 convention site. ADAPT protesters were joined by representatives of their local counterpart — Le Mouvement des Consommateurs Handicapes de Quebec (MCHQ) or the Movement of Disabled Consumers of Quebec. ADAPT members swarmed across the road to enter the hotel, despite at least a one-to-one ratio of police to protesters. Even as a wall of police barricades was hastily erected, protesters climbed down from their chairs and crawled under the barriers. They were carried back by the police, but no arrests were made. That evening ADAPT took a more undercover approach. "No small feat for over 100 wheelchairs," commented Stephanie Thomas. Sneaking through back alleys and a back door, 15 people in wheelchairs were carried down a flight of stairs into one of the satellite hotels in which APTA members were staying. Meanwhile, two other `groups` converged on the front door using their wheelchairs to push aside makeshift barriers of luggage carts. Singing and chanting, ADAPT took over the lobby — blocking elevators, escalators, and stairs as APTA members looked on in shock, Finally, the police selectively arrested 28 of the demonstrators, including two who had chained themselves to the stairway. That night, a judge sentenced members of the group to a $50 fine, to be paid on the spot, or they would be faced with three days in jail, with a probation banning those arrested from entering downtown Montreal for six months. Twenty of the group refused to pay the fine and went to prison. Nevertheless, this put no damper on ADAPT's actions. Next hit: the APTA Spouses' Luncheon and Fashion Show, a favorite ADAPT target. The luncheon was held at a chalet atop Mount Royal on Mon-day, October 3. Ten more ADAPT members were arrested, as the APTA buses were stopped and the spouses were forced to walk past chanting demonstrators. On Monday night, October 3, 20 wheelchair users penetrated the Queen Elizabeth Hotel through an underground shopping area. 7 year old Jennifer Keelan, who uses a wheelchair, and her mother, were taken into custody and threatened with arrest, but were later let go. Meanwhile, in two Montreal prisons, the system was showing its inability to deal with severely disabled inmates. The ADAPT inmates were on a hunger strike. Officials decided that, due to good behavior, everyone would be out by Tuesday morning. ADAPT swung into the final phase of operation Tuesday morning. As requested by MCHQ, it was time to hit the local transit system — which is completely inaccessible to people with mobility impairments. Buses were stopped for an hour at a local bus transfer site, while a local woman crawled from her wheelchair aboard a bus and tried unsuccessfully to ride. "We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we are inconvenienced all our lives," said Wade Blank of ADAPT to the crowd. Blank is the founder of ADAPT. On Wednesday, October 5, ADAPT entered the Longueuil METRO subway station and once again tried to ride. The station had no ramps or elevators, and narrow turnstyles. 50 ADAPT members sang and chanted in the cavernous station — and cheered as 15 others crawled out of their wheelchairs, down the steps, and across the floor to the turnstyles where police blocked their passage. From the dirty platform floor, ADAPT held a press conference. We explained our simple desire to use the public transit that our taxes pay for," says Stephanie Thomas. "Lack of access is degrading for people with disabilities." The pressure on APTA is clearly mounting. APTA is now considering a resolution which strongly supports mainline transit access — ADAPT's demand from the start. In addition, Le Mouvement des Consommateurs Handicapes de Quebec has learned first hand the effectiveness of direct action techniques and has vowed to continue the pressure locally in Montreal. "In Quebec, now they are saying 'Nous serons transporte!', says Stephanie Thomas. "That means what we have been saying all along, and will continue to say: 'We will ride!" Photo by Tom Olin: On a Montreal street Mike Auberger pushing his knees through a police barricade as two officers try and hold him back. In the background another ADAPT person is also up against the barricades held by police. Caption: Mike Auberger of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) breaking through police barricade at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel where the American Public Transit Authority (APTA) was staying for its convention last October.
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St. Louis Post Dispatch 5-22-88 PHOTO by Ted Dargan/Post Dispatch: A Line of ADAPT people roll down a city street. The first person in line (Mike Auberger) has two long braids and sunglasses. His arms hang on either side of his motorized wheelchair and his ADAPT shirt is somewhat covered by the chest strap on his chair. Next to Mike is a man in a manual wheelchair with curly hair and a beard (Bob Kafka) who has is legs crossed and is wearing the same ADAPT shirt as Mike. Behind them a man (Jerry Eubanks) with no legs in a manual wheelchair is being pushed by a blind man (Frank Lozano) who is smiling. Behind them is another man in a maual wheelchair. Behind him is someone in a motorized wheelchair who is looking off to the side. Behind them is another person in a wheelchair. The photo is grainy so it's hard to make out many details. Caption reads: Disabled people demonstrating downtown last week for more accessible bus service. Title: Bus Stop By Joan Bray Of the Post-Dispatch Staff ACTIV1STS FROM local advocacy groups were absent from the scores of protesters who took to St. Louis streets last week asserting the rights of the disabled to accessible bus service. Leaders of the local groups say tactics, not goals, caused them and their members to opt out of the demonstrations. About 150 people blocked entrances at Union Station and surrounded buses at the Greyhound terminal. A majority of them were in wheelchairs, on crutches or otherwise disabled. And they were out-of-towners. They belong to a loosely woven group, American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, called ADAPT for short. The group was protesting the policies of the American Public Transit Association, which was holding a regional meeting at the Omni International Hotel at Union Station. As a result of ADAPT's civil disobedience, 78 arrests were made, two group court appearances were held and a lawsuit was filed by the group over treatment at the City Workhouse. We support ADAPT's policies on access 1,000 percent," said Max J. Starkloff. He is executive director here of Paraquad Inc., which advocates rights for the handicapped. "But we have not participated in the demonstrations." "Our methods are negotiation, public testimony and organized public rallies," Starkloff said. "Our goals ore the same" as ADAPT's. Both the local activists and ADAPT want the transit association to push for installing a wheelchair lift on every bus in the country. They see 100 percent accessibility as a civil right. Rut the transit association notes in a written statement that no such accessibility is required by the Constitution, the Congress or the courts. It says the number of lifts on buses has increased to 30 percent now from 11 percent in 1981. In that same period, the administration of President Ronald Reagan has slashed the federal transit program's budget by 47 percent, the association says. The association says each local transportation agency should be allowed to determine how it will provide access for the disabled. Special services — like the Call-A-Ride service operated by the Bi-State Development Agency — may work better than lift-equipped buses in some areas, the association says. Local groups' methods for effecting change include working within the system. Starkloff serves on Bi-State's committee on transit for the elderly and disabled. The chairman of that committee, Fred Cowell, is executive director of the Gateway chapter of Paralyzed Veterans of America. Bi-State has made a commitment to install wheelchair lifts on all its buses, Cowell said. But the committee wants the agency's board of directors to adopt a policy stating it will do so. "We know that the buses are here to stay," Cowell said. "If or when budget cuts come, special services such as Call-A-Ride would be the first to go." Cowell and Starkloff said they feared that between the bureaucracy and the protests, the primary point — the need for equal transportation — was being missed. "A disabled person is not unlike any other person," Cowell said. Disabled people need to get to their jobs, to medical care and to social engagements, be said. "There is absolutely no difference in their need to get around," he said. Starkloff noted that the cost of a van equipped for a wheelchair — a minimum of about $20,000 — was prohibitive for most people. But the disabled should not have to wait at a bus stop on the chance that the next bus may be equipped with a lift, be said. Nor should they have to plan their trips 24 hours in advance, as Call-A-Ride requires, he said. Cowell said, "The main thing the (BI-State) committee has been trying to do is develop a deepening concern for services for the disabled and elderly." The fact that the committee has been successful in persuading Bi-State to buy only buses with lifts prevented the agency from bearing the brunt of ADAPT's effort here, one of the protest leaders said. The Rev. Wade Blank, a Presbyterian minister from Denver, is a co-director of ADAPT. He has a daughter who is disabled. Two months ago, representatives of ADAPT met with State officials in preparation for their trip here and learned of the agency's commitment to lifts, Blank said. As a result, ADAPT aimed its protests at the transit association's meeting and Greyhound Bus Lines. Greyhound is bidding on local routes in some metropolitan areas — Dallas, for one, Blank said. But it does not equip its buses with lifts, he