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San Francisco Chronicle WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1987 This story continues in ADAPT 365 and ADAPT 360 but the entire text is included here for easier reading. Title: Chains Halt the Cable Cars Photo by Jerry Telfer/The Chronicle: Two people in wheelchairs block a cable car. One sits in a manual chair with his back to the camera and another sits sideways to the camera (Mike Auberger) in front of the Cable Car door. They are chained with a long chain to the cable car. From inside, a man (Frank Lozano) stands in the stairwell talking with them. Caption reads: Handicapped demonstrators chained themselves to cable cars yesterday at San Francisco's Powell Street turntable, halting the system for more than two hours. Police arrested 75 people. The protesters have lobbied the American Public Transit Association convention at Moscone Center for improved access to transportation for the disabled. Story on Page A2 Title: Disabled protesters block cable cars; police arrest 78 By John D. O’Connor, of the examiner staff Chanting “We will ride!,” 78 disabled protesters used their wheelchairs and their bodies to block the Powell Street cable car line for more than two hours Tuesday before police moved in to arrest them. Urged on by at least 100 supporters who ringed the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market streets and cheered like fans at a boxing match, some of the demonstrators chained themselves to the cow guards of the little cars as bemused tourists looked on. Forty-three of the protesters wound up spending the night in the not-yet-opened $1 million-plus gymnasium on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice, Sheriff Mike Hennessey said. “There’s nothing but generally pleasant feelings among them,” Hennessey said after inspecting the facilities for the wheelchair-bound demonstrators, who had refused to sign citations issued by the police. Hollyann Fuller Boies, an organizer with the September Alliance For Accessible Transit, said the group selected the cable cars as the focus of their protest because they symbolized the general inaccessibility of all public transit vehicles. "This is a problem that needs attention now,” Boies said. “It’s not just the cable cars, it’s almost every form of public transportation, and nothing is being done to remedy the situation.” But MUNI spokesman Tom Rockert said the protesters’ wrath was misdirected. “A cable car is just the very last thing we could modify to accommodate a handicapped person,” he said. “It has no power. We’d need an awful lot of batteries to power a lift of the type they’d need. Besides, we’re committed to making our rubber-wheeled fleet more accessible to the handicapped.” Rickert said MUNI’s Elderly & Handicapped Advisory Committee, which is made up of elderly and handicapped people, decided “that cable cars could not be modified to be accessible and that from a technical point of view such a proposal is not feasible, practical or safe.” Boies said the people arrested were willing to stay in jail to draw attention to their cause rather than sign the citations offered by the police. By 5 p.m., most of those arrested appeared ready to do just that. Lt. John Gleeson of the police Tactical Detail said 48 of the 78 arrested had refused to sign and were preparing for a night in jail. Henessey said 43 were housed in the new gym. He said the rest were let go for a future court date because they had no prior arrests in the three days of demonstrations. Hennessey said he and his staff, knowing about the demonstrations in advance, had planned for the protesters to be housed in the gym by borrowing cots from San Francisco and Laguna Honda hospitals and other city-operated medical facilities. “Actually, we anticipated 75 to 80 persons,” Hennessey said. Outside the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, 75 wheelchair-bound sympathizers held a candlelight vigil Tuesday night and chanted, “Let our people go.” The protesters, who also staged noisy demonstrations outside a convention of American Public Transit Association members at Moscone Center Monday and on the steps of City Hall Sunday night, said that they hope their actions will force APTA to adopt a national policy regarding handicapped access to public transit. Photo by Examiner/Katy Raddatz: A little girl in a wheelchair (Jennifer Keelan) leans forward resting her head on a heavy rope barrier. Behind her, holding a push handle of her chair, a woman (Cyndy Keelan) in an ADAPT no steps/we will ride T-shirt stands among a crowd. All are watching something beyond the camera. Caption reads: Cynthia Keelan and daughter, Jennifer, of Tempe Ariz. From behind cable car rope, they watch protest of disabled.
