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இல்லம் / ஆல்பங்கள் / Wade Blank - Founder of Atlantis Co-Founder of ADAPT 89
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Page 8 Apri11988 [Headline] Religion and the disabled [Subheading] Disability + Power Civil, human rights by Rev. Wade Blank This article is about power, a word that has many negative connotations about it. While we admire people who have power, and people who use power, we still fear getting and using power for ourselves. We believe the meek shall inherit the earth," it is better "to be seen and not heard," [boxed text] These people gained power by acting, by laying aside social etiquette and taking action in their self interest; they gained power by taking risks. [text resumes] and being liked means not being too outspoken. Not only do we have some fear of power; we have great difficulty applying the term to people with disabilities, because our society does not recognize the possibility of a disabled per-son having power or being powerful. Our feeble attempts at gaining power are done in more accepted and passive ways of urging the vote, writing our congressperson or going to meetings. If the disability movement really wants power so it can address its oppression, then it needs to learn how to get power and how to use it. In Denver, there are twenty thousand people who use wheel-chairs for mobility. In 1978, the city of Denver had no wheel-chair accessible buses on its mainline system. That meant that there were twenty thousand people in wheelchairs that were not permitted on buses. To change that situation obviously required power and a lot of it. You could go to all the meetings you wanted, write all the letters you could write, but the situation wouldn't change. A group of twenty five disabled people got together and pledged to each other their willingness to take personal risk and personal action that would change the situation. First, the actions they would take would educate the public about their need for public transportation. Secondly, they would disrupt the able-bodied to the extent that it would get media coverage and to the extent that civil disobedience would occur and people would be arrested. In July of 1978, 25 people surrounded two buses at a main intersection of Denver and held the buses for two days. The police didn't arrest anyone because they were afraid of a bad public image. That action started a year of civil disobedience by those 25 people who did actions every three or four weeks. Today all 700 buses in Denver have wheelchair lifts. A re-markable demonstration of power! Twenty five people, willing to act, changed the situation for 20,000 people. These people gained power by acting, by laying aside social etiquette and taking action in their self interest; they gained power by taking risks. Once they showed them-selves and others how serious they were, and once people understood that these people with disabilities would be back over and over again until they got what they wanted, these once powerless people gained power, and to this day have maintained it. For the disability movement to succeed, every community in the United States needs disabled people willing to act in their own self interest to gain power. Only with power will all the issues affecting disabled people be won. That power network is now developing but we have a long way to go! We Will Ride, We Will Be Free!
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Rocky Mountain News Mon., Aud. 3, 1992 [Headline] Ex-minister gets radical for disabled Wade Blank was talking to George Roberts, remembering the days before Roberts got arrested. Blank is co-director of Atlantis Community, which fights for rights for the handicapped. Roberts has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair-and is an inspector for Atlantis. The two met 21 years ago, when Blank was an orderly in the nursing home where Roberts thought he would spend the rest of his life. "I remember back when I first met you, I didn't think I'd ever get in trouble. I've been arrested 32 times in protests since then," Roberts said. "George," Blank said, "I always did have faith in you." Last week, Denver installed a plaque on the 14th anniversary of a demonstration by Atlantis members, demanding wheelchair access on all RTD buses. It also marked the day the second stage of the American Disabilities Act went into effect, prohibiting employers from discriminating against the handicapped. Blank, 51, grew up in Canton, Ohio, went to an all-white high school and college, and supported Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. A black college roommate dared him to go to Selma, Ala., to march with Martin Luther King Jr. Blank became pastor of a church in Kent, Ohio, which became an underground meeting place for the Students for a Democratic Society. After he Kent State killings, he went back to McCormick Theological Seminary and got a masters degree. He moved to Denver and worked as an orderly in a nursing house Roberts had a job counting fish hooks for 10 [cents] an hour. Someone was stealing televisions, so Blank asked him to be a night watchman. A couple of nights later, Roberts pinned the burglar against a wall with his wheelchair. Blank helped residents of nursing homes find apartments and co-founded Atlantis to help them. Atlantis helped fight for the disabilities act. It also has organized sit-ins around the country, disrupting meetings and closing down government buildings. "You'll find that my bitterest enemies are disabled people, because I'm able-bodied and I'm so radical," he said. "I fight the notion they should just be Jerry's kids. I want them to have control." Roberts is married and owns a home. "I couldn't have done it without Wade and Atlantis," he said. "Yes," Blank said. "You could have. You just might not have known it." [image] [image caption] Blank