said. A spokesman for Greyhound said last week that, instead, it provided a free ticket for a companion for a disabled traveler. Regarding the transit meeting, Blank said: "Our whole intent is to go after people who are so much wrapped up in the system that they insulate themselves from the issue. They have to live and breathe (ADAPT's protests) when they go to these conventions." Demonstrators here represented some of ADAPTs 33 chapters across the country, Blank said. He said his headquarters was with a group in Denver called the Atlantis Community, which moves disabled people out of nursing homes into independent living arrangements. Funding comes primarily from church donations and foundation grants, he said. From 1978 to 1981, ADAPT protested — and "caused a major disruption" — in Denver every month, Blank said. In 1982, the buses there became 100 percent equipped with lifts, he noted. ADAPT has since protested in all the cities where the transit association has met and where it has been invited by other activists, for a total of about 15 cities, Blank said. [unreadable] ...only buses with lifts, he said. Blank said the failure of local groups to join ADAPT's protests did not weaken the cause. Another success that ADAPT points to is a ruling by a federal Judge in Philadelphia in January striking down a regulation of the US. Department of Transportation that allows transit authorities to spend only 3 percent of their budgets on the disabled. The Judge postponed the effect of the ruling while the Justice Department appeals it. Three percent of Bi-State's budget for the current fiscal year Is $2.6 million, said Rosemary Covington, an agency official who works with the advisory committee. But Bi-State will spend only $1 million because of delays in getting bids on new buses and in expanding the Call-A-Ride service. "We are having budget problems, but that wasn't the reason" the money wasn't spent, Covington said. The remaining $1.6 million does not roll over to the fiscal year that begins July 1, she said. She said that by early next year, Bi-State expected that 221 of its fleet of about 700 buses will be equipped with lifts, 12 of the more than 120 routes will be operated entirely with lift-equipped buses, the Call-A-Ride service will include all of St. Louis County and the city and a voucher system will be available for back-up cab service. Equipping all the agency's buses with lifts will take six to seven years, Covington said. Meanwhile the committee will help evaluate the services for the disabled, she said. "If ridership doesn't materialize" on the buses with lifts or "if it costs thousands or millions (of dollars) to maintain them, that will enter into the decision making," Covington said. Bi-State is training drivers how to use the lifts and plans to promote and advertise the service heavily, she said.
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THE HANDICAPPED COLORADAN Vol. 9, No. 2, Boulder, Colorado, September 1986 PHOTO: Head and shoulders of a man (Wade Blank) with long straight hair parted in the middle, and wire-rimmed round dark glasses. He is wearing a vest over a button down shirt and undershirt and he is smiling. Caption reads: Wade Blank. Some say he wants another Kent State. Title: Rosa Parks leads Detroit protest march Famous black activist ignores plea from Coleman Young to stay out The faces and forms in the column of marchers behind her were a little different today from those she led 30 years ago, but the woman at the head of the march hasn't changed much. Rosa Parks is 74 now and slowing down a little, but she still radiates the same spirit that helped ignite the black civil rights movement in 1956 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man and move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus. The police put her behind bars that day but within hours a local Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, ]r., orchestrated a bus boycott that was to be the first act of organized protest that would bring an end to segregation in less than 10 years. On Sunday, Oct. 5, 1986, the issue was once again segregation and public buses, but this time there were only a handful of black faces among the marchers who took to the streets of Detroit. Yet it was just as easy today as it was in 1956 to identify what made these protestors different from other people. They were in wheelchairs. Rolling under the banner of the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT), they had come to Detroit to picket their old nemesis, the American Public Transit Association (APTA), which was holding its annual national convention ln Detroit. APTA represents most of the nation's public transit systems and has steadfastly refused to support—or even to-vote on—a proposal to require transit systems to add wheelchair lifts to buses. The state of Michigan requires that all transit companies receiving state funds be wheelchair accessible, but the city of Detroit has avoided that requirement by refusing to accept any financial assistance. Buses in the largely white suburbs have lifts, but a wheelchair passenger who wants to continue a trip into Detroit is out of luck. Detroit mayor Colernan Young, himself a black who played a prominent role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, does not support accessibility for disabled persons and was scheduled to address the APTA convention along with Ed Bradley, also a black and a CBS newsman and regular on "60 Minutes.” Both Young and Bradley reportedly pleaded with Parks not to participate in the march on the APTA convention, but after a late night meeting with staff and advisors, Parks said she would not renege on her commitment. As The Handicapped Coloradan " was going to press, it was reported that Young was going to ask the Detroit city council to rescind ADAPT's parade permit. An ADAPT spokesperson said he expected some 150 ADAPT members from across the country to be joined by at least another 100 protestors in making the march on the Westin Hotel Renaissance Center. "l think we're on the brink of breaking this thing wide open,” said Wade Blank of Denver, who helped form ADAPT. Blank said he was hoping Parks‘ participation would help people to understand that disabled people look upon accessibility as a civil right. APTA, on the other hand, says it's a question of practicality and finances and so should be left to the discretion of the local transit provider. Geographical conditions have to be taken into consideration because lifts are difficult to operate in snow and on curved roads; according to Albert Engeiken, APTA's deputy executive director. Blank scoffs at that position and suggests that lift technology has reached a point where they can be operated in all kinds of climatic extremes, if the transit provider is truly committed to accessibliity. Many transit systems did order lift-equipped buses in the late 1970s when the Carter administration's Department of Transportation mandated accessibility. APTA, which acts as a lobbying and policy-making group for some 300 separate transit districts, filed a lawsuit that eventually led to a reversal of that decision. In Denver, the Regional Transportation District (RTD) announced that it was scrapping its plans for providing mainline accessible service on the basis of that ruling and quickly found itself battling wheelchair protestors in the streets. In falling snow and freezing temperatures, protestors blocked buses and chained themselves to railings outside the RTD offices untll the courts interceded. RTD was ordered to provide some accessible service, but the board of directors continued to resist the Idea. However, ln 1983 the appointed RTD board was replaced by an elected body and quickly voted to commit Denver to accessibility. That same year, APTA brought its national convention to Denver. Disabled individuals and groups who had fought for lifts in the streets of Denver united under the ADAPT banner and, with the support of Mayor Federico Pena, threw up pickets around the convention hotel and arranged to present its demand for accessibility to the convention. No vote was taken and the issue was not brought before national conventions held ln Washington, D.C., in 1984 or in Los Angeles in 1985. ln both cities ADAPT members defied police and blocked buses. A handful were arrested in Washington and a couple of dozen in Los Angeles. ADAPT didn't limit itself to picketing just APTA’s national convention but dogged the organization across the country, sending pickets to various regional conventions, including San Antonio and Cincinnati (see related story). Buses were blocked and more demonstrators went to jail. In some cases, confrontations with local police turned ugly. That has led some disabled groups to break away from ADAPT and Blank’s leadership. Denver's Holistic Approaches to Independent Living (HAIL, Inc.) and its executive director Theresa Preda went to Detroit but refused to participate in some of ADAPT’s actions. "They told me they were afraid I wasn't going to be satisfied until there was blood in the street, until someone in a wheelchair got killed,” Blank said. “They told me I was trying for another Kent State." Blank, who founded the Atlantis Community which, like HAIL, fosters independent living, was a campus minister at Kent State University when national guardsmen fired on student demonstrators during a Vietnam war protest. Four students were killed. Blank denied that he had any such intention, but added that ADAPT has no intention of giving up civil disobedience. “It’s the most effective weapon we've got," he said. Blank said, ADAPT would probably stop buses in Detroit. "They just received 100 new buses," he said. "Without lifts, of course." Blank said he would not be surprised if protestors were to be arrested. Ironically, on the eve of the march the Wayne County jail was filled to capacity (1700) and prisoners were being turned away.
