ARCHIVAL (ADAPT, 3-19-90):
PROTESTERS (CHANTING): A.D.A. now! 

STENY HOYER (REPRESENTATIVE, MD-D): Let me say that there are many members in the Congress, almost all, who understand that now is the time to pass A.D.A.

MARY LOU BRESLIN (CO-FOUNDER, DISABILITY RIGHTS EDUCATION AND DEFENSE FUND): There was just widespread bias and discrimination. People were considered to be second-class citizens.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 1-23-92):
NEWS ANCHOR: Beginning next week, accommodating the disabled is the law of the land. It is the most sweeping civil rights law since the 1960s.

NARRATION: The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to integrate people with disabilities into American society.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 7-13-90):
NEWS REPORT: It was the disabled themselves who made it happen, who demanded the opportunity to be judged by their abilities, not by their disabilities.

JULIE FARRAR (ADAPT ACTIVIST): People who were born after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed don’t necessarily know that it was a battle. Anybody can tell you rights are never given. People have to say, I demand my right to participate fully in American life.

TEXT ON SCREEN: 1976

ARCHIVAL (1976):
MARY LOU BRESLIN: I’m a post-polio quadriplegic. That means that I have lack of use of both legs and, to some degree, both arms. 

MARY LOU BRESLIN: I became disabled as a young kid and I got polio, and there really were very, very few opportunities. Kids were not integrated in public schools at that time. The communities were architecturally inaccessible.

NARRATION: As an adult, Mary Lou Breslin still felt there was no real place for people like her.

MARY LOU BRESLIN: Everybody made decisions for you. You did not live an independent, free, self-determining life, and there were just a lot of sort of physical challenges to navigating in the world.

JULIE FARRAR’S CAREGIVER (LIFTING HER OUT OF THE BED): One, two, three…over.

JULIE FARRAR: When you’re born with a disability, the medical establishment sees you as a mistake. I really learned from the moment I was born that I was broken. I remember going to the movies and to restaurants and getting kicked out because somehow my crutches were a fire and safety hazard. Because of my packaging, I was being prevented from participating in everyday life. Then I just realized it’s the way society sees me that’s broken, and I could use that anger as a tool to let the world know I deserve to be here.

NARRATION: Julie Farrar and Mary Lou Breslin were both active in the emerging movement demanding civil rights for people with disabilities. 

MARY LOU BRESLIN: There was a long history of institutionalization in this country. You’d end up in an institution with no control over your life. Employment figures were terrible. People’s access to the economy was very bad, and it was really obvious that a national policy was needed.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 4-5-77):
NEWS ANCHOR: Today there were demonstrations at 11 regional offices of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 4-5-77):
NEWS ANCHOR: They accuse Secretary Califano of weakening and delaying regulations to implement the 1973 law to protect the rights of the handicapped.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 4-15-77):
PROTESTERS: Go tell Califano we shall not be moved.

MARY LOU BRESLIN: I was at the San Francisco demonstration where a group of people occupied a federal building there for 27 or 28 days.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 4-15-77):
JUDY HEUMANN: We will not leave the building until the regulations are signed as we want. 

MARY LOU BRESLIN: It was a successful effort and is really seen now, I think, as the sort of birth of the modern disability rights movement.

JULIE FARRAR: What we wanted was access to public transportation.

NARRATION: Farrar joined a protest group called ADAPT.

JULIE FARRAR: ADAPT started out. They had their first protest on July 5th in 1978. They blocked buses on Colfax and Broadway in Denver, Colorado, which is a main intersection.

ARCHIVAL (ADAPT, 1986):
PROTESTERS (CHANTING): Access is a civil right.

NARRATION: After getting Denver to modify some of its buses, ADAPT expanded around the country. 

ANITA CAMERON (ADAPT ACTIVIST): I’ve been arrested 140 times in 39 years. We chained ourselves to buildings, buses, blocked streets. That was the message that we’re not second-class citizens, that we deserve to work, and that we are regular people too.

MARY LOU BRESLIN: The disability community by 1979 understood that implementing civil rights required policy intervention.

PAT WRIGHT (CO-FOUNDER, DISABILITY RIGHTS EDUCATION AND DEFENSE FUND): And so we started DREDF, the Disability Rights Education Defense Fund.

NARRATION: The new organization – DREDF – opened a Washington office and began work on a new law called the Americans with Disabilities Act.

PAT WRIGHT: Historically, disability policy was made by non-disabled people for disabled people, and was based on unfair assumptions that people with disabilities could not be integrated into society fully. My goal for the A.D.A. was to integrate people into society, period. Whether you were blind, deaf, had a physical disability, a mental disability – that all people belonged in society.

NARRATION: They had help from civil rights leaders and members of Congress whose own family members had disabilities. But many businesses, worried about what it would cost, opposed the bill. 

MARY LOU BRESLIN: It’s not simply a matter of taking the sign down that says sit in the back of the bus. You have to make the bus equipped with equipment to get the wheelchair user on the bus. So much of the discussion about the A.D.A. had to do with how far do you have to go? Which money do you have to spend? What are the limits?

NARRATION: While they worked to get a bill that could pass, a student protest erupted at Gallaudet, the nation’s premier university for the deaf. 

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 3-10-88):
NEWS REPORT: The school is shut down, and the students say it will stay that way until they get a president who is, like them, deaf. 