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"...I do a lot of theater. One Presbytery meeting, they had the Council of Churches in for dinner, of all the Akron churches, and I hired this guy to dress up like Santa Claus and come in the middle of dinner, "Ho, ho, ho," and he had a big bag of toys, and then I had a bunch of little kids run in behind him--white kids--and everybody thought that was the gig with the supper. So then he's giving out gifts, and then I had twelve black kids run in behind him, and he started hitting them with his bag. We were trying to make a statement on racism in the church. You can imagine how that affected my fellow clergy..." Wade Blank, 1992
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Metro Page 6-Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo. Sunday March 14, 1982 [Headline] Radical fights battles for handicapped By Jerry Brown News Staff "This is what political organizing is all about," said Wade Blank as he mopped the kitchen floor in the home of a severely disabled client at the Atlantis Community for the handicapped. "The secret to political organizing is providing services," he added while cleaning, dressing, feeding and collecting dirty laundry for Francis Peyrose. He is one of about 65 handicapped people who receives care from Atlantis at least twice daily at home. "Most organizers don't realize that. A lot of my organizing friends give me a hard time for spending my time like this," said Blank. Blank is co-founder and co-director of Atlantis, an organization dedicated to teaching handicapped people how to live outside the institutional confines of nursing homes and how to expand their civil rights. He is best known in Denver for leading a series of highly publicized demonstrations against the Regional Transportation District for not providing better service to the handicapped. He and his followers blocked a bus for a day in 1978 and this year staged a sit-in at RTC headquarters. Blank was born Dec. 4, 1940, grew up in Canton, Ohio-"Football Hall of Fame country." He lettered in football (didn't everybody?"), attended Muskingum College ("a small Christian college for small Christians" and became a Presbyterian minister and political follower of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. "In short," Blank said, "I was a classic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male bigot." But in the 1960s, Wade Blank became a radical-participating in civil rights demonstrations with Martin Luther King Jr., providing a meeting place for student racials from Kent State University at his church, which closed after the FBI began pressuring members of the congregation to find another place to worship, and helping draft resisters flee to Canada. Blank attributes his political metamorphosis to the 1963 assassination of Presi- [image] [image caption] Wade Blank helps dress Francis Peyrose, one of about 65 residents who receive daily care at Atlantis Community. News Photo by Jon Gordon. [text resumes] -dent Kennedy and the political taunts of a black roommate at McCormick Theological College in Chicago, where he studied for the ministry. The civil rights marches have ended, the Vietnam War is history and he no longer is an active minister. But Blank remains a radical. And he is leading his own civil rights movement-on behalf of the physically handicapped. Because of what he believes are significant political and social strides by Denver's handicapped community in recent years, Blank said Denver is rapidly becoming a mecca for the disabled. Denver has more handicapped people per capita than any city in the United States, he said, with an estimated 16,000 residents who are confined to wheelchairs. Blank moved to Denver in 1971 after taking a year off from his political and social battles to get a master's degree in the theology of rock music-a year he described as a "period of healing." But he considers his theological thesis on the "new prophets" of rock music-The Who, Jethro Tull, Jefferson Airplane, Sly And The Family Stone, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and The Grateful Dead-one of his crowning achievements. A copy of the thesis, written more than a decade ago, shares a spot in his personal scarpbook along with newspaper clippings of protest activities and political fights in which he has been involved. Blank said he was suffering from political burnout when he moved to Denver. He spent his first few months in Colorado giving lectures on rock music and "learning the community." He became an orderly in a nursing home, an experience that led the able-bodied Blank and Glen Kopp, who is disabled and confined to a wheelchair, to form Atlantis. Nursing homes are little more than concentration camps, Blank said. While working at Heritage House nursing home, which has a "youth wing" for the disabled, Blank and his staff began pushing such radical ideas as allowing their patients to have wine with their meals, set their own curfew hours and form a patient-run council that rated the performance of staff members. There were failure; efforts to give the patients the right to hire and fire their nursing home attendants were unsuccessful. The push for patient rights didn't sit well with owners of the nursing home, Blank said. The final straw, Blank said, was when he and his staff