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Handicapped Coloradan Volume 9, No. 3, Boulder Colorado October 1986 [There are two articles included here.] Headline: Rosa bows out at last minute PHOTO: by Melanie Stengel, courtesy of UPI Three uniformed police officers surround a woman in a scooter (Edith Harris) and hold her arms. They are in front of a city bus, and behind them you can see a fourth officer and a city building. The caption reads: EDITH HARRIS, 62, of Hartford, Conn., is arrested by police during demonstrations in Detroit in early October. Harris, a grandmother who lost her legs to diabetes, was in Detroit to picket the national convention of the American Public Transit Association (APTA). Harris has participated in similar demonstrations in Washington, D.C, and Los Angeles, Calif. She was also arrested in both those cities. Ironically, Harris compares herself to Rosa Parks, the black civil rights leader who decided at the last minute not to participate in the Detroit transit demonstrations. Title: Blacks blast ADAPT [This article continues in ADAPT 288 but the entire text is included here for easier reading.] Civil rights heroine Rosa Parks shocked disabled groups when she said at the last minute that she would not participate in any actions protesting Detroit's lack of accessible public transit. “We do not wish any American to be discriminated against in transportation or any other form that reduces their equality and dignity," Elaine Steele an assistant to Parks, said in a letter dated Oct. 3 and delivered to Wade Blank, co-founder of the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). "However," we cannot condone disruption of Detroit city services." Parks had said she would appear at a Sunday, Oct. 5, news conference and possibly lead a march across Detroit. Steele said that Parks "supports active peaceful protest of human rights issues, not tactics that will embarrass the city's guests and cripple the city's present transportation system.“ Blank said he asked Steele how their tactics differed from those used by Parks and other blacks to fight segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s but she was unable to provide him with a satisfactory answer. Parks is credited with igniting the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala. bus in 1956. Parks' defiant action caused a Montgomery minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. to organize a black boycott of that city's buses. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and CBS newsman Ed Bradley — both black -- were scheduled to address the national convention of the American Public Transit Association (APTA) and reportedly asked Parks not to embarrass them by participating in the ADAPT action. Blank said that Parks had wavered once or twice in the weeks before the convention, but that he had managed to persuade her to stick to her original decision. But less than a week before the convention opened, Parks and her staff met in long session, and decided to support ADAPT. The Handicapped Coloradan has so far been unable to reach Parks or her representatives to learn what made her change her mind so suddenly. Blank said that he "wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Chrysler or Ford told her that they wouldn't contribute to the Rosa L. Parks Shrine if she went through with the action.” Parks is currently involved in raising money to commemorate her role and that of other blacks in the struggle for equality. But Blank stopped short of condemning Parks, saying that the 74-year-old leader has earned the respect of everyone for her actions in the 1950s. He said, "Maybe it just isn't her time any more. If I had known we were going to put her on the spot like this, I wouldn't have done it. She was under a lot of pressure. Apparently the phone never stopped ringing.” However, Blank had plenty to say about Bradley, who is a regular on the highly rated television news program "60 Minutes." Before giving a speech on apartheid in South Africa, Bradley told the 2300 APTA delegates that ADAPT had asked him not to appear at the convention. Bradley said he talked with both Young and Parks and all three agreed that they did not approve of the tactics used by the disabled group. Blank said he tried to contact Bradley by phone on at least six different occasions during the two months preceding the convention but was never able to get past his secretary." "We wanted to explain our position, but he apparently wasn't interested. This may tell you just how much homework they do on ‘6O Minutes.' Maybe people who make their living by intimidating others can't take it themselves," Blank said, referring to the often adversarial approach used on the program. “Blank said he was never able to ‘get through to Young directly but a member of Young's staff said they were welcome to ride the city's buses. "Then they arrested us for doing just that," he said. The state of Michigan requires that all transit systems receiving state funds be wheelchair accessible, but the city of Detroit avoids that requirement by financing its own transit system. Representatives of the suburban Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority (SEMTA), which is accessible, said it would be willing to introduce a pro-accessibility resolution at the next APTA convention if it can find two or three co-sponsors, according to Blank. Young defended ‘Detroit's policy at a news conference by saying that he couldn't "make gold out of straw" to pay for the lifts. Young attacked ADAPT for employing “sabotage and sensationalism” and accused the group of taking "advantage of their disabilities" to block buses and get publicity for their cause. “That's not the way to win cooperation," he said. Blank said the only time people in power take notice of disabled people is when they engage in civil disobedience, pointing out the efforts their opponents made to discredit ADAPT. “The police told us that APTA had told them we were urban terrorists." He said he was sure few people in Detroit knew of the difficulties encountered by persons with disabilities in using public transit before ADAPT hit town. Blank said he tried to get Jesse Jackson and his rainbow coalition to support ADAPT in Detroit, but every time he telephoned he was told that “Jesse was in the air" flying to another appearance. Some members of Jackson's other group, PUSH, did participate in some of the Detroit demonstrations. Blank said he was saddened that so many blacks could not understand ADAPT's motives. “I guess it was just one human race story running up against another" he said. PHOTO: The dark figures of 3 Detroit police officers loom into the frame from all sides. Through a small hole between their arms you can see the face and chest of a man (Ken Heard) they are surrounding. Below their arms you can see the wheels and frame Ken's wheelchair. Caption reads: Detroit police had their hands full when they placed Ken Heard under arrest. Title of 2nd article: 54 arrested in transit showdown [This article is continued in ADAPT 295 but the entire text is included here for easier reading.] At least 54 demonstrators were arrested in Detroit as disabled groups once again laid siege to a national convention of their arch-foe, the American Public Transit Association (APTA). Seventeen or 18 protesters (accounts vary) were arrested Monday, Oct. 6, when they attempted to board -- and block -- Detroit city buses, which are mostly not equipped with wheelchair lifts. Those arrested were released on a $l00 personal bond and were ordered not to participate in any actions that would lead to a second arrest. The next day, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 37 protesters, including 13 repeat offenders, were booked by police for blocking one of the two entrances to the McNamara federal office building. Twenty-four of these were released after posting the $100 personal bond apiece, but the repeat offenders had bail set at $1,000 each. Even as the protesters, primarily members of the militant American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT), began pouring into Detroit Friday night, the Wayne County jail was already filled to its 1700 person capacity and was turning away all prisoners charged with misdemeanors. The 13 two-time offenders were held Tuesday night in a gym at police headquarters which has bars on the windows and which has been used on other occasions as a holding area for prisoners waiting to be incarcerated. Ironically, the gym's facilities were not accessible to persons in wheelchairs, and police were obliged to carry their disabled prisoners when they needed to use the restrooms. Outside police headquarters, another 60 demonstrators gathered and staged an all-night candlelight vigil. As in other cities where ADAPT has staged demonstrations in its fight to win mandatory accessible public transit, the police said they were in a [unreadable.] More than one officer complained that you can't help but look bad when you arrest someone in a wheelchair. The Detroit police had received briefings from other cities visited by ADAPT and had given some special training to officers in dealing with disabled protesters. ADAPT had originally been granted a parade permit to stage a march on the Westin Hotel where APTA conventioneers were meeting, but Mayor Coleman Young and police went to the city council and got the permit rescinded. No parade permit was issued when ADAPT marched on APTA in Los Angeles, but police made no attempt to push the marchers off the streets and in fact routed traffic away from the demonstrators. However, in Detroit police dogged ADAPT marchers for two miles, making [unreadable] protesters stuck to the sidewalks, even when obstacles such as a large puddle of water hampered, their progress. ADAPT spokesperson Wade Blank said the Detroit action cost $20,000 and that the group was seeking additional financial assistance to continue to press their fight, which has taken them to APTA's national conventions in Denver, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, as well as to regional meetings in San Antonio, San Diego, and Cincinnati. Blank said several reporters asked him about reports that ADAPT was being funded by lift manufacturers. “I’m sure someone with APTA planted that question to try and discredit us,” he said. Blank said ADAPT had received contributions of $100 each from two lift manufacturers but that this was for other projects. “Besides, that isn’t enough to make bail for more than two people." APTA'S 1987 convention is set for San Francisco and ADAPT is already beginning to lay the groundwork for disrupting that meeting. “People ask why we do these kinds of things (civil disobedience)," Blank said. “But look how much publicity we get. People are finally getting the word about what public transit really means to someone in a wheelchair.” California has required all public transit systems to convert to accessible systems as they replace old equipment, but Blank said he’s heard that there have been some problems with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in recent months. But before they head for San Francisco, ADAPT has been asked by disabled groups in Boston for assistance in setting up a program to pursue accessible transit there.
