The Socialist
November 1991

[Headline] Campaigning From Jail

By J. Quinn, Socialist Party Candidate for President

Shortly before I flew to Florida on the afternoon of October 4, I received by first printed campaign literature, some palm cards with Bill Edwards' and my name on them along with some highlights of the 1992 Socialist Party platform. By the afternoon of October 6, I had joined more than seventy demonstrators for the rights of the disabled in the Orange County, Fla., jail, where we stayed for the next three days.

Thus I joined the grand tradition of Eugene V. Debs, who spent his entire 1920 campaign in Atlanta Prison for his opposition to World War I, and of Norman Thomas, who was jailed during his 1936 campaign for helping CIO organizers fight for free speech in Boss Frank Hague's Jersey City. It is tradition I would rather honor in the breach than in observance, but sometimes a candidate has no choice.

The police arrested me for trespass just outside the front door of the Peabody Hotel in Orlando. I was with nearly 300 other members of ADAPT, American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, who were trying to present our views to members of the American Health Care Association staying at the hotel. AHCA is the lobbying group for the big nursing home chains, which have become enormously profitable since the enactment of Medicare legislation in 1965. AHCA is currently suing Louis Sullivan, Bush' secretary of health and human services, to get more money distributed through the states to nursing homes in order to warehouse more disabled and elderly persons.

[image]
[image caption] Orlando police arresting a disability activist. Photo by Tom Olin

[text cut off] 1.6 million severely disabled people can live independently at home, work-ing at whatever jobs are within their capacity, and providing pay for the family members and friends who are their primary care givers. AHCA and the Bush administration have no use for programs which would interfere with the publicly-funded private profits of the nursing homes.

More than half the ADAPT members in Orlando were attending their first public protest. They are a politically varied group. Some are still grateful to Bush for signing the Americans with Disabilities Act last year, which climaxed a battle for accessible public transportation and access to buildings. Of course Bush signed it reluctantly, and his predecessor Reagan worked very hard to prevent its passage.

It is ADAPT and similar militants who deserve credit for the act. The first demonstrations against inaccessible buses began in 1978 in Denver, where ADAPT is still centered. Some of you may recall the article I wrote for The Socialist about the deaf-blind and wheelchair-bound Socialist Dennis Schreiber and his Chicago group, Dis-abled Americans Rally for Equality. DARE and other groups of disabled led off the 20th anniversary March on Washington in 1983 at the invitation of Coretta King. Dennis and several comrades from that march were with me in Orlando, continuing the militant Socialist tradition of Helen Keller.

Most of the ADAPT members liked the Socialist platform highlights I showed them. We are, of course, for equal rights regardless of disability, for a complete socialized health care system, and for a restructured housing industry which would make it easy to modify living space for the disabled. Our foreign policy planks are appeal-ing to those who became disabled while fighting senseless wars to protect foreign profits. Although anyone can suddenly find themselves in the ranks of the disabled, the poor and disadvantaged are disproportionately victims of industrial accidents, random violence, a deteriorating environment, and preventible disease. Unlike the reforms advocated by the major parties in order to stifle dissent, our demands are in-solubly linked and interdependent be-cause of our basic socialist message. Perhaps a few of those I talked to are beginning to understand that.

Nothing radicalizes a group faster than a brutal and stupid opponent, and we had that in Orlando. The police bugged our meeting rooms, studied tapes of previous ADAPT demonstrations so that they would know which leaders to arrest, and tried to arrest as many able-bodied attendants as possible in order to immobilize the rest of the group. ACHA devoted five out of six hand-outs in their press kit to attacks on us, nearly all of them lies. Orlando has become the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country through the tourist and convention business engendered since the opening of Disney World in 1970, and the chamber of commerce was obviously leaning on the police to see that AHCA had an incident-free convention.

This conspiracy did not succeed. Our arrests made for some of the most spectacular television since Bull Connor's, Birmingham. A vigil, of our comrades continued outside the jail for the entire time that we were inside. Demonstrations outside the AHCA meetings in the Orange County Convention Center also continued. We were released after three days ready to demonstrate again. A court order threatening arrest for any of us who stepped outside our hotel stopped our last attempt to reach the AHCA delegates who were meeting with their legislative friends, but we were able to show our symbol of a wheelchair chained on a cross to a press conference anyhow.

The jail was unequipped to handle so many disabled persons. It took them 14 hours to process us. The over-crowded women's section never had enough bottom bunks. Needed medical treatments were unavailable or behind schedule. Guards and trustees bent the rules for us, allowing me writing materials and the use of my cane, for instance, but even the jailers most ashamed of themselves were unable to revolt against the system of which they were a part. We were given no chance in court to defend our actions. The judge allowed us to plead no contest, sentenced us to time served plus $100 court costs apiece, and warned us not to be outside agitators again in his jurisdiction.

This jailing was nowhere near so rough as some of those I endured in the South during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and it made a spectacular opening for the 1992 campaign, but it seemed downright unfair for me to be jailed while George Bush, who was in Orlando the week before, got to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Disney World by shaking hands with Mickey Mouse. Of course he and Quayle look more natural doing that sort of thing than Bill Edwards, my running mate, and I do.

Létrehozva

Péntek 12 Július 2013

Feltöltve

Péntek 9 November 2018

Albumok

• Orlando, fall 1991

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Canon EOS 40D

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2013:07:12 15:50:02

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f/11.0