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Montreal Daily News Title: A wheelchair Army Goes to War! [This article continues in ADAPT 385 but the entire text is included here for easier reading.] Photo 1 by ALLAN R LEISHMAN/Montreal Daily News: In a crowd of uniformed police officers and others, two policemen stand on either side of a protester sitting on the wet ground. The protester sits, back to the camera, wearing a cap and his face and head are obscured by a white trash bag under his jacket. These two police officers are looking back beside the camera. The police barricade is just visible in front of the protester. Caption: Roundup: Police are kept busy by demonstrators last night. Photo 2 on the left and below the other photo by ALLAN R LEISHMAN/Daily News: A person in a manual wheelchair is tipped completely back by attendant and protester Jan Ingram the front wheels of the chair are hooked over a very low heavy metal barrier. Behind that barrier are standard police barricades and uniformed officers are standing behind them. One policeman is in between the standard barricades and the low barrier and he is looking at other officers and pointing at the person in the wheelchair. Caption: Protesting: One of the wheelchair demonstrators near the barricaded Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Title: 25 arrested in downtown demonstration by Ron Charles Montreal Daily News MUC police arrested 25 wheelchair-bound demonstrators last night after they forced their way into the lobby of the Sheraton Centre in downtown Montreal. The demonstrators were protesting the American Public Transit Association's (APTA) reluctance to endorse wheelchair lifts on new buses. They crashed their wheelchairs through a luggage-cart barrier hotel employees had built in an attempt to ward off the protesters. [Subheading] Came along When APTA, a Washington-based transit authority organization, brought its annual conference to Montreal this week, the protesters came along as part of the ticket. The demonstrators, from a group called American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT), have been protesting at APTA conferences for eight years. Only a few members of a local disabled rights group took part in the demonstrations — the rest were from the U.S. Police said all those arrested — who are expected to be charged with assault — were American citizens, many of them Vietnam veterans. About 50 MUC police officers showed up to clear the Sheraton's marble-covered lobby after the protesters, singing "we want to ride," blocked elevators and escalators. Police wheeled the demonstrators one by one to a waiting wheel-chair bus being used as a paddy wagon. Police snipped chains linking protesters Mike Auberger and Bob Kafka's wheelchairs to a handrail in the lobby. Although the APTA conference is taking place at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, some of the 3,000 attendees are staying at the Sheraton. Earlier in the day, police turned the Queen Elizabeth into a fortress with metal street barriers as about 75 demonstrators wheeled toward the APTA conference headquarters. They blocked traffic in both directions on Dorchester for more than two hours as police tried to pen the group in with the barriers. Police took two protesters who had crashed the barriers out of their chairs in order to lift them and their chairs over the barriers. [Subheading] Took chair "The police took his chair away, separated him from his legs," said Lori Taylor as she watched from the side-walk when police lifted her husband, Lester, over the barrier. "He can't walk, he's just sitting on the wet ground and all he wants to do is ride a bus like you and me." Bill Bolte, who started ADAPT's Los Angeles chapter, said police overreacted to the demonstration. "This really confuses me because I know that after the Canadians (hockey team) won the Stanley Cup, all types of terrible activity went on," said Bolte. "People overturned cars while everyone, including the police, just looked the other way and went and had a cup of coffee." Several demonstrators who broke through the police perimeter smashed their chairs into barriers in front of the hotel entrance, but hotel security and police stood their ground. Police arrested some 25 wheelchair demonstrators after they forced their way into the lobby of the Sheraton Centre. They were protesting the American public transit association’s reluctance to endorse wheelchair lifts on new buses. It was showdown time yesterday, as wheelchair-bound protesters took on city cops outside the Sheraton hotel on Dorchester Boulevard Some demonstrators where roughly carried and wheeled away as the melee grew ugly. The protesters were making their case for better accessibility to buses at the American Public Transit Association convention.
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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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May 22, 1986 - Cheyenne Wyoming State Tribune—27 [Headline] Handicapped Protesters Arrested CINCINNATI (UPI) — A group of handicapped protesters charged with disorderly conduct and criminal trespass refused to post bond and spent the night in the Hamilton County Justice Center. The demonstrators, protesting the lack of access to public transportation for the disabled, were arrested Wednesday for blocking entrances to the Westin Hotel and the building housing offices of the city's bus system. The Westin was singled out because the American Public Transportation Association was holding a regional conference there this week. Barricades had been erected to keep the protesters from entering the hotel. Several of those arrested were released on unsecured appearance bonds for medical reasons. The first defendant's trial was scheduled for next Wednesday. “If the Cincinnati transit system, police and judicial system deny access to disabled people, why can't the disabled block the access to the system,” said Michael Auberger of Denver before his arrest. “We just want to be treated like everyone else.” Auberger was among those who spent the night in jail. About 40 wheelchair-bound members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, based in Denver, participated in the demonstration. Fourteen were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Robert Kafka of Austin, Texas, George Cooper of Dallas and Auberger, all of whom had been arrested earlier in the week, were charged with criminal trespassing for blocking the entrance to the building where Queen City Metro's offices are located. The three men, confined to wheelchairs, had been arrested Monday for refusing to get off a bus they had paid to board. A Hamilton County Judge had ordered them to leave Cincinnati until their trial, but another judge rescinded the order Wednesday morning. Auberger, Cooper and Kafka attempted to speak to Queen City officials but were not permitted to enter their offices. When they returned to the ground floor, they chained their wheelchairs together to block the entrance. One worker was forced to use an alternative route to return to her office. "We asked one lady to wait a few minutes," Auberger said. “The disabled are told to wait a lifetime.” The Rev. Wade Blank, director of ADAPT, said some staff members would remain in Cincinnati and that local clergy would be asked to monitor and support those arrested.