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January / February 1987 METRO Magazine [Headline] Handicapped Rights and APTA Highlighted text: A seeming fixture at APTA conventions is a demonstration by the handicapped. In this exclusive interview with METRO Magazine,Rev. Wade Blank describes the movement’s goals and objectives. Shortly before the APTA Annual Meeting in Detroit last October, the General Assembly of the Denver Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church unanimously passed a resolution favoring 100% accessibility to all publicly funded transit buses. The resolution calls upon the" U.S. DOT “to mandate that all public buses bought with federal monies be accessible to all people, specifically including those persons who use wheelchairs for mobility." The resolution declares that equal access to public transportation is a basic human right. It urges the American Public Transit Association to support total accessibility, and calls on all public transit systems to work toward the goal as well. According to sponsors of the resolution, 14% of U.S. citizens are disabled and thus denied full access. The resolution also recommends to all churches and church agencies to consider adding equal access facilities to all their church buses and vans. Wade Blank, a Presbyterian minister and leader in the disability rights movement for 11 years, said the resolution is the latest effort in the struggle to enable disabled Americans to integrate into their communities. According to Blank, disability rights is a civil rights movement similar to the black political movement of the 1950's and 60's. Blank is a leader of ADAPT, the Denver-based American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, an organization which has demonstrated on behalf of disability rights at several APTA conventions in recent years. Blank said his organization has about 800 people who actively support it, though he believes many thousands more wheelchair-bound people would do so if they could. What follows is an interview with Rev. Blank conducted in Detroit during the APTA Annual Meeting there during which 18 disabled individuals were arrested for demonstrating at the city hall. METRO: Mr. Blank, what is your organization trying to accomplish at this APTA meeting? Blank: First of all, in 1983 we introduced a resolution before APTA in Denver, Colorado, in which we said that we wanted APTA to vote in favor of having public transportation accessible to people in wheelchairs. That resolution said three things. First, that APTA should inform all its members that it will now endorse accessibility; second, that they should take a public vote member by member (about the issue); and third, that they should inform the transportation industry that accessibility is their position. They have refused since 1983 to act on the resolution, so we assume that that means they don't favor accessible public transit. Now as to what we are doing here. Whenever APTA goes into a community (to hold a convention) we do two things: we demonstrate against APTA, and we use the occasion to illustrate to the public that their local transit system is not wheelchair accessible, in other words, every bus being wheelchair accessible. METRO: Over the years your organization has demonstrated at a number of APTA meetings and very often the demonstrations have been very disruptive. Do you think that your activities have paid off? Blank: They've paid off in the sense that first they are directed to other people with disabilities in order to raise their consciousness about their rights. Our group has grown three times over the last few years. Secondly, it tells the able-bodied public that people in wheelchairs cannot board transit, which most people never even think about. And thirdly, it teaches the community at large that our political movement is in fact a civil rights movement. METRO: Your organization demonstrates against APTA. But isn't it true that you're also hoping for action on the local level wherever you mount a demonstration? Blank: Yes. In effect, APTA does our organizing for us by picking the cities it goes into. We follow and go in and raise consciousness for our cause. I don’t think anyone can understand how alienating it is (to be disabled). My daughter is in a wheelchair. If she goes to a bus stop and the doors open and shut and the bus drives off without her, there's no way of expressing to people how alienated, how shut out that makes her feel. Of course, the transit people want to make it an economic argument...but that didn't cut it with the black movement and it's not going to cut it with the disabled movement either. METRO: How is ADAPT funded? And what is your annual budget? Blank: Mainly from the Roman Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans and the United Church of Christ. ADAPT itself doesn't have a budget per se. A trip like this (to Detroit) will run us approximately $15,000 for all the logistics involved, hotels, food, attendant care, just the logistics of moving that large number of disabled. METRO: How big is your staff? Blank: We don't have a staff, we don't have bylaws, we don't even have officers. It's just a consensus group. For example, in Denver, the disabled groups each do their own thing, and there's a lot of individuals who have joined ADAPT by simply saying, I want to be part of it. That's all it takes. We have a list of names of who those people are. METRO: You mentioned the logistics of moving the disabled. Do you bring people along with you to do the demonstrating, or do you seek to have local disabled join in? How does this work? Blank: In July we flew here with some disabled and met with the local disabled. They basically said they'd recently filed suit and were trying to get access to the buses, but that they didn't believe they could support any demonstrations because they'd be afraid to lose what they have now. That's almost to the letter the situation in every community we go into. The disabled are very afraid to lose what little they have. Plus, a disabled person in a wheelchair is by definition passive about the way they see themselves. But before we leave Detroit we will have a few people who will dare. By seeing the press, they'll see it's pretty amazing and they want to be a part of this. It changes the way they view themselves. That's how we recruit members. METRO: Tell me how the organization started? Blank: It started in Denver in 1975 when we announced we were going to make the transit system there accessible. Everybody laughed at us. We had about 20 members. We filed suit and lost. On July 5, 1978, the day after the suit was lost, we went down and blocked the first two buses in the whole movement. We held those buses for two days, sleeping on the streets. The battle in Denver went on in spurts. We started in 1978. In 1979 (Denver RTD) announced they'd make their transit buses accessible, but in 1980 when Reagan took office they went to a posture of inaccessibility. We hit the streets again and they reverted back to accessibility. In 1982, they finally signed an agreement with us that they would be totally accessible. So then other groups asked us: how did you do that? we'd like you to teach us how. Rather than just sit in Denver and enjoy our system, we decided to export what we'd won there using the same tactics on a national basis. METRO: You said earlier that the economic argument against accessibility doesn't fly. Yet to APTA and the transit industry the economic argument is very real. After all, the funds to pay for accessibility come out of their budgets. They can cite some very dramatic statistics of how much subsidy each handicapped ride costs. So how can you say the economic argument doesn't carry weight? Blank: Because those figures are not true. Denver, for example, bought 160 buses. The lowest bidders (for that contract) bid accessible buses. Neoplan undercut everybody else’s bid and they bid accessible. So you can't go just by the lifts themselves, you go by the total cost of the bus. METRO: But you also have to consider the maintenance costs and personnel costs too. In San Francisco. for example, one of the agencies there has two maintenance workers who do nothing but service the lifts, that's all those individuals do. Blank: That's true. But they have people who work on the motors, and people who work on the brakes, and people who work on every aspect of the buses that service the able bodied. The figures out of Seattle and Denver on maintenance per lift is under $400 a year, if they do preventive maintenance. Now that's a lot lower than APTA's figures of $2,500 per lift (per year). That figure is correct if you don't ever fix the lifts. In other words if you drive around and they break down and they're all gummed up, then you have to put new hydraulics in because you haven’t changed the oil. Then you're going to top out at $2,500 the same way if you don't keep your car up. METRO: During his remarks to APTA, CBS correspondent Ed Bradley charged your organization had mounted a mailgram campaign against his coming. He went on to give a presentation about apartheid in South Africa Your comments? Blank: The disabled community in the United States is suffering from a form of apartheid. The disabled live in section 8 housing, high-rise housing which is for disabled and elderly, They live in nursing homes. They go to workshops like Goodwill where they're segregated, and they are paid under 10 cents an hour in the average workshop in the United States. That's what the salary is. The disabled can't ride public transportation, so you have a form of apartheid. METRO: Thank you.
