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ADAPT (345)
Contra Costa Times, Monday, September 28, 1987 Serving Central Contra Costa County (This article is continued in ADAPT 343, but the entire text is included here for easier reading) Photo Title: NO TAXATION WITHOUT TRANSPORTATION Staff Photo by Brad Mangin: A solid mass of mostly wheelchair using protesters fill a park. Above their heads you can see palm trees and a monument, on which a couple of camera people are standing. The protesters are chanting, mouths open, and some are raising their fist in the air. A man in the front is holding a sign that reads "No taxation without transportation." Caption reads: DAN O'HARA of Walnut Creek, left, participates in Sunday's demonstration in San Francisco. Title: Disabled arrested in SF protest By Donna Hemmila Staff writer SAN FRANCISCO — Protesters in wheelchairs, chanting "If you can take us to jail, take us to work," were arrested Sunday at City Hall where they disrupted the opening of a national public transit convention. More than 35 disabled people were hauled into special wheelchair-lift equipped vans on charges of disturbing the peace. Groups of demonstrators blocked the entrance to the City Hall rotunda where delegates from the American Public Transit Association kicked off a five-day convention Sunday. As San Francisco police officers pushed the wheelchairs into the waiting vans, other wheelchair riders parked in front of the vans to keep them from driving away. Captain Michael Pera said the demonstrators would be given citations at the Hall of Justice and released. "The situation was getting out of hand," Pera said. "My understanding was by the demeanor of the crowd, they wanted to be arrested." More than 150 disabled protesters and their families had marched from an afternoon rally at Union Square. The parade of wheelchairs had stopped traffic on downtown streets and demonstrated in front of the Hilton Hotel on Powell Street, where convention delegates are staying. The five-day transit convention is expected to bring nearly 15,000 representatives from transit agencies across the United States to the Bay Area. Disabled organizers have vowed to disrupt the convention, being held at the Moscone Center, to call attention to the transit organization's policy on access for disabled people. Disabled organizers say the APTA is responsible for weakening federal laws that require public transit agencies to equip their buses and subways to carry disabled passengers. A successful lawsuit brought by APTA changed federal law to give local transit agencies the right to decide what type of accessible transit to provide. Many transit districts have chosen to carry wheelchair passengers in dial-a-ride-type vans rather than equip their regular buses with wheelchair lifts. Members of the American Disabled for Public Transit and the September Alliance for Accessibility are demanding to ride the same public transit system that able-bodied passengers use. At the rally in Union Square, the protesters heard pledges of support from Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, feminist Eleanor Smeal, the Rev. Cecil Williams from Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco and labor leader Jack Henning. During the rally the protesters chanted curses against APTA and waved signs with slogans such as "No Taxation without Transportation." The songs and chants were punctuated with the clanging bells of passing cable cars, a San Francisco attraction none of the wheelchair riders can board because the cars lack lifts. McCarthy said he backed the disabled community in its fight for independence. Many disabled rely on public transit to go to work and are being denied opportunities because they don't have transportation, he said. "There is no footnote to the Constitution that says everybody gets these civil rights except the disabled," McCarthy said. Disabled speakers fanned the crowd's anger with accounts of their morning meetings with APTA representatives at the Hilton Hotel. Disabled representatives said the wheelchair-accessible door to the hotel was barricaded and they were told to exit through the garage. "The backdoor entrance went out in the '60s with the civil rights movement," said Judy Heumann, of the September Alliance. "We're not going to go through the back door anymore." Albert Engelken, deputy executive director of APTA, denied his organization had ordered the hotel barricaded. "This is not a happy situation," Engelken said as he watched wheelchair users demonstrating on the streets below from the fourth floor window of the Hilton. "Obviously it's a sore spot. Nobody likes this." APTA's executive board has agreed to set up a task force to study their policy, but Engelken said the organization is not ashamed of its stand on disabled access. Only California and Michigan have laws that mandate full accessibility on public buses and rail systems. "You folks in California chose Artie you want and APIA thinks that's great," Englenken said. "We just wonder if the people in California should be telling the rest of us what to do." APTA has estimated it would cost $13 billion to make every public transit system in the United States accessible to the disabled. Staff Photo by Brad Mangin: A woman, Paulette Patterson, surrounded by protesters and signs, has her mouth wide in a chant. She is holding a sign on a stick that reads "We Will ADAPT". Beside her another woman, Maryann Collinsworth, holds onto her chair. Behind them another sign that reads "Transit Access Now" is visible. Caption reads: Paulette Patterson of Chicago waves a sign during Sunday's demonstration demanding better access for the disabled on public transportation.