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The Cincinnati Post, Wednesday, June 11, 1986 11A Opinion Small photo of the head of a white man with short hair and black rimmed eye glasses. James L. Adams Crosscurrents Title: Pretenders to the Civil Rights movement The attempts of minorities of all stripes to identify with the black experience in America to gain even legitimate goals strike me as being a deception and a fraud. It also trivializes the dehumanization the blacks suffered at the hands of the white majority for 350 years. Only one group was brought to this country in chains, treated like animals, sold on the block like livestock, forced to live in shanties and valued only for the labor they could produce. And even after being freed from the shackles of slavery, blacks were denied their civil rights for another 100 years. No other group in this country has had to suffer those indignities. Yet minorities as diverse as militant feminists, homosexuals and the handicapped hoist the banner of oppression and try to do a black face routine as farcical as the old showboat acts on the Mississippi of the last century. The wheelchair protests staged by the Denver-based American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) here last month are only the latest examples of groups with gripes trying to piggyback on the black civil rights struggle. Let us all agree that more needs to be done to make sure the disabled among us can get where they want to go. And there obviously are cities doing more than Cincinnati to make public transportation accessible. Denver is one. But that is begging the question. Cincinnati is not Denver. Queen City Metro is strapped for funds. It cannot provide all the service it would like for the handicapped—or even the able-bodied. But the issue is money, not civil rights. Determined to get arrested, the wheelchair protesters blocked the Westin hotel entrances, grabbed onto the wheel well of buses to keep them from moving, and one wacko with a death wish even rolled into the path of a bus going 40 mph. Bob Kafka, one of the 14 arrested—and given special treatment at the Hamilton County Justice Center—wrote a letter to The Post that began: “I am writing this letter from the Hamilton County Jail, in which I am spending Memorial Day, for the crime of trying to ride public transportation." Kafka's emotional appeal falls flat. (He obviously was trying to imitate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail" stirred the conscience of a nation.) Kafka's crime was not that of trying to ride public transportation. He was charged with disorderly conduct for crawling aboard a bus, dragging his wheelchair, dropping 50 cents in the fare box and then demanding to ride - knowing full well the bus could not move with him on it. But Kafka, in his letter, attempts to equate the problems of the handicapped with those of blacks who were forced to ride in the back of the bus: “Those in power have decided to oppress us and make sure disabled people do not ‘step out of line’ and assert their rights," Kafka wrote. “Queen City Metro decided they were going to keep disabled people in their place.” By couching his complaint in vintage 1960s language, Kafka confuses the issue. The disabled should be heard. But they should give rational reasons for their demands for equal access to public transportation and not try posing as an oppressed minority that dares not “step out of line." I didn't see any cattle prods or police dogs used to quell the demonstrations. After the protesters had left town, Council Member David Mann had pangs of conscience that caused him to make some of the silliest statements in the annals of Mann. “It seems to me that every human being in Cincinnati — visitors, handicapped or otherwise — had the absolute right to enter the Fountain Square South complex on equal terms," Mann wrote, as if he had been living in a cave during the four-day wheelchair protests. “If you and I were free to move unfettered into the public areas of the Westin, then those who happen to move by wheelchair should have been treated precisely the same." I know philosophers have struggled for centuries to define reality. After reading Mann’s views on what took place in front of the Westin, I can understand why. His perceptions are unreal. Those who happened to “move by wheelchair” were not treated precisely the same as others because they were intentionally trying to block the entrances and disrupt bus service. That's called breaking the law. It seems to me that even a council member from Clifton, who happens to be a lawyer, should be able to make that distinction. The restrictions were not based on class discrimination. Rather, they were triggered by those misguided handicapped persons who believe they can gain greater access to public places by denying that right to others. The wheelchair protesters would have scored more points with the public by shunning crazy antics and making their appeal in a sane manner. I think it revealing that the Greater Cincinnati Coalition of People With Disabilities refused to participate in the public demonstrations. The coalition leaders believe they can accomplish more by talking with local city and bus officials than by trying to disrupt traffic. They certainly will gain more public sympathy. James L Adams is associate editor of The Post. PHOTO by the Associated Press: Two men in wheelchairs, one with dark curly hair and a beard in a manual wheelchair (Bob Kafka), and the other with long braids, a headband and a dark beard (Mike Auberger), block a narrow hallway. Both are wearing light colored shirts with the ADAPT no steps logo in black. Behind them at least seven men -- two appear to be police officers -- stand, looking somewhat exasperated. caption reads: Bob Kafka. left, and Mike Auberger chained themselves together to block the entrance to Queen City Metro offices.