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THE PLAIN DEALER, THURSDAY, MAY 22; 1986 page 19-A PHOTO by AP: Four policemen in their fancy police hats are "rolling" a man (Rick James) up a 150 degree (ie. almost vertical) "ramp" into a van. Rick is sitting with his hands up by his chest. His hat is missing and his hair is flying out in all directions. His expression is a mix of amazement, disgust and resignation. Caption reads: Cincinnati policemen push Rick James of Salt Lake City, Utah, up a ramp into a van after he was arrested outside a downtown hotel as part of a demonstration by American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation. Title: Cincy arrests disabled in protest of bus access By BILL SLOAT STAFF writer CINCINNATI — Police arrested l7 disabled people yesterday after they blockaded the entrance to a downtown hotel or chained themselves to the doorway of an adjoining office building that houses Queen City Metro, this city’s public bus service. Eleven of them refused to post bond and were in Hamilton County Justice Center under cash bonds ranging from $1,500 to $3,000. Five were released late yesterday on personal bonds. One pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct and was found guilty. Sixteen were in wheelchairs from polio, paralyzing spinal accidents, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and amputations. One was blind and walked carrying a white cane. The arrests were made during a non-violent, noon demonstration that challenged lack of access to city buses here and around the nation. Chants of “We will ride" and “Access now” came from about 52 demonstrators outside the Westin Hotel. Some removed footstands from their wheelchairs and banged on metal barricades. Police stood behind the barricades and refused to let the demonstrators into the hotel. All 17 taken to jail said they were members of a national handicapped rights organization called American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation. “This is a civil disobedience action," said Wade Blank, 47, a Presbyterian minister who helped organize yesterday's protest. Blank, who now lives in Denver, was involved in anti-war demonstrations at Kent State University in the 1960s when he lived in Akron. Several of the people loaded onto vans and hauled away to the Hamilton County Justice Center on disorderly conduct charges compared Cincinnati to Selma and Montgomery, two Alabama cities where civil rights activists were jailed by authorities in the 1960s. “The message needs to be sent out that we can’t ride a bus because we're handicapped,” said Glenn Horton, 46, of El Paso, Texas. "It's discrimination it’s segregation and it’s appalling that it could still be happening in this country." Horton said he had been confined to a wheelchair since age 9, when he fell and broke his back. Bill Bolte, 54, of Los Angeles, said handicapped people needed mainline bus service to get to jobs, movies, dates, shopping, banks and anywhere else they might want to go. “We're already in prison," said Bolte, who had polio 51 years ago. “We're going to see that what few rights we have are not going to be taken away. Our rights to public transportation are being deprived, and we will not sit for it." Organizers of the protest said they took to the streets because about 600 executives of public and private transit companies in the eastern United States and Canada were attending a convention in the hotel that ends today. Protesters said the convention should adopt a resolution supporting the installation of wheelchair lifts on all public buses in the nation. Many came from Denver, which has such lifts in use on its bus fleet. The demonstration also came a day after the U.S. Department of Transportation announced in Washington, D.C., a new regulation that allows transit authorities to establish alternative services for the disabled instead of putting lifts on regularly scheduled buses. Demonstrators complained the rule meant that buses, subways and rail lines wouldn't be made accessible to people in wheelchairs. Police Chief Lawrence Whalen said the comparisons with Alabama in the 1960s were unfair when it came to the police. Police in the South during the civil rights era often brutalized protesters. Whalen yesterday said, “Our officers handled themselves very admirably. The group has had their chance to protest and get their point across." He said the police assigned to make arrests had attended special briefings on how to handle disabled people and were instructed to ask the people in custody the best way to lift them into vans. “We wanted to be sensitive to their special needs." Whalen said. Three of those arrested yesterday were out on $3,000 bond after incidents Monday when two climbed aboard city buses, paid fares and refused to leave when ordered off by Queen City Metro officials. The third interfered with a bus. The three, Robert A. Kafka, 40, of Austin, Texas; George Cooper, 58, of Irving, Texas; and Michael W. Auberger, 32, of Denver, were charged yesterday with Criminal trespassing when they chained themselves to the entranceway of Queen City Metro's offices. Police Capt. Dale Menkhaus told his men to use bolt cutters to get them out of the building. Kafka, Cooper and Auberger had been ordered Tuesday not to set foot in Cincinnati by a Municipal judge at the time they posted bond, but another Municipal judge lifted the banning order shortly before yesterday's protests started. Police Chief Lawrence Whalen said 14 others were charged with disorderly conduct for their activities outside the hotel. Bond was set at $3,000 each, a Hamilton County Municipal Court official said. Before the demonstration began, the group gathered in a Newport, Ky., motel for a strategy session on civil disobedience. They agreed not to carry anything but identification with them when they confronted police in downtown Cincinnati and they voted not to post bail. None of the people arrested were from Ohio. The 11 who refused to post bond and were in jail last night are: Bolte; Bob Conrad of Denver; Joe Carle of Denver; Auberger; Horton; Jim Parker of El Paso, Texas; Cooper; George Roberts of Denver; Earnest Taylor of Hartford, Conn.; Lonnie Smith of Denver; Kafka. Kelly Bates of Denver pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct, was found guilty and sentenced to 30 days in jail, which she is to start serving tomorrow. Those released on personal bond are Ken Heard of Denver; George Florman of Colorado Springs, Colo.; Frank Lozano of El Paso, Texas; Rick James of Salt Lake City, Utah; and Arthur Campbell of Louisville, Ky.
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Friday. May 45, I986, Gazette Telegraph -- A3 headlines Gazette Telegraph wire services the nation Title: Cincinnati called civil rights battleground CINCINNATI — Leaders of 17 wheelchair-bound protesters who were arrested while demonstrating for access to public transit buses say Cincinnati has become a civil rights battleground. “This is the Selma, Ala., of the disabled civil rights movement,” said the Rev. Wade Blank of Denver, a co-founder of the group American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, which staged this week's protests. Seventeen protesters from Texas, Colorado and Utah were arrested Wednesday, when the American Public Transit Association concluded its regional meeting. Some boarded buses and declined requests that they get off. Others blocked a parking entrance to the hotel where the association met, while three others chained themselves together to block a doorway in the Queen City Metro headquarters.