ADAPT (206)
Village Voice, March 4, 1986, p.27 [Headline] NAT HENTOFF: America’s Apartheid [This was part of a series of articles Mr. Hentoff wrote for the Village Voice on disability issues and people with disabilities in our society.] PHOTO in center of page, Photo credit Michael Rondou / Press - Telegram: A slight man (Bobby Hartwell) in a somewhat rickety manual wheelchair sits in front of a large city bus [number 4405]. Through the windsheild a very beefy uniformed man, perhaps the driver, stands arms resting in front of him. Behind and to the side of this first bus is a group of three police men standing and conferring. Behind them a couple of other wheelchair riders are blocking a second bus. Behind that bus a third is barely visable. Text box above the photo: “Anatomy is not destiny and never has been.” The photo caption: A demonstrator holds a bus hostage In Long Beach, California: Because of the way the bus is built, the demonstrator can't get on. [Italicized] A “caste” of. . . persons has been created [in America]. Members suffer a stigma of abnormality, inferiority, and dependency, are provided with separate facilities and programs, and are encouraged to interact only with others of the same caste. [Italicized ends] —Robert Funk, Director/Attorney, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Inc. [Italicized] Black people started a movement when they were forced to sit in the backs of buses. We're not even allowed on the buses. [Italicized ends] – Julie Haraskin, during a nonviolent direct-action demonstration in Los Angeles by ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) Barry Giddings is a citizen of the United States who lives in Philadelphia. In 1981, he was shot in the neck and became a quadriplegic. The only way he can get around is in a wheelchair. Until December 10, 1985, he and his brother lived in his mother's home. On that day, Mrs. Giddings and her family were evicted. She went to Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services to get shelter for herself and her sons. Mrs. Giddings was told that she and her nondisabled son would be provided shelter, but Barry Giddings would have to provide for himself. Why? Because he was disabled. The apparatchiks tried to make Mrs. Giddings understand that they had no choice in this matter. Taking care of her disabled son's needs, they explained, would cost more money than was being spent on the average homeless soul in the city's shelters. Then there were the costs of additional insurance premiums to cover the city if this quadriplegic were taken in. Then where should he go? Was this man to be thrown out into the street to lie there until he died? Not our problem, said Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services. Lest you think that the decision to wholly abandon this disabled man was made by some low-level employee devoted to the increasingly popular notion that inconvenient people should be terminated, the person who sent Barry Giddings into the night was following the policy of Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services. A relative arranged to have Giddings taken into Jefferson Hospital for the night because the staff there, unlike the folks at Adult Services, could not bear leaving him without shelter. They put him in the emergency room. The next day, he was removed to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, although he did not require hospitalization. What he required, was a place to stay, and Magee Rehabilitation Hospital couldn’t keep him because providing shelter wasn't its' function. Barry Giddings, with the help of Stefan Presser, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, took the city of Philadelphia to court. The class action suit charged that the city policy discriminates against homeless people who are disabled, and thereby violates their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law as well as their rights under Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That statute forbids discrimination against the handicapped in any program receiving Federal funds, and Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services, as part of the Department of Human Services, does receive Federal money. The city of Philadelphia quickly caved in, placed Giddings in a temporary shelter and said it would find permanent housing for him and his mother. As Stefan Presser points out, a particularly shocking thing about the case was that although the city had been engaged in a vigorous campaign to get the homeless into shelters, it had this firm policy of shutting out the disabled among the homeless. "There's no telling," Presser told me, “how many disabled people have been turned away until we got the policy changed, and who knows what happened to them? Some of the organizations for the disabled inform me that from time to time they've had phone calls from people who have been refused shelter because they're not able-bodied, but when they got to the phone booth from which the call was made, there was no one there." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man could have a counterpart in the experiences of the nation's disabled for many, many years. As Robert Funk, Director of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund, wrote in 1981: “American society, under the guise of humanitarian efforts, has developed a record, with respect to treatment of disabled persons, that is a history of isolation and discrimination inflicted upon them because of their ‘handicaps.’ This history, manifested in the attitude of ‘out of sight, out of mind,' carried out through policies of custodialism, has resulted in an ostracized, invisible minority denied access to organized society." This year, in his part of a forthcoming book, Images of the Disabled/Disabling Images, Funk makes the corollary point—— and see if any of this applies to you ---- that "the general public does not associate the word 'discrimination' with the segregation and exclusion of disabled people. Most people assume that disabled people are excluded from school or segregated because they cannot learn or because they need special protection. So too, the absence of disabled coworkers is simply considered a confirmation of the obvious fact that disabled people can't work. These assumptions are deeply rooted in history. Historically, the inferior economic and social status of disabled people has been viewed as the inevitable consequence of tho physical and mental differences imposed by disability." I know a young woman whose disability is athetosis, a form of cerebral palsy, which affects her speech and the way she walks. She is a first-class writer --- a published writer --- and a graduate of Harvard Law School. Currently in Hartford, she specializes in state regulation of automobile and homeowners’ insurance. Her name is Lisa Blumberg and she wrote me recently: "If nondisabled adults spent more time talking to disabled adults, they would learn that anatomy is not destiny and never has been." But because many disabled adults are segregated from the rest of the population, misconceptions about them, along with ignorance of who they actually are, continue to create more discrimination. For instance. Michael Landwehr of the Council for Disability Rights in Chicago, born with spina bifida, was disabled during surgery when he was 12. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. Landwehr watched with great interest when in 1973 Congress enacted Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act forbidding discrimination against the disabled in any programs or activities that receive Federal funding. So what has Michael Landwehr's life been like since 1973? “I have been denied an apartment based on my disability," he says. “Last year I was uprooted from home when the commuter train I took to work refused to let me continue riding without an attendant. I was told I could not buy a ticket in the first-class section of an airliner unless I also purchased a ticket for an attendant. I have been denied jobs and promotions on the basis of my disability. Every day I am denied access to public transportation. [He is in A wheelchair.] “Hundreds of thousands of disabled persons remain incarcerated in nursing homes and institutions, isolated from every aspect of community life, denied their right to vote, denied the right to education and employment. Disabled people remain the most unemployed and underpaid group in the country. For every dollar earned by a nondisabled white male, a disabled white male earns 52 cents, a disabled minority male earns 25 cents, and a disabled minority woman earns 12 cents." But the disability rights movement is gathering momentum and has already brought about some changes. Accordingly, by the end of this decade, there is likely to be a stretching of public consciousness concerning this form of American apartheid that has largely been ignored during the rise of all the other movements for equal protection under the law-—blacks, women, Native Americans, homosexuals and lesbians, Hispanics, et al. Future columns will include an exploration of the nonviolent direct-action arm of the disability rights movement, which is currently the most vigorous continuation of the Martin Luther King-Saul Alinsky legacy. The series will also go into the history of legislation and court action concerning the disabled; the seemingly infinite ways in which the disabled are distorted, sentimentalized, and underestimated by the press, television, and films; a battery of very specific legislative recommendations by the disabled; and a good deal more. One of the underlying themes is a comment by Vassar Miller, who has published eight volumes of poetry, one of which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In her early sixties now, she was born with cerebral palsy. “What handicaps me far more than my physical condition," she says, “is the reaction society has to it. And, no less important, my reaction to society's reaction." Vassar Miller has edited a new book, Despite This Flesh (University of Texas Press), an extraordinarily illuminating collection of short stories and poems about the disabled. If public television had any imagination, a striking series could be made from Despite This Flesh. It ranges from pungent, poignant, and sharply funny evocations of childhood to a resoundingly erotic poem about a paralyzed man, "Seated Nude" by Richard Ronan. In her introduction, Vassar Miller tells of how, when she was a child, before there was ever such a thing as special education or mainstreaming, her stepmother “had tried to enroll me in a private school. ‘They just looked at me and started talking about God!‘" her stepmother said in dismayed tones when she came home. By the time the 1980s are over, a picket line of the disabled might elbow God aside and change the admissions policies of a school like that. The pressure is rising inside the disabled to break out of their caste, to be visible, to be part of whatever the hell's going on that they want to be part of. Consider ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit). In a number of cities around the country, its members have been demonstrating and getting arrested in protests against the lack of lifts on buses and the absence of ways of enabling the disabled to use other forms of public transportation. On October 6 in Los Angeles, a march of some 280 disabled ended at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, where the American Public Transit Association was holding a convention. This was the scene, as described in The Disability Rag (Box 145, Louisville, Kentucky): "Attempts by ADAPT members to descend to the main lobby of the Bonaventure on the one elevator connecting the lobby with the street level were met with police resistance. Security forces turned off the elevator and escalators. Police blocked doors to prevent other disabled people from entering the hotel. Chants of ‘We Will Ride!‘ filled the Bonaventure from protesters inside and out. A number of ADAPT marchers, determined that conventioneers would not be able to use the escalators either, tried to block the escalator entrances or to throw themselves down the steps....By Monday, the Bonaventure had become a police-held fortress.“ I bet you never thought disabled people could do anything like that. It's just the beginning. As an ADAPT organizer yelled at a crowd of the disabled in Los Angeles, “We've got to get over our slave mentality!"