From: Julie Dawson 
Subject: Equality of Opportunity -- HISTORY.TXT  (fwd)
Amendments Act of 1988, which expanded the protections afforded
by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and prohibited discrimination in
the sale or rental of housing on the basis of disability.  The
Fair Housing Amendments Act was significant for several reasons. 
First, it added to the momentum the disability had been building
throughout the 1