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THE HANDICAPPED COLORADAN Vol. 8, No. 4, Boulder, Colorado, November 1985 [This article continues in ADAPT 115 but the story is included here in its entirety for easier reading.] PHOTO on center-right of the page and shows several people in wheelchairs (including Larry Ruiz looking away on left, as you face the bus, and George Florum on right in black ADAPT T-shirt holding a coffee and a cigarette) in front of a large bus. One person stands in front of the bus holding a scarecrow-like effigy of a person in one hand and something else in the other. A person in a white shirt is seated in the driver's seat. Another person similarly dressed is standing next to him. Above them behind the windshield is a destination type sign reading “EASY.” Caption: DEMONSTRATORS BLOCKED BUSES in Long Beach during the fourth day of the Los Angeles demonstration. One protestor (center) holds up an effigy representing the American Public Transit Association. Police arrived later and made several arrests. Demonstrators said the Long Beach police treated them properly. [Headline] Access showdown in L.A. Leads to massive arrests In a scene reminiscent of the black civil rights marches of the 1960s, some 215 people in wheelchairs rolled down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles on Sunday, Oct. 7, to protest the lack of accessible mainline public transit in the United States. ' Chanting "We will ride!" and carrying inflammatory placards, the single-file column snaked its way 1.7 miles from the MacArthur Park staging area to the Bonaventure Hotel where the American Public Transit Association (APTA) was holding its national convention. Although the demonstrators had been denied a parade permit, police made no attempt to halt the march and routed traffic around the procession. However, the hands-off attitude disappeared once the column of wheelchair militants reached the hotel. As hotel security personnel blocked the only wheelchair-accessible elevator that gave access to the main lobby, several of the demonstrators pulled themselves from their wheelchairs and threw their bodies in front of the escalators, vowing to prevent anyone else from entering or leaving the hotel. The disabled demonstrators shouted "Access now! Access now!" while police deliberated their next move. Finally, after an hour, the police moved in. Eight demonstrators, including one woman, were arrested for “refusing to leave the scene of a riot," according to a police spokesperson. But they didn't go without a fight. George Florom of Colorado Springs thrashed about so hard that it took three officers to subdue him. One of the officers claimed that Florom kicked and bit him, During the scuffle, police said one of the demonstrators grabbed an officer's gun. Florom was removed to a specially equipped police van. He was soon joined by Edith Harris of Hartford, Conn, a veteran of other APTA demonstrations, who had been arrested during the San Antonio APTA protest. Harris had tried several times during the day to get the police to arrest her, even to the point of throwing shredded ADAPT literature in the street and demanding that police arrest her. Police merely removed her motorized chair from the street and picked up the paper, But when Harris threw herself on an escalator, the police moved in and escorted her to a waiting police van. Police and demonstrators differed as to how well the department handled the arrests. "We look bad no matter what we do," Sgt. Bill Tiffany said. A police spokesperson said the department had medical personnel on hand and tried to provide for the special needs of those arrested. That wasn't the case, according to Wade Blank of Denver, one of the founders of the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT), which helped organize the Los Angeles demonstration as it has similar protests in Denver (1983), Washington, D.C. (1984), and San Antonio, Texas (1985). "The police were real nice until we got to the Bonaventure," Blank said. “But it was a real bad situation at the hotel. The cops turned into real pigs. They wouldn't let us use the hotel restroom. Some of them laughed at a lot of disabilities of the demonstrators, and a few of them pulled their clubs and threatened us with them." Blank said he learned that the officers who pulled their clubs were later given reprimands. Lou Nau, chairman of the Disability Rights Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was also critical of how the police handled the arrests. Nau said that Mike Auberger, a quadriplegic community organizer for the Atlantis Community in Denver, was not allowed to use a bathroom for eight hours, causing hyperreflexia, while others who were arrested were not allowed to take necessary medications although they repeatedly explained the danger this might cause. Four men were handcuffed behind their backs and then left for up to five hours in their chairs in police vans, according to Nau. Of the eight arrested, Harris was released that same night and five of the men by the following afternoon. The other two men were not released until Tuesday morning. Some 53 disabled protestors maintained a night-long vigil outside the county jail. The police later issued this statement: “It must be stressed that the Los Angeles Police Department has repeatedly tried to meet with demonstration leaders in the attempt to provide legal alternatives to accomplish their objectives and avoid the distasteful necessity of arresting handicapped citizens." To that end, Jack Day, a board member of the Southern California Rapid Transit District (RTD flew to Denver earlier in the year to [print completely faded] in an attempt to talk the organization out of civil disobedience. Blank was one of those who met with Day. "We told him we wouldn't use civil disobedience if the (Southern California RTD) agreed to introduce and support a resolution at the APTA convention calling upon APTA to reverse its stand and back mandatory wheelchair lifts on buses," he said. Day said that was not possible. Meanwhile back in Los Angeles Day's other board members continued to discuss ways and means of handling the demonstrators. Ironically, Los Angeles — the city where demonstrators chose to make their point - is one of the most accessible in the country. California and Michigan are the only states that require all new public transit vehicles to be equipped with lifts. Usha Viswanathan, a spokesperson for the Southern California RTD, said that 1,891 of the district‘s 2,445 active buses were equipped with lifts and another 200 were being retrofitted. The lifts cost between $15,000 and $20,000 each. Within the next five years, the district intends to operate only lift-equipped buses, making it the first 100 percent accessible system in the country. In other parts of the country it's Up to the local transit provider to decide whether or not to offer accessible service. And that's the way it should bee, according Albert Engelken, APTA's deputy executive director. Geographical and climatic conditions have to be taken into consideration because lifts are difficult to operate in snow and on curved roads, Engelken said. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration's Department of Transportation mandated that all new buses be outfitted with wheelchair lifts. APTA, which acts as a lobbying and policy-making group for some 300 separate transit districts across the country, filed a lawsuit that eventually reversed that decision. Since then disabled groups have dogged APTA wherever it meets, insisting that the organization vote on a resolution calling for mandatory accessibility. That‘s why the demonstrators were in Southern California, Jim Parker of El Paso explained. Parker said ADAPT was very appreciative of the steps California was taking toward complete accessibility.” "This is a model city," he said. The demonstrators were in Los Angeles to embarrass APTA, not the local transit district, he said. That didn't stop the demonstrators from stopping buses, however. On Wednesday, Oct. 10, wheelchair demonstrators poured onto the streets of Long Beach, where they held several buses hostage. Protestors said they would release the buses if Laurance Jackson, general manager and president of Long Beach Transit and the newly elected president of APTA, would meet with them. A spokesperson for Jackson said that would be impossible, as Jackson had other commitments at the convention and the protestors had come unannounced. Before the day was done, police issued 33 misdemeanor citations for failure to disperse and arrested l6 protestors, all of whom were later released on their own recognizance. Blank said that the Long Beach police acted appropriately under the circumstances. Long Beach had been the scene of another confrontation earlier that same week. On Monday, 26 wheelchair demonstrators staged a roll-in at the office of U.S Rep.Glen Anderson (D-Long Beach), who is chairman of the House Transportation Committee. Anderson, who had been expected in his office that day, had been detained in Washington due to a heavy work load. The congressman later issued a statement pointing out that he had consistently voted to support accessible systems. Anderson blamed the Reagan administration, not Congress, for overturning a "requirement that the handicapped be given full accessibility to public transit." Most of the demonstrators agreed with that assessment. Blank and Parker compared APTA to the Klu Klux Klan and called upon its individual members either to fire its executive board, including executive vice president Jack Gilstrap, a longtime foe of mandatory accessibility, or to pull out and form a new national transit organization. A Gilstrap aide said he had no intention of resigning. Blank said Gilstrap and the rest of the APTA membership could expect to see them again when the organization holds its next national convention in Detroit in 1986. ADAPT plans similar tactics, since Michigan, like California, has already opted for total accessibility. "It's a question of civil rights," Blank said." And it's a national issue. Wherever they go, you can expect to find us." 3 photos filling the top three-quarters of the page. Photo 1: A man (George Florum) in a manual wheelchair wearing a black no-steps ADAPT T-shirt is loaded onto a lift of some type of vehicle by three beefy police officers Caption: GEORGE FLOROM OF of Colorado Springs is arrested for blocking buses in Long Beach. Photo 2: A dark shot of a man in a white T-shirt (Chris Hronis) being pulled upward by several sets of hands. Caption: CHRIS HONIS [sic], a California ADAPT member, is arrested at the Bonaventure Hotel. Photo 3: a couple of small groups of protesters in wheelchairs and standing, are in front of one bus and beside another, while police stand nearby. Caption: ACTIVISTS hold a bus captive in Long Beach. To the left of photo 3 is an ADAPT "we will ride" logo with the wheelchair access guy and an equal sign in the big wheel.