began working on plans to move some of the patients out of the nursing home into houses in the neighborhood The entire staff, except Blank, was fired, and "I was told I could stay only if I worked for the boss' son." Blank resigned from the nursing home and helped start Atlantis. The organization's dedication to getting [image] [image caption] Wade Blank as he appeared in the pre-radical days. [text resumes] handicapped people out of nursing homes often puts Blank at odds with nursing homes and the families of the handicapped people he seeks to help. Atlantis has ended up in court more than once and has won some notable legal battles along the way, Blank said. In 1977, for example, Atlantis won a court battle allowing two of its clients to keep their baby despite their disabilities. Atlantis twice has won court battles permitting its clients to continue living on their own, despite the objections of their families. Drawing on his earlier experience a a civil rights and anti-war activist, Blank also has led protests by the handicapped on a variety of issues. The series of demonstrations against RTC since 1978 to protest the lack of wheelchair-accesible service have gained the most publicity. Under Blank's leadership, Atlantis also has fought to give the handicapped: *Better educational opportunities. *More political power by getting them to the polls (and making polling places accessible to people in wheelchairs). *"The right to move up and down the streets" by persuading city officials to replace steep curbs with concrete ramps at many intersections. Although Blank has severed his ties with the church, he refuses to renounce his ordination. He sees his involvement with Atlantis as a natural extension of his earlier work as a church minister. But Blank also said he will stay at Atlantis only as long as he believes he can further the political rights of the handicapped. If the day comes, he said, when there are no more political battles to be fought for the handicapped, it will be time to find a new cause. [image that say Atlantis Community ]
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"...there was a lot of student action. Most every campus had something major going on in it. There were students shot down in the South, too, at one school. I forget the name, but there were six or seven students killed there. It was a black college, so it didn't get the ink. I think it was Jackson State. Same time, right around the same time, you know, he National Guard there opened fire, but it was blacks killed and it never got the attention that Kent State got. That was a real heavy time. The night of the shootings, I had 2,000 people gather in a parking lot, and we marched down to the National guard headquarters, because I wanted to do something, again theatrical, but people were ready to riot. Some wanted to go up there, a lot of my black friends and SDS friends were--it's hard to express how crazy people were--crying, beating on themselves, beating on others--just an incredible reaction. And they wanted to go back up to Kent and challenge the National Guard tanks. hey were surrounded. All of the roads into Kent State were blocked with tanks, so I got them to march silently down to the National Guard headquarters in Akron where the National Guard was based--the Armory. There were cops as far as you could see, with helmets and clubs. I mean, everybody's ready to go at it--because of the tension. It was just thick. We brought in this big vat of water, big laundry vat, and we had 2,000 people dip their hands in the water and hold their hands up like washing their hands, and then we took the water and threw it under the door of the National Guard headquarters. Very powerful. It's one of those things you only see in movies, and it was very therapeutic. I don't know what else could have been done at that point Really, nothing anybody could do. People were shot. So that was a real heavy time..." Wade Blank
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[Headline] 2 Globevile schools cleared of heavy metal danger [Subheading] Study results in court's dismissal of parents' bid to keep son out of first grade at Garden Place By Greg Lopez Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer Students at two Globeville elementary schools are not exposed to unacceptable levels of lead, cadmium and arsenic from the ASARCO Globe Plant, according to a study released this week. The study, commissioned by Denver Public Schools, tested air and dust inside and outside Swan-sea and Garden Place elementary schools in the Globeville neighbor-hood for the three substances, all of which are believed to cause cancer. All levels were lower than federal guidelines for exposure, although most were higher than normal. The study suggested that air filters be used and areas in the school be cleaned regularly to lessen exposure. The study, the most comprehensive look so far at the old smelter's effect on the schools, is one of many studies of pollution from the ASARCO plant. A motion filed by Wade and Lois Blank seeking to keep their son from entering first grade at Gar-den Place was denied yesterday in Denver District Court after the study was presented. The Blanks said they are satisfied that the schools are safe. "This is good news for every-body who has their children there," Wade Blank said. "I'm happy for them, if the study is accurate." The Blanks said they have en-rolled their son, Lincoln, 6, in the private Gilpin Grammar School be-cause they are angry that DPS ignored earlier requests for information about the safety of the school. The study, conducted