- LanguageAfrikaans Argentina AzÉrbaycanca
á¥áá áá£áá Äesky Ãslenska
áá¶áá¶ááááá à¤à¥à¤à¤à¤£à¥ বাà¦à¦²à¦¾
தமிழ௠à²à²¨à³à²¨à²¡ ภาษาà¹à¸à¸¢
ä¸æ (ç¹é«) ä¸æ (é¦æ¸¯) Bahasa Indonesia
Brasil Brezhoneg CatalÃ
ç®ä½ä¸æ Dansk Deutsch
Dhivehi English English
English Español Esperanto
Estonian Finnish Français
Français Gaeilge Galego
Hrvatski Italiano Îλληνικά
íêµì´ LatvieÅ¡u Lëtzebuergesch
Lietuviu Magyar Malay
Nederlands Norwegian nynorsk Norwegian
Polski Português RomânÄ
Slovenšcina Slovensky Srpski
Svenska Türkçe Tiếng Viá»t
Ù¾Ø§Ø±Ø³Û æ¥æ¬èª ÐÑлгаÑÑки
ÐакедонÑки Ðонгол Ð ÑÑÑкий
СÑпÑки УкÑаÑнÑÑка ×¢×ר×ת
اÙعربÙØ© اÙعربÙØ©
Home / Albums / Tags ADAPT flag + Tom Olin 4
- ADAPT (1789)
The Handicapped Coloradan / Page 15 & 16 [This article continues in ADAPT 1786, but has been completely included here for easier reading.] Title: "If heaven isn't accessible God had better Watch out!" Photo: Waist up picture of Wade Blank with his below shoulder length blonde hair and round tinted glasses. He is smiling and wearing a vest. Caption reads: Wade Blank ADAPT founder dies in Mexico. Wade Blank went down to Baja, California, in February and drowned there trying to save his eight year old son Lincoln. He was there vacationing with his family. The money for the trip came from Wade’s share of a legal settlement in San Francisco when bad guys violated the civil rights of ADAPT demonstrators. He couldn't afford that kind of trip on his own. He never made more than $16,000 in his life. Lincoln was in the water swimming. An undertow got him and Wade went in after him. He had to know there was very little chance either one would survive. Some fisherman from a nearby village fished Wade’ s body from the water. His wife Molly brought his body home and they covered the coffin with an American flag. Only the stars on this flag formed a wheelchair. Lincoln’s body was never recovered. A few days before he left on that vacation, I told him to skip Baja and its treacherous waters for the calmer seas off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Wade said he’d think about it but we both knew he wouldn’t alter his plans. Wade Blank liked to be where the action was. Many of the 1100 people who filled the ballroom at the Radisson Hotel on Sunday, Feb. 21, to say goodbye to their fallen comrade had accompanied him into battle. “If heaven isn’t accessible,” one of them warned, “God better watch out!” Wade founded the Atlantis Community in 1975 when he helped several disabled people move out of a nursing home and into their own apartments. Then he went on to help organize protests against RTD for not having wheelchairs lifts on its buses, a move that later led to the creation of ADAPT, which then stood for American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (“The hard part is getting the acronym right,” he told me at the time.) I asked Tom Olin who was going to replace Wade. “No one,” he said. “Wade was into empowering disabled people. It’s a tribute to him that we’ll just keep on going.” Maybe. But it won’t be the same. People like Wade Blank don't come along very often. A writer for Westward once called Wade the nearest thing to a saint he had ever met. But Wade wasn’t perfect. After all, he was a Cleveland Browns’ fan. He had it so bad that on game day he’d call home to his folks in Ohio and have them put the phone next to the radio. He was president of the Cleveland Browns Fans in Exile Club. A small part of him died when Elway found Jackson in the end zone in the 1987 AFC Championship game. He was a devoted father who had a vasectomy reversed after he married Molly. He called me soon after the operation and bitched about having to lie still to prevent the tubes from severing again. It was the only time I knew him to stay still. The time spent was worth it. He loved Lincoln and Caitlan just as he loved Heather, his adopted daughter. He instilled in them special values. A neighbor recalled a time when she came home and observed Lincoln in front of his house directing some other kids. They weren't playing cowboy and Indian or war or any of the usual childhood games. They were playing rally. “All right,” Lincoln said. “United we stand, never apart.” Wade was a Presbyterian minister whose language would make a coal miner blush. I quoted him a lot on these pages over the past ten years or so but I never quoted him accurately. He used four letter words the way other people use punctuation. Someone made a TV movie about the events at Heritage Nursing Home and Wade said it was close to the truth. But the actor who played Wade didn’t quite capture his style. Wade wore his hair long and looked a little like a construction worker who took a wrong tum back in the 1960s. He once asked me if I wore ties. “I own one,” I said. “It keeps my sleeping bag rolled up.” He liked that. He hated ties. At the memorial service, those few men who showed up wearing ties were asked to remove them—out of respect. By then I owned a real tie. You can‘t go to a funeral in my small hometown without one. I left it at home for Wade. He didn’t have the eloquence of a Martin Luther King. He didn't need it. He wasn’t interested in grabbing the spotlight for himself. He taught his friends that their wheelchairs were a weapon and if they used them right, the whole world would take notice. RTD took notice. Denver became one of the first