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MAinstream magazine [No date] [This story continues in ADAPT 222, but is contained here in its entirety for reading ease.] [Headline] ADAPT takes the fast lane to make transit accessible By Michael Ervin San Antonio—The first indication that something was about to happen came when an oversized, stretch-limo of a van pulled up beside the Alamo and a wheelchair lift uncurled out of the back door. The colorful banner on the side of the van read: ACCESS FOR ALL. Six more people in wheelchairs were in another van parked in a lot down the street. As they proceeded down the sidewalk to join the demonstration in front of the Alamo the pedestrians stopped and looked them over. A parade of people in wheelchairs is bound to draw stares. But the expressions accompanying these stares were unique—welcoming, supportive, somewhat star struck. Maybe they knew they were coming. Before the 50 or so members of various chapters of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit even arrived here there were stories in the media about previous ADAPT confrontations with the American Public Transit Association (APTA.) Television news showed footage of the mass arrests that occurred last October in Washington, D.C. when ADAPT members tried to force their way into the center where APTA was holding its annual convention. That's the kind of escalating media coverage Wade Blank likes to see. He’s the main force behind ADAPT. “We're becoming famous. When we had our first ADAPT meeting in Denver in 1982, our goal was to make the officials of any city we were coming to nervous. We wanted them to say, ‘No! Not here! We don’t want ‘em!’” They were certainly nervous in San Antonio. When a horde of people in wheelchairs showed up at the offices of the local transit authority for a noisy demonstration, the employees locked themselves in a large office as if they were afraid ADAPT was going to take them out one by one and shoot them. And when the march that began at the Alamo turned into an equally raucous occupation of the lobby of the posh hotel where APTA people were staying, hotel security had no idea what to do. And the bewildered looks of the innocent tourists were amusing. They’d certainly never seen anything like that before. “Seeing a bunch of disabled crazies blocking buses and doing things like that redefines everything everybody’s been conditioned to believe about the disabled," Blank says. This radical redefinition of what the disabled are (in the eyes of both the disabled and nondisabled) is what ADAPT is all about. And having stuffy APTA conferences and conventions as a backdrop helps make that point. APTA’s primary sin, according to ADAPT, is that it spent big bucks on a lawsuit that struck down the federal mandate that all fixed-route public buses be lift-equipped. ADAPT sees equal transit access as the most basic civil right. “It's the same segregation as when blacks had to sit in the back of the bus or yield their seats to whites. Except it’s even worse,” says Blank. “The disabled can’t even get on the bus.” By using APTA as a symbol of the stifling paternalism that keeps the disabled in a position of dependency, ADAPT makes the immorality of inaccessible public transit quite clear. *** Wade Blank is an ordained minister who never goes to church. “It’s in the true Jesus tradition. He was kicked out of the synagogue and never went back.” Blank worked in a nursing home for a few years after seminary. It frustrated him to see the disabled friends he made there stuck there simply because they had no place else to go. So in 1976 he and some others began Atlantis, an independent living center in Denver. ADAPT was born of Atlantis. Blank says Atlantis likes to “do the impossible” in terms of working with clients who have the deepest holes of dependency to dig out of. Frank, a man with cerebral palsy who was part of the ADAPT Denver caravan to San Antonio, was sprung by Atlantis in 1976 from a nursing home he had been in since 1934. Another woman began feeding herself for the first time when she became part of Atlantis. She was always physically able to. Her mother just didn't want her making a mess. Another woman had never seen a head of lettuce. Her salads had always come to her prepared. It’s rather stunning seeing people who were mired in the world of please and thank you traveling around the country, blocking buses and maybe getting arrested. It’s gotten ADAPT and Atlantis in trouble with irate relatives. The father of a woman arrested for blocking buses in Denver told Wade that since he was a reverend he must be brainwashing his daughter into joining his cult, just like Jim Jones. He said he was going to tell the newspapers so they could investigate. But Blank says, “All we’re saying to people in Atlantis and ADAPT is, ‘You are an important person.’ I just tell them (the irate relatives) that people get excited when they see that they are important and that they are expected to be somebody.” In 1978, it became clear that the mission of Atlantis could never be fully accomplished as long as Denver’s public transit system was totally inaccessible. What good was it to set someone up in an accessible apartment if they couldn’t move beyond it? They might as well have still been in the nursing home. So the Atlantis people took to the streets of Denver. They blocked buses. They held sit-ins in the transit authority offices. They got arrested. But four years later, they won and Denver is on its way to full access. [Bordered text box in center of page: “We created a drama and let it unfold . . .I guess we raised consciousness.”] The next year, APTA made the mistake of holding its convention in Denver. The target was too tempting for Atlantis to resist. Here was the personification of everything Atlantis opposed right on its step and begging to be hit. Atlantis formed a permanent transportation component call ADAPT. They organized confrontations around the convention and vowed to follow APTA everywhere until it passed ADAPT ’s resolution renouncing the lawsuit and the damage it did. These confrontations would also provide a focal point and a training ground for activists from other cities so they could form their own ADAPT chapters. Mike Auberger of Atlantis is a quadriplegic resulting from a bobsled accident during the 1972 Olympic time trials. “When we started ADAPT, we were a bunch of crazy nuts. A year later, we were a possibility. Now, we’re a reality. We started in one city and here we are about 20 cities. We must be selling something everybody needs.” The hope is that the feeling of self-importance that inspired the disabled of Denver will be as infectious in San Antonio and in cities all over America. ADAPT paved the way in San Antonio by creating a three-day headache for the police and transit authority and forcing them to take the issue very seriously. They also permanently etched the issue on the minds of the people of San Antonio with pictures on the front page of the newspaper of disabled people blocking APTA tour buses. “We created a drama and let it unfold,” Blank says. “I was talking to a reporter and I said, ‘I guess we raised consciousness.’ She said, ‘Boy did you! That’s all this town is talking about.’ ” “Now you can’t say that about too many political movements today.” But even if it doesn’t play in San Antonio, Auberger sees what happened there as another battle won. “Again we took on APTA and beat them. You’ve got this guy in a $300 suit and a designer tie with his initials and a soup stain on it. More and more people are starting to see APTA that way.” If success can be judged by police reaction, ADAPT is accomplishing a lot. Knowing ADAPT ’s penchant for blocking buses, the police routed buses away from areas with high ratios of wheelchair-users. They obviously did their homework by talking to police in other cities who had to deal with ADAPT. A television news report even told of how San Antonio police intelligence photographers were following ADAPT members around. And it’s clear that transit authorities are taking ADAPT very seriously too. The next target is Los Angeles, where APTA will hold its convention in October. ADAPT has obtained a copy of a private memo of the Southern California Rapid Transit District that speaks of the authority’s plans to spend $10,000 to $15,000 to “handle vast numbers of wheelchair bound people” who will be coming to town. “While confrontations cannot be stopped, they can be blunted.” It speaks of how the RTD is “searching for ways to diffuse or ward off demonstrations,” perhaps by pacifying everyone for a few days with a conference on accessible transit [ibid]. “Can we take control by creating a hospitality center for the handicapped?” the memo says. Who can resist such an opportunity. ADAPT is on its way.