I. KING JORDAN (FORMER PRESIDENT, GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY): Deaf President Now was a revolution. It was truly a revolution. It was on national TV and people saw, hey, this is really a civil rights issue. It’s true that a deaf person should lead Gallaudet, and people with disabilities should lead their own lives and make their own decisions.

NARRATION: After the university conceded, I. King Jordan became Gallaudet’s first deaf president. 

I. KING JORDAN: I wanted people to see me, to see: Here’s a guy who can do this job. I mean, he can lead the university.

ARCHIVAL (GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, 3-1-88):
GALLAUDET PROTESTERS: Deaf president now! 

NARRATION: Because it was in Washington, members of Congress saw the Gallaudet protest.

PAT WRIGHT: The demonstrations were the essence of what we were talking about with the A.D.A., and they couldn’t ignore it. It was in the press, it was on the streets. They were in the middle of it.

I. KING JORDAN: The leaders of the A.D.A. legislation immediately took advantage of the publicity and brought the A.D.A. legislation to the floor.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 9-8-89):
NEWS ANCHOR: The United States Senate has approved legislation that would protect millions of disabled Americans.

NARRATION: A year later, the A.D.A.  passed in the Senate, but got bogged down in the House. 

JULIE FARRAR: We had these people on the inside fighting for the A.D.A., and then the ADAPT leadership got a call saying, can you help us push this bill over the finish line?

ARCHIVAL (ADAPT, 3-12-90):
PROTESTER (CRAWLING UP THE STEPS OF THE U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING): Pace yourself, take your time.

JULIE FARRAR: And so hundreds of people crawled up the steps to the Capitol to symbolize the lack of access to the country that disabled people in America faced.

ARCHIVAL (ADAPT, 3-12-90):
PROTESTER: A.D.A. now. A.D.A. now.

ANITA CAMERON: I knew that we were making history. You know, I felt like we were crawling into history.

I KING JORDAN: One of the people who crawled up was an 8-year-old girl, and people kept telling her, you don’t have to keep going. She said, no, I’m going to the top. It was such a thrill to see that, and it had a huge, huge impact because that was right before the vote.

ARCHIVAL (ADAPT, 3-12-90):
PROTESTER: We’re almost ready to reach that mountain top, Jennifer. Come on, Jennifer!

ANITA CAMERON: The next day we went to the Rotunda. We began to chant very loudly – Access is a civil right. A.D.A. now, A.D.A. now.

ARCHIVAL (ADAPT, 3-19-90):
PROTESTERS: Now! Now! Now! Now!

PAT WRIGHT: It has become a symbol, the visual of what the A.D.A. was about. It was an education tool to change people’s perspective, and it helped move the bill.

NARRATION: Ultimately, it passed with bipartisan support.  

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 5-22-90):
NEWS ANCHOR: At the Capitol, those who’ve struggled for equal rights for years savored an overwhelming victory.

ARCHIVAL (GEORGE H.W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY, 7-26-90):
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH:  Every man, woman and child with a disability can now pass through once-closed doors into a bright new era of equality, independence and freedom.

NARRATION: The A.D.A. made it illegal to discriminate in areas like employment, public accommodations, and education, and it brought people with disabilities greater freedom to work, travel and run their own lives. 

MARY LOU BRESLIN: It’s changed the architectural face of the country. You have to have A.D.A. compliant plans when somebody is renovating or building, and that’s now taken for granted. It’s like – did you ever do it differently?

ANITA CAMERON: I was able to go back to school, get a job in the real world, where they had no issues whatever with accommodations.

I. KING JORDAN: If I go to the doctor’s office, I don’t call in advance and say, hey, don’t forget you need to have an interpreter. Now they’re legally required to do that.

NARRATION: One important result of the A.D.A.: People with disabilities gained the right to be cared for in their own homes, not in institutions.

JULIE FARRAR: When the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, we fought to get some of the long-term care funding through Medicaid to be diverted from nursing homes. It opens up the world, being able to have home care services.

I. KING JORDAN: We made a lot of progress, but we have major concerns for cuts that are happening throughout the government that are reducing support for people with disabilities.

NEWSPAPER HEADLINES ON SCREEN:

Trump’s mass firings strike a hammer blow against Americans with disabilities

Amid shutdown, Trump administration guts department overseeing special education

ARCHIVAL (AAPD, 5-13-25):
PROTESTER (CHANTING): No cuts to Medicaid! No cuts to Medicaid! 

ARCHIVAL (SCRIPPS NEWS, 6-25-25):
NEWS REPORT: You can see some folks using mobility devices, all kind of, shades of people protesting against the Medicaid cuts. 

NARRATION: With cuts to federal programs, including Medicaid, activists worry that home care and other benefits will be lost. 

JULIE FARRAR: Medicaid pays for her to take care of me. I would be at risk for institutionalization.

MARY LOU BRESLIN: We don’t know how bad it’s going to get, but the advocates have their work cut out for them going forward.

PAT WRIGHT: I have a hard time now when I meet with younger disabled people who can’t imagine you couldn’t get into a restaurant, you couldn’t go to the movies, you couldn’t get on the bus. They’ve lived a life of being integrated, but they don’t understand the work, really, that went behind it. So far, A.D.A. has held up. I’m sure we’re going to lose it. But, you know, I can’t stop that. It’s up to the next generation to fight for.

(END)