cities in the U.S. to adopt accessible public transit. Wade helped carry that message to countless other cities. He showed people how they could make a statement by going to jail and then he went out and raised the bail money. Eventually, in a parking lot in Atlanta, the feds gave in. Accessible public transit would be the law of the land. Wade wasn’t about to rest on his laurels. He turned his attention to an earlier cause. ADAPT changed the acronym to American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today and took on the nursing home industry. Wade knew that the disabled warriors who took on the federal government over accessible transit and got themselves arrested scores of times were strong enough to live in their own homes. He vowed to force the federal government to take money away from the nursing homes and make that dream a reality. That battle goes on. His friends at ADAPT are planning a memorial service in his honor in Washington, D.C. this May. At the same time, they’re going to make sure Bill Clinton honors his promises to provide funds for such attendant care. It's a fitting memorial but you can find plenty of monuments to Wade Blank in this country. There one at every street comer where there’s a curb cut and one on every bus equipped with a lift. And every time someone who is exploited because of a physical disability raises a fist in defiance and fights for his or her freedom and humanity, you’ll see Wade’s image in their eyes and his dream in their hearts. So long, Wade. If it’s really heaven, there won’t be a dress code. Written by Tom Schantz - ADAPT (32)
History and Mission Independent Living for People with Disabilities [This brochure continues in ADAPT 33, but the entire text is included here for easier reading.] PHOTO by Tom Olin (bottom right): A man (George Roberts) in wheelchair raises the power fist with his right hand. He is carrying a sign that reads "Nursing Homes = Jail." Behind him a group of other wheelchair protesters are lining up. Atlantis was founded in 1975, the second “Independent Living Center” in the country after Berkeley. A group of young disabled adults and six concerned staff from a Denver nursing home concluded that no amount of outings to concerts or bingo games could normalize life for these young people. The real solution was to move into the community, in apartments within the city’s neighborhoods, to create self-determined lifestyles where the disabled clients choose their own food, direct their own care, and determine their own priorities. This was a revolutionary concept in 1975, but the people of Atlantis were able to convince the State Legislature to fund personal care assistance outside an institutional setting for the very first time. In the more than fifteen years since its founding, the agency has been able to assist over 400 disabled adults in moving from sheltered settings and maintaining independent lives. The Atlantis Community staff specializes in assistance for very severely, multiply-disabled people, carrying out our belief that any disabled person can live outside an institution, if s/he is willing to accept the risks and inconveniences in order to enjoy self-determination and liberty. To that end, the staff and clients are experts in helping with everything from finding an apartment to applying for benefits, from grocery shopping to weddings, from cooking training to camping trips. The assistance with daily living activities and the basic skills training and reinforcement offered are complemented by the trained and state-certified staff of home health aides and their supervisors who visit the clients at home as often as needed — usually several times a day. The people of Atlantis also offer other independent living services to people throughout the nation — ranging from information and referral services to assertiveness training and technical assistance. The city of Denver and the Atlantis Community have become a mecca for disabled people seeking an accessible environment and comprehensive services. PHOTO by Tom Olin (top left corner): 4 people in wheelchairs (left to right, Joe Carle, Diane Coleman, Bob Kafka and Mark Johnson) lead a march. Everyone is dressed in revolutionary war garb -- wigs, three cornered hats, jackets with braid on them. Over their heads is a large flag, the ADAPT flag. PHOTO (bottom right): An older man (Mel Conrardy) in a white jacket and pants, sits in a wheelchair on a lift at the front door of a bus. To his right on the side of the bus door it says RTD Welcome Aboard. Mel looks relaxed and is smiling. - ADAPT (629)
PHOTO: by Tom Olin. A long, single-file line of ADAPT marchers is headed by Lee Jackson (left), Bob Kafka (center), and Terri Fowler (right) being pushed by some one. Lee and Bob have on different ADAPT no steps logo T-shirts. Behind Bob someone is carrying the ADAPT flag, behind that person you can see Claude Holcomb, and a few more people back you can see Wade pushing someone (Paulette Patterson?). They are marching down the street (in front of the Russell Federal Building in Atlanta) A TV cameraman is standing on the sidewalk filming the march, and near him two people in wheelchairs and another person are on the sidewalk. - ADAPT (553)