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Denver Post, Issues, 10/6/85, no page number [Headline] Transit leaders to face protests from disabled By Jack Farrar Special to the Denver Post The American Public Transit Association will run into some political street theater when it rolls into Los Angeles today for its annual meeting. Waiting for the group will be a militant cast of handicapped individuals, including members of a Denver organization called Atlantis, who want full accessibility to the nation's public transportation system. As APTA delegates convene at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, more than 100 people in wheelchairs – members of the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit – will be “marching” single-file from MacArthur Park, more than a mile away, to begin a week-long series of demonstrations. They won't have a parade permit. They haven't asked for one. Through such acts of civil disobedience, the demonstrators hope to force the APTA, public officials and the news media to think about what they consider to be the most pressing issue facing the handicapped: access to public transportation. One contingent of protesters will be led by Wade Blank, a 44-year-old Denverite who cut his activist teeth in the 1960s, marching with blacks in Alabama and peaceniks in Ohio. Access 'a right'[boldface] Blank is the founder and executive director of Atlantis, one of ADAPT's most militant member organizations. “Jobs and education don't mean much,” Blank argues, “if you can't take a bus to get there. Accessibility to public transportation – moving from one place to the other – should be a right, not just a consumer service.” For the past three years, ADAPT, largely under Blank's leadership, has demanded that APTA adopt total accessibility for the handicapped as an official policy rather than as an objective. Transit association officials have responded by citing numerous improvements made in service for the handicapped – improvements that the handicapped have applauded – and contends that total accessibility is financially impractical. “We have not ignored the handicapped,” says APTA Deputy Executive Director Albert Engelken. “Accessibility is a compelling issue. But total accessibility is an enormous undertaking, and with federal dollars shrinking, our resources are limited. In any case, it is not the role of an association like ours to establish policy.” Disabled activists, however, believe the costs of accessibility are distorted by the transportation industry. Moreover, they argue, the issue is civil rights, not economics. “Public transportation is a tax-supported system,” Blank says. “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?” Long regarded as a quiet minority, disabled individual recently have added a more confrontational approach to their struggle for equality, and the man frequently in the front lines of that movement is Blank, whose long blond hair and granny glasses evoke the image of the 1960s activist. He encourages the handicapped to take to the streets when they feel their demands are being taken less than seriously. Members of Atlantis have made headlines locally and nationally with their tactics in Denver – chaining themselves to seats of fast food restaurants, occupying intersections that don't accommodate wheelchairs, and blocking the entrances to buildings with architectural barriers. Rules watered down [boldface] Progress in making public transportation available to the handicapped can be traced to the Urban Mass Transit Administration's adoption of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 1979. [sic] Section 504 generally made it illegal to exclude any individual, by reason of handicap, from any program receiving federal dollars. UMTA's regulations stated that all new buses purchased with federal money must include wheelchair lifts and aimed for 50 percent of peak-hour accessibility on regular bus routes. RTD standards strict [boldface] The Regional Transportation District in metropolitan Denver has adopted accessibility standards that are more stringent than required. Even after Section 504 regulations were softened in 1981, RTD's board chose to maintain its commitment to provide 50 percent peak-hour accessibility on all routes, and 100 percent off-peak accessibility. And RTD will soon become the first public transit system in the United States to introduce wheelchair lifts on its larger, regional commuter buses. Despite such advances, Blank will not be satisfied until disabled individuals throughout the United States can board and ride a bus whenever and wherever the able-bodied do the same. “We simply want APTA, as the association which speaks for the public transportation industry, to declare its intention to make the system accessible. We know it will take time. But isn't this the country that put a man on the moon?”
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Dallas Times Herald, Saturday Nov. 24, 1984 [Headline] Wheelchair activist adopt radical tactics Los Angeles Times WASHINGTON — It was a scene reminiscent of the 1960s civii rights demonstrations as angry protesters chanted slogans, picketed the White House and stopped traffic before they were finally dragged away by police. And the series of confrontations that ended with 27 arrests last month all seemed to come down to a similar central issue —- the right to sit on a bus, to have full access to public transportation. There was one striking difference, however. Unlike Rosa Parks and the black civil rights activists who battered down the Jim Crow barriers in the South, these protesters were in wheelchairs, and their goal was equal access for the physically handicapped. "It's a civil right to be able to ride public transportation," says Julia Haraksin, a wheelchair-bound Los Angeles resident who participated in the demonstrations. Organizations representing handicapped persons long have urged Washington to require that all new buses and rail systems built with funds from the Department of Transportation's Urban Mass Transportation Administration be equipped to accommodate handicapped riders. But Haraksin and other handicapped individuals are beginning to press the old arguments with more radical tactics. Frustrated by years of negotiating, lobbying in Washington, going through the courts and staging non-confrontational protests, some handicapped activists now are resorting to confrontations and civil disobedience. Thus, early in October, 100 members of a newly formed coalition called American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit confronted a national meeting of city transportation heads here, using the kind of civil disobedience tactics used 20 years earlier by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Protesters were arrested when they blocked entrances and buses of those attending the American Public Transit Association convention. “The strategy was to physically be a barrier because handicapped people have to face barriers all their lives," Wade Blank, a founder of Denver-based ADAPT, said. Calling the protests here “our Selma," leaders of ADAPT claimed a public relations victory and promised their struggle has only begun. They already are focusing their efforts on what they hope will be a larger demonstration at the next meeting of the American Public Transportation Association a year from now in Los Angeles. But their cause may be in for a tough battle. Their opposition comes from the Reagan administration, from many city governments and even from within the handicapped community. And as public attention focuses on the underlying budget choices involved, the opposition may swell with the addition of taxpayers concerned about the possible costs of a national full-access program. ADAPT argues a legal right to full access for the handicapped already exists. Federal law states Urban Mass Transportation Administration funds — which account for about 80 percent of the costs of the equipment in most municipal transportation systems —- cannot be spent on programs that discriminate against, or exclude, the handicapped. The law does not make clear, however, whether handicapped persons must be provided with access to regular bus lines or whether they can instead be provided with alternative transportation systems. Nor does it indicate who should make that decision. Current Department of Transportation policy, which is strongly supported by the American Public Transportation Association, allows each city to make its own decision on what type of transportation it will provide for the handicapped. This is in sharp contrast with Carter administration policy, which in 1979 interpreted federal regulations to mean full access. Members of ADAPT, opposing the separate-but-equal philosophy, argue that paratransit does not meet the needs of the handlcapped and is inherently discriminatory. “lt segregates the disabled people trom the able-bodied community," Mike Auberger, an organizer for ADAPT, said. Because paratransit requires advanced scheduling, sometimes weeks before a ride is needed, he said, “you have to schedule your life according to the transit system." Transit authorities, on the other hand, argue full access can be too expensive, given the low percentage of handicapped riders in many cities. Lift-fitted buses cost an estimated $8,000 to $10,000 more than regular buses. Furthermore, lift systems are often unreliable and time-consuming to operate and maintain, authorities add. In Denver, for example, the transportation district has spent $6.3 million to purchase or retrofit buses with lifts, 80 percent of which was paid for by the federal government, according to spokesman Gene Towne. Since it started mainline access in 1982, the district has spent close to $1 million in maintenance of the lifts and expects to spend an additional $900,000 this year. Yet only 12,000 of the district's 38 million riders use the lifts, according to Towne. ADAPT counters the issue is not cost but civil liberties. "In America, we have a way of hiding our prejudices with pragmatism," said Blank, a Presbyterian minister and veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s who now supports handicapped activists. Across the country, cities are using a variety of approaches to the problems of providing mass transit for the handicapped. ln Los Angeles, mainline access is required by state law. Although 1,850 of the Southern California Rapid Transit District's 2,400 buses are fitted with wheelchair lifts, some local advocates charge that broken lifts, drivers who do not know how to use the equipment or refuse to do so and an overall lack of commitment to providing access limits the system. [Bottom of the page is torn so missing text is included in brackets, as it is just a guess.] In Seattle, 570 of 1,100 buses serve the handicapped, providing about 5,900 rides a month. [The] Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle also contracts with groups to supply paratransit [vans] and half-fare cab service, [providing] 8,400 rides a month. In Denver, 432 of the [city's] buses are lift- or ramp-[equipped] providing more than 1,00[0 rides] per month. The city also [uses] vans and small buses in a transit system that provides [x number of] rides a month. None of Chicago's 2,400 [mainline] buses is fitted with lifts. [Instead] the city provides 42 [paratransit] buses, which offer 12,000 [rides per] month.