by Chemistry and Industrial Hygiene Inc. of Wheat Ridge, found that cadmium levels at Swansea, 4650 Columbine St., were a concern because students also may be exposed to heavy metal outside of school. At Garden Place, 4425 Lincoln St., the major concern was the level of lead concentration in dust, a problem possibly caused by lead-based paint. The study also noted that lead-based paint poses a similar problem in other older Denver schools. The study concludes that, "there are no environmental conditions at the two schools which would result in arsenic, cadmium and lead exposures to children or staff which represent unacceptable health risks if school management continues and/or implements appropriate control procedures." The study is only the latest development in more than a decade of concerns about emissions by ASARCO. ASARCO plant officials say their operation meets all state, local and federal emission standards. Nine Globeville residents sued ASARCO last week, charging that the plant has contaminated soil, lowered property values and endangered their health. [image] [image caption] Debra Reingold/Rocky Mountain News. Lois and Wade Blank are glad study shows safe schools, but son Lincoln, right, is in private school. At left is daughter Caitlin, 4. Stapleton Homes, a public housing project in Globeville, was closed last year by the Denver Housing Authority because of fears of toxic pollution, among other reasons. Tests then showed none of the children in Globeville schools had dangerous concentrations of toxic materials in their bodies, according to the health department.
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[This page continues the article from Image 1813. Full text is available on 1813 for easier reading.]
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SALT OF THE EARTH People who are good & thirsty for justice [Headline] Rev. Wade Blank [Subheading] Michael Ervin interviews Rev. Wade Blank Wade Blank is co-founder of the Atlantis Community for people with disabilities in Denver, Colorado. Working in a nursing home, Blank, an ordained Presbyterian minister, became out-raged by the way residents there were treated like children with no control over their lives. Since the early 1970s, he and the Atlantis Community have helped hundreds of clients move into independent, integrated housing throughout Denver. Atlantis has also revitalized the disability-rights movement nationally by launching American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). That organization has led campaigns of civil disobedience to force city transportation boards to ensure access for persons with disabilities to public transportation. The demands of ADAPT became federal law as part of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. "That a group of powerless people can change their government is the greatest compliment to democracy," says Blank. "It's what we learned in civics. Most people believe government is not changeable. We believe it is." I grew up in Canton, Ohio. The joke around the house when I decided to go into the ministry was that the Vietnam War was God's way of calling me into the church. I was a classic WA$P conservative. I was going to be a country preacher But then at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago they gave me the intellectual education to critique my own ignorance about theology. Mix that with the black militant historians who were coming on the scene. I went to Selma because I had a black friend in the seminary who dared me. I saw these blond women in miniskirts yelling "nigger-lover." It didn't fit my stereotype of blond women in mini-skirts. I was feeling boxed in by life. Everybody was going to fight this war in Vietnam, and that was neat and tidy. Blacks had their place, and that was neat and tidy. I had the same feelings of in-adequacy everybody else did. Suddenly, there's someone saying, "Maybe you're not inadequate. Maybe the system makes you feel inadequate." When we started Atlantis, I saw it as fitting in with all that. Dr. Martin Luther King said the joy of the struggle was in the struggle. This was the struggle. The mission of Jesus was to stir up the status quo and make people whole. That's what this movement is all about. It's about taking someone with cerebral palsy and saying, "You are a total person in society, and if people don't believe that, they're going to before we're done with them." By 1966 I was ordained and had taken a rural parish in Ohio. I lasted about a year and a half before the lid blew. I opened a coffee house with a rock band. But the parents had their kids boycott it. So it fell flat. The next call I took was in Akron at an all-white church. I got tight with the black clergy down the street. We would bring the black Baptist choir into our church and send our choir there. Then the Kent State stuff started. I offered some alternative services, and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members started coming. We opened a storefront called Alice's Restaurant where we sold books and did draft counseling. We started running people into Canada. These were guys being drafted. Their numbers had come up. I would leave my Volkswagen full of gas and leave the key under the mat. If the car ever got caught, I would claim it was stolen. One day when I got to my office, two guys were going through my desk. Turns out they were FBI. They called all the members of my church. After the shootings at Kent State I had 35 members left. So it closed. I went back to the seminary and got my master's degree. Then my wife and I decided to drop out. We put names of cities in a hat and picked Denver. I got a job at $1.90 an hour as an orderly at a nursing home. After a year I quit. But the nursing-home owner hired me back as a recruiter. Can you imagine me coming to your house and selling you on living in a nursing home? I had community meetings and saw some of the deep, deep places some people from state institutions were coming from. They weren't educated, they didn't have any self-esteem, they didn't know their parents. I put that into political jargon. I said, "The problem is you're stuck here. The problem is whether you have any rights as a person." They began to grab onto that. Anything that went wrong, their rebuttal was, "I have rights." They challenged me on why I was enforcing curfew, why I was making people go to workshop. I had to put up or shut up, so I sided with the residents. I was on my way out by then. I went on leave, and when I came back, everyone's radios were confiscated. Electric wheelchairs were taken away. They were going to control the peasants. The only thing the residents had to fall back on was what I taught them about demonstrations and activism. So they started refusing to eat, refusing to do anything. The nursing-home director drove out one night, and he was kicking doors open, shining a flashlight in their faces, insulting and intimidating people. So we started moving people out. I got eight slum apartments renovated. Everyone thought we were stark raving mad. I used to go to the grocery store for them. They didn't have a way to get there. That opened the whole can of worms about public transit In 1978 we held a press conference and announced the time had come for people in wheelchairs to be able to board buses. We blocked buses overnight. We slept in the street. We had the keys to two buses and demanded the general manager come down and get the keys. We made him walk a gauntlet of wheelchairs. We announced we would hold protests once a month until all buses were accessible. During the process we proposed an elected transit board. When the state legislature approved an elected board, the very first action of that board was to make buses accessible. Just as the Selma march led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the many marches we've done led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That a group of powerless people can change their government is the greatest compliment to democracy. Most people believe government is not changeable. We believe it is. Now we want to take on the nursing-home industry, one of our most oppres-sive systems. It's a $52 billion industry. We want to defund it and create serv-ices that allow disabled and elderly people to live at home and participate in society. We need to use that money to liberate people. It would be redirected into a national attendant-services program. It would guarantee a person from the moment of their disability a right to attendant services. If a person has a physical need, right now we're meeting that need in an institutionalized environment. We want it met in a humanizing environment. The religious community is in a dilemma over the disability-rights movement. It approaches it as a do-good situation, which makes it automatically paternalistic. People prefer to see it as an access issue rather than an empowerment movement. If you give access to something irrelevant, what's the difference? Give access to something empowering. The church is all about empowering people from a spiritual and a physical point of view. There needs to be a lot of thinking about what the lame person outside the gates of Jerusalem really represents. Do you put money in his tin cup, or was Jesus asking people to go beyond that? ■ [image] drawing of Wade Blank next to three wheelchairs
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"...I never put myself in a position to be arrested, Wade said that was alright, because I could play a positive role within the system. I was never sure in my heart. if I was on the right side of the bars. I knew he was..." -Justin Dart, Jr.
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A memorial celebration for Wade and Lincoln Blank will be held Sunday, May 9th 11:30 am at the Lincoln Memorial Washington, DC. As Wade would have wanted, this will kick off 3 days of ADAPT's bi-annual national action to free 1.6 million disabled citizens from nursing homes. Two memorial funds have been set up. Donations to benefit disability rights should be sent to: Atlantis/ADAPT. Donations for the family should be sent to: Wade Blank &Family Memorial Fund. The address for both [word italicized] funds is: c/o First National Bank of Denver 300 South Federal Blvd Denver, CO 80219 [image] Wade Blank with his son sitting in his lap. Photo: Susan Goldstein
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"...on Christmas Eve the following year, I had a black woman who was very pregnant and a white guy, and we rented a burro from the zoo or something, and we went to a Holiday Inn on Christmas and said they'd just travelled a great distance and needed a place to sleep, and we had the Associated Press there and the UPI. They went all over the United States, that one theatrical comment of black and white, and that was the extent of it. It's very powerful stuff, but it blew my image as a Presbyterian minister to the max. I've got great pictures of that couple standing there signing in. To the credit of the manager, he let them in, sent up a bottle of champagne, and the Holiday Inn named him as manager of the year, so everybody won, because he was so quick on his feet..." Wade Blank, 1992