June 12, 1990 - Guardian. 5 Disabled 'ecstatic' as rights act clears House By DIANE COLEMAN The Americans with Disabilities Act, considered by many to be the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, easily cleared the House of Representatives May 22. It is expected to reach the president‘s desk by July 4. The act prohibits discrimination based on disability in public accommodations, employment, transportation and telecommunications. It is intended to address "rampant, daily discrimination in every sphere of American life,“ Rep. Pat Schroeder, D-Colo., told her colleagues on the House floor. “Mentally retarded persons are kept out of restaurants. Persons with cerebral palsy are turned away from theaters. . . . Employers cite fears of hiring disabled persons because their customers will feel uncomfortable or even repulsed,” Schroeder added. Despite strong opposition from private business and transportation lobbies, chief among them the National Federation of Independent Businesses and Greyhound Lines, Inc. , the Americans With Disabilities Act achieved bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. The House vote was 403-29. Under pressure from the NFIB and the National Restaurant Association, the House version of the bill was amended at the last minute to allow employers to remove people with HIV infection from food handling positions. Sponsored by Rep. Jim Chapman, the amendment passed narrowly, although the Texas Democrat conceded there is no “evidence that‘AIDS can be transferred in the process of handling food.” Tom Sheridan of AIDS Action, representing 500 community-based service organizations, predicted that the Chapman amendment would go down to defeat in the House-Senate conference committee. “It’s a horrible amendment for all people with disabilities because . . . it begins to codify the fact that irrational fear is protected by the law,” he said. Nonetheless at press time Senate conferees had agreed to include the restrictions. “Cheers and tears” filled the House gallery at the moment of the ADA's long-awaited passage, according to Tennessee disabled activist Michael Gibson, “but we all know that the bill is only a first step. Several agencies will be writing key regulations which offer innumerable opportunities to weaken the effect of this legislation,” Gibson said. SOME DELAYS, FEW LOSSES While many activists feared the House would water down the Senate version of the bill, Marilyn Golden of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund said that the ADA “has not been weakened anywhere near the extent that much legislation is. " According to Golden, who has worked intensively for the bill's passage over the last two years, various timetables and phase-in provisions were adopted to avoid other forms of compromise. The ADA’s protections against employment discrimination, which parallel those applied to federally funded entities since 1973, do not go into effect for two years. Prohibitions against discrimination in public accommodations, such as theaters and restaurants, will require accessibility in facilities “construct[ed] . . . for first occupancy no later than 30 months after the date of enactment." Telephone companies will have three years to put in place a relay service for deaf people and others who depend on non-voice telecommunication. A requirement that all new public buses be lift-equipped will take effect in only 30 days. Many attribute this to seven years of non-violent civil disobedience by the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit. Greyhound, a private carrier, was given six years to begin replacing its retired buses with accessible ones. Activists also waged a last-minute battle over employment discrimination remedies. Recently proposed legislation would add damages to the relief available to discrimination victims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the face of this, Golden said. the Bush administration tried “to renege on its agreement for parallelism” between the ADA and the 1964 act. It backed an amendment that would have kept remedies for disability-based discrimination at current levels if and when discrimination remedies are increased for other minority groups and women. The amendment was narrowly defeated just prior to the final vote on the bill itself. Overall, Golden said. “We're ecstatic." The ADA “will hopefully begin to convey to the American public. left, center and right (because in some ways I don't think the consciousness of the left is any better), that disability is not a personal issue, that there’s a systematic oppression of people with disabilities. . . . Even Congress has faced the fact of the systematic discrimination. " PHOTO (by Tom Olin): A closer view of a mass of marchers coming around a huge tree on a broad sidewalk leading up to the Capitol. Stephanie Thomas, Frank Lozano, Jennifer Keelan and others lead the march which is 12 across in some places and scattered in others. The ADAPT flag (an American Flag with the stars arranged in the wheelchair symbol instead of in rows) flies over the crowd from a few rows back. Some people are in suits and ties, some in T-shirts. Some are in wheelchairs, some carry cameras; children to older folks are in the mix. Caption reads: Seven years of nonviolent civil disobedience by the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit has been credited for the requirement that all new buses be lift-equipped. Above, ADAPT march on U.S. Capitol.