THE DENVER POST
8B
Wednesday, September 20, 2000

[image]
[image caption] Rick James heads for Washington, D.C., for a national protest to call attention to a legal challenge to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Denver Post / John Leyba

[Headline] Disabled group to join D.C. rally
By J. Sebastian Sinisi
Denver Post Staff Writer

About 30 wheelchair users gathered outside the Atlantis Community independent living center in south Denver on Tuesday morning to cheer members of their group who were leaving by van for Birmingham, Ala.

There, they'll join a national dis-abled protest over the Garrett vs. University of Alabama case, now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court, that they fear could undermine disabled rights.

About 1,000 are expected in Birmingham on Friday, said wheel-chair user Joe Ehman, who helped organize the privately funded tour from Denver. Ehman is the housing coordinator for the American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, or ADAPT, arm of Atlantis.

In Birmingham, the eight-member Denver group will shift to a bus for news conferences and rally stops in eight other cities, including Atlanta, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

More demonstrators will join the Denverites along the way. The tour ends with a rally expected to bring at least 3,000 to the U.S. Capitol at noon Oct. 3 to draw attention to the Garrett case, which questions the constitutionality of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed a decade ago.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Oct. 11.

"I'm not looking forward to rid-ing eight hours a day in a van ev-ery day, but everything we've gained under the ADA is now in jeopardy," said Rick Viator, 40, in a wheelchair for five years because of a gunshot wound. "People need to know that our rights are in danger," said Rick James, 50, who was also making the trip. James has used a wheel-chair since childhood.

Atlantis-affiliated demonstrators engaged in the first disabled civil disobedience anywhere in the U.S. when they chained their wheelchairs to bus stops at Broadway and Colfax Avenue in 1977 to protest lack of wheelchair access on Denver buses.

As a result, Denver was the first city in America to have wheelchair lifts on buses, long before the ADA made such access mandatory nationwide. ADAPT made front-page Denver news last February when members handcuffed themselves to Currigan Hall entryways during a homebuilding industry exposition to protest a dearth of disabled: friendly home construction. That action resulted in 17 arrests.

Utworzone

czwartek 18 lipiec 2013

Umieszczono

piątek 13 listopad 2020

Albumy

• The Rolling Freedom Express & Washington DC, fall 2000

Odwiedzin

136

Ocena

nieoceniane

Oceń to zdjęcie