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Home / Album / Tags DREDF - Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
+ Diane Coleman 2
ADAPT (595)
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT Sept. 18, 1989 [This story appears in ADAPT 595, 590 and 602. It is included in its entirety here for ease of reading.] [Headline] Liberation day for the disabled by Joseph P. Shapiro Forty-three million will soon win basic civil-rights protections. Their growing movement has brushed aside the opposition and is changing America The day before the Senate passed historic legislation to protect the civil rights of disabled people, Mary Jane Owen got another rude reminder of the daily discrimination that faces people like her. Owen, a writer who is blind and uses a wheelchair, was lobbying senators for the disability-rights bill. But when she moved onto Constitution Avenue to go home, a taxi driver at curbside sped away rather than pick up a woman in a wheelchair. It is similar acts, repeated hundreds of thousands of times a day to the nation's 43 million disabled, that fueled an angry political movement that has brought the nation to a path-breaking moment. In a few weeks President Bush is expected to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act, a broad statement that will extend to the disabled the same protections against discrimination that were given to blacks and women in the 1960s and 1970s. The Senate passed the measure 76 to 8 last week, and the House is likely to approve it next month. The bill is a profound rethinking of how this country views disabled people, defined as anyone with a physical or mental impairment that "substantially limits" everyday living. For the first time, America is saying the biggest problem facing disabled people is not their own blindness, deafness or other physical condition but discrimination. The bill, says Senate sponsor Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), is "an emancipation proclamation for people with handicaps" that will fundamentally change their lives, getting more of them out of their homes and institutions and into full participation in society. Under the new law, restaurants, stores, hotels and theaters can no longer turn away a person with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, AIDS or any other disability. Employers would be prohibited from rejecting qualified workers just because they are disabled, and they would be required to fashion generally inexpensive modifications to the workplace to make it accessible to the disabled, such as putting a desk on blocks to raise it for a wheelchair user. It would also require that new buses be equipped with lifts so that wheelchair users could get on public transit. New buildings, or those undergoing major reconstruction, would have to be made accessible to disabled people, with elevators installed in shopping malls and new structures higher than two stories. Telephone companies would have to hire operators who could take a message typed by a deaf person on a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) and then relay it orally to a hearing person on another phone. [Subheading] Cost of Access. Businesses, particularly small ones, are wary of the changes. John Sloan, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, complained that the bill will impose costly requirements on businesses" and is "so broadly written" that it is unclear how far, and to what expense, a business will have to go to avoid being open to a lawsuit. Sponsors of the bill said estimates that its implementation might cost billions of dollars were wildly exaggerated. Past experience shows they may be correct. When Congress in 1973 protected disabled people from discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding, North Carolina education officials estimated it would cost them $15 billion to make state university buildings accessible, says architect Ronald Mace of Barrier Free Environments. Instead, many changes were simple and cheap. To accommodate students in wheelchairs, classes were moved to ground floors rather than installing elevators to carry them to top floors. The cost so far has totaled $l5 million, says Mace. Similarly, a 1982 study for the Labor Department found that half the accommodations made in the workplace cost little or nothing. For example, it was easy for companies to change a wheelchair user's work hours to conform with the schedule of lift-equipped buses. Another 30 percent of the accommodations were achieved for between $100 and $500. That included such changes as giving a telephone head-set to a quadriplegic telephone operator. Despite the concerns of business groups, their opposition to a bill that would open them up to a new spate of lawsuits was surprisingly muted and not nearly as vociferous as their fight against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For one thing, no one wanted to look like a bigot fighting a civil-rights bill, particularly one that was rushing through Congress. More important, businesses in the last few years have seen disabled people as a new source of labor and customers. “If they can get to the stores, business is going to increase" says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce‘s Nancy Fulco, who nonetheless lobbied to limit the rights bill's impact on business. [Subheading] Hidden Army. The mixed feelings of business groups underscored how disability rights is a civil-rights movement different from any other. Unlike the black and women's movements, disability-rights groups have never filled the streets with hundreds of thousands of marchers. Instead, the disability movement boasts “a hidden army,“ says former Representative Tony Coelho, who has epilepsy. Since a fifth of the nation's population has some form of disability, ranging from mental retardation to severe arthritis, Coelho argues, “disability impacts practically every family.“ Nowhere was that clearer than in Congress and the White House. where key supporters of the rights bill felt a particular need to win the bill‘s passage because they personally know about disabilities. Most important was President Bush, who has two sons with disabilities. Bush's strong statements in support of the bill during the 1988 campaign won him important support in the usually Democratic disability community. Nevertheless, the rights bill was in trouble until mid-June because of business fears about its cost. Then, on the day he left Congress, Coelho called Bush to ask him to renew his commitment to the bill. Within a few weeks, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu convened a strategy session with key senators to negotiate a compromise. That was easy to achieve once sponsors agreed to the White House request they drop the provision that would have allowed the disabled to sue for punitive damages if they were discriminated against. a provision that was the most opposed by business lobbies. From that moment, the compromise bill has been on a fast track. The success of the disability movement is extraordinary because it sprang up with little noise and little notice. One essential ingredient has been the growth of a new class consciousness among the disabled. Seventy-four percent of them feel they share a “common identity” with other disabled people, and 45 percent argue that they are “a minority in the same sense as are blacks and Hispanics,” according to a 1985 poll by Louis Harris & Associates. “All disabled people share one common experience—discrimination,” says Pat Wright of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund. Often it is crude bigotry. In January, an airline employee in New York who resented having to help a 66-year-old double amputee board a plane instead threw him on a baggage dolly. A New Jersey private-zoo owner a few summers ago refused to admit children with Down syndrome to the monkey house because, he claimed, they upset his chimpanzees. It is that kind of outrage and countless more subtle discriminations that fueled the movement that now wants to change the image of the disabled. Many now reject the traditional attitudes of society that suggested their lives were tragic and pitiful. Many now loathe charitable appeals such as the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon that raised $42 million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association over Labor Day weekend. Such extravaganzas seek funds by emphasizing the most desperate cases. That kind of approach, activists say, suggests that disabled people are to be cared for and cannot be contributing members of society. “We don’t want to be dependent any more,” says Lex Friedan of the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research Foundation in Houston, who is a quadriplegic wheelchair user, the result of an automobile accident. “We want to be part of society in every way.” Such new attitudes reflect fundamental changes in the lives of disabled people. Since 1975, when federal law first ensured all disabled children access to schools, hundreds of thousands of disabled students have gotten a better education alongside nondisabled peers. Many grew frustrated after college, when they found there were few such protections to help once they tried to find jobs. A recent Census Bureau study concluded that the gap between the earnings of disabled and their nondisabled co-workers is growing. A disabled worker in 1987 made only 64 percent of what his nondisabled colleagues earned. In 1980, it was 77 percent. The 1985 Harris survey found that 70 percent of working-age disabled people were unemployed. Of those, two thirds said they wanted to work but were prevented from doing so because, among other reasons, they faced discrimination in hiring or lacked transportation. Those who do not work now collect federal disability and welfare checks, costing nearly $60 billion a year. “It doesn’t make sense to maintain people in a dependency state when those people want to be productive, tax-paying citizens,” argues Jay Rochlin of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Although no one knows precisely how many millions of dollars could be saved by bringing the disabled fully into the work force, Sylvia Piper, an Ankeny, Iowa, mother, says she saved taxpayers $4.8 million by ignoring physicians who urged her to institutionalize her retarded son, Dan, when he was born. Instead, she kept him at home and sent him to public school with non-disabled children, the kind of role models who inspired him to get a job this summer. Dan, now 18, saved $800 from his pay as a drugstore stockroom worker. His first purchase was a gray bedroom rug, upon which he slept the night it arrived. The next morning he was ready for work early and announced, “I've got to work harder and make more money." Once again, says his delighted mother, Dan grew when faced with a challenge. The nation’s changing demographics have added to the urgency of meeting the needs of the disabled. By 1990, there will be 6.2 million elderly Americans with one or more basic disabilities, up from almost 5 million in 1984, according to estimates by the Urban Institute, a research organization. And the explosive growth of the number of those with AIDS and HIV infection has already added hundreds of thousands more disabled to the population. That is why AIDS-policy advocates teamed up with disability groups to make sure civil-rights guarantees under the bill also applied to those with AIDS. People with AIDS had won federal court rulings protecting them under existing disability-rights laws, which apply only to federally funded programs. The new bill will expand that protection to the private sector, so that people with AIDS and HIV infection cannot be fired from jobs or denied service in restaurants. [Subheading] Galvanizing Issue. Along with being better educated and more independent, the new generation of disabled people has become more politically sophisticated. Some 200 independent-living centers, which have sprung up since the 1970s to provide a mix of counseling and support services to severely disabled people, became bases of advocacy. One galvanizing issue came in the early 19805, when a Reagan administration anti-regulation effort tried to eliminate key federal protections that prohibit discrimination by any program or contractor receiving federal funds. Negotiating sessions over the regulation first brought then Vice President Bush face-to-face with Evan Kemp, who headed Ralph Nader’s Disability Rights Center. The regulation was never changed, in part because of Kemp’s advocacy and growing friendship with Bush. Last week, the President named Kemp, a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since 1987, to chair the civil-rights agency, which will handle job-discrimination cases brought under the new law. The disability-rights movement is distinctive, too, because it has never had a Martin Luther King or a Betty Friedan to lead it. Part of the reason is that there are hundreds of different disabilities. Nonetheless, disabled people, such as student protesters who last year gave Gallaudet University its first deaf president, I. King Jordan, are now adopting on a small scale the protest tactics of the civil-rights movement. Thirty members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, which uses tactics of civil disobedience, on Labor Day backed their wheelchairs against buses at the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal and disrupted busy holiday traffic in a protest for wheelchair lifts on buses. As the historic legislation was being debated, there was a curious twist. Watching with interest was a paraplegic visitor from Moscow, Ilya Zaslavski. He made history earlier this year when he won election to the new Soviet national legislature, the first person anywhere in the world to run as a disability candidate. Zaslavski watched the work of Congress and announced plans to introduce SDA—-a Soviets with Disabilities Act. INSERTED TEXT BOX: THE COST FACTOR Businesses are concerned about the costs imposed by the civil-rights bill: BUILDINGS: The cost of making accessible new buildings and those existing structures that are undergoing major renovations runs between 0 and 1 percent of building costs. TRANSIT: Changes required of bus and transit systems to help the disabled over the next 20 years might cost several hundred million dollars. PHONES: It will cost $250 million to $300 million a year to hire operators to work relay systems so deaf people can communicate with those who can hear, according to federal and AT&T estimates. INSERT: PHOTO (Roberta Barnes -- San Antonio Light): A line of people in wheelchairs diagonally crosses the picture. In the front Lonnie Smith Archuleta with his buff physique, in a T-Shirt with a medal-like imprint on the front, wheels his sports chair. Behind him a slight woman (Diane Coleman) with very thin arms and leg braces on her extended legs, rolls her power chair with a flag attached. She wears a straw hat, red ADAPT no steps T-shirt and long red skirt, across which she wears a sign reading "Gentler -n- kinder nation??" Behind her another woman in a power wheelchair (Linda Johnstone) wears a different red ADAPT T-shirt and a sign across her knees reads "We Need a Ride To Work." Behind her is another large woman in a wheelchair (Mary Kay Sanders) in dark sunglasses and a white dress; she carries a white parasol and appears to be chanting. Over the top of the parasol another sign (held by someone walking but obscured from view) written in calligraphy can be seen: "Access is a Civil Right." The line bends back and around out of view. Caption reads: Countless Frustrations. Angry protesters in San Antonio wheel through the streets to protest the lack of accessible public transportation.
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.