How an act of civil disobedience in 1978 Denver helped propel incapacity rights : NPR

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

To put in writing his signature on the Declaration of Independence, Stephen Hopkins used his left hand to regular his proper. Historians say Hopkins had a incapacity, what we now name cerebral palsy, or possibly Parkinson’s. As he signed, the delegate from Rhode Island stated, my hand trembles, however my coronary heart doesn’t. It wasn’t till the twentieth century that folks with disabilities started demanding their rights to the Declaration’s promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For the sequence we’re calling America in Pursuit to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, NPR correspondent Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolf of Colorado Public Radio inform the forgotten story of 1 group of disabled Individuals and a rare act of civil disobedience.

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JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: It is one of many busiest intersections in downtown Denver the place Broadway crosses broad Colfax Avenue, the place the Colorado State Capital, with its gleaming gold dome, towers towards the uninteresting winter sky. Automobiles rush by and buses. This can be a hub for metropolis buses.

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SHAPIRO: The bus driver spots Daybreak Russell (ph) in her wheelchair and lowers the automated wheelchair carry.

UNIDENTIFIED DRIVER: Hello.

DAWN RUSSELL: Hello.

UNIDENTIFIED DRIVER: I do know it is for you.

RUSSELL: I’d’ve been all proper with you…

Each time that carry goes down, what does that really feel like?

STEPHANIE WOLF, BYLINE: Russell is the incapacity rights activist. She desires us to see how straightforward it’s for her to experience a metropolis bus now.

RUSSELL: You by no means get on it – not as soon as – with out eager about them. So when you concentrate on The 19, it is each time that carry goes down.

WOLF: The 19 – she’s speaking a few group of disabled individuals referred to as the Gang of 19 and their little remembered act of civil disobedience at this bus cease virtually 50 years in the past. It was a protest that led to this wheelchair carry on this bus.

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GANG OF 19: (Chanting) We need to experience. We need to experience. We need to experience.

SHAPIRO: In 1978, on the day after the Fourth of July, a gaggle of principally younger individuals who use wheelchairs surrounded and blocked two metropolis buses.

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GANG OF 19: (Chanting) We need to experience.

SHAPIRO: The standoff lasted by means of the evening and into the subsequent day. That Gang of 19 was demanding that Denver’s transit company put wheelchair lifts on buses. They needed the power to get onto a bus and experience, too.

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GANG OF 19: (Chanting) We need to experience. We need to experience.

SHAPIRO: Incapacity wasn’t understood as a civil rights challenge again then. So on that sizzling July day in 1978, these disabled individuals blocking the buses had been doing one thing disabled individuals weren’t anticipated to do.

WOLF: Particularly for this group as a result of only a few years earlier, as younger adults, teenagers and even preteens, virtually all of them had been dwelling in a nursing residence.

JOHN HOLLAND: No actions, nothing to do, warehoused, bodily accidents, mattress sores, loads of mattress sores.

WOLF: Denver lawyer John Holland.

HOLLAND: It was a cesspool. I imply, they’d cockroaches in cereals. Debbie Tracy, I had {a photograph} of her with flies in her face. She could not transfer her arms, proper? Simply coated in flies.

WOLF: Holland sued that nursing residence with the assistance of a person named Wade Clean. Clean labored on the nursing residence on the wing with the younger residents. He was horrified by circumstances there and began a gaggle that moved these younger individuals into their very own houses and flats.

SHAPIRO: Clean, who died in 1993, wasn’t disabled. He was a Presbyterian minister. He’d marched with Martin Luther King at Selma. He understood that driving a bus was an emblem of American civil rights. He advised the Gang of 19 to indicate up on that busy avenue nook and directed considered one of them, George Roberts, in his wheelchair, to get in line for the bus.

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WADE BLANK: So on July 5, George Roberts sat patiently on the bus cease ready for the subsequent bus to return. When the doorways opened, he stated, can I get on?

SHAPIRO: This is Clean years later, recalling how that confused the bus driver.

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BLANK: When the bus driver closed the door saying no to George, we gave a hand sign, and all the opposite 18 moved into the streets and blocked that bus and as that…

BRIAN MCCLOUD: I imply, it was extremely straightforward so long as you had the desire to do it.

WOLF: Brian McCloud.

MCCLOUD: As soon as the bus is stopped, you will have any individual instantly go to the door of the bus.

WOLF: He is one of many final dwelling members of the Gang of 19.

MCCLOUD: After which have a 3rd individual go to the aspect of the bus, the place the motive force cannot pull out. So he is principally trapped. He is aware of he is screwed. He cannot transfer anyplace.

BARRY ROSENBERG: When the police got here after the buses had been occupied (laughter) – the police got here, and so they shouted, and so they received in individuals’s face, and nobody budged.

WOLF: Barry Rosenberg labored with Wade Clean and helped on the protest.

ROSENBERG: Nobody spoke. Nobody talked again. They only sat and had been quiet.

SHAPIRO: The Gang of 19 had been taught easy methods to do civil disobedience by Wade Clean. That created an issue for the police.

BILL ROEM: Properly, they weren’t going to arrest anyone in a wheelchair. That was fairly apparent.

SHAPIRO: Invoice Roem was an attendant there to feed and empty the catheters of the individuals in wheelchairs.

ROEM: Not solely would the optics look unhealthy, however the precise means of attempting to get them off the road.

SHAPIRO: The police could not work out easy methods to arrest individuals in wheelchairs. Buses weren’t accessible, nor police vans, the jail or the courthouse.

WOLF: One other attendant, Lisa Wheeler, noticed the officers’ uncertainty and challenged them.

LISA WHEELER: Why aren’t you arresting him? Are you afraid of him? You do not need to contact him? You understand, stuff like that, I suppose (laughter).

WOLF: So the police arrested Lisa Wheeler and Invoice Roem, the 2 attendants who weren’t disabled, as a substitute.

HOLLAND: I moved to dismiss the costs on the grounds of equal safety violation.

SHAPIRO: John Holland, the lawyer, went to courtroom to get the costs towards the attendants dismissed. He argued that the disabled members of the Gang of 19 had been denied their civil proper to be arrested.

HOLLAND: And I am going to always remember saying to the decide, how are we going to have a civil rights motion if we will not even be arrested? So possibly slightly extra eloquently like that.

SHAPIRO: The decide agreed. The Gang of 19 received the proper to be arrested and handled like another protest group.

WOLF: And so they received much more. The transit company agreed to pay for wheelchair lifts on over 200 new buses. The Gang of 19 turned the core of a incapacity civil rights group referred to as ADAPT. Its members used civil disobedience and received arrested throughout the nation to struggle for accessible transit, a proper that was then written into the Individuals with Disabilities Act in 1990.

SHAPIRO: We’re again on the nook of Colfax and Broadway with Daybreak Russell, who confirmed us how she will get on a bus with a wheelchair carry. She joined ADAPT in 1996. She’s been arrested dozens of occasions. She’s misplaced rely.

RUSSELL: And we’re the misfits of the misfits, and have a look at the place we at the moment are. Are you kidding me?

SHAPIRO: After buses, ADAPT members started protesting everywhere in the U.S. for legal guidelines to assist disabled individuals stay outdoors of nursing houses and establishments, to stay in their very own houses, and to pursue the promise of the Declaration of Independence to get pleasure from the identical decisions and possibilities given to all Individuals.

WOLF: For NPR Information, I am Stephanie Wolf.

SHAPIRO: And I am Joseph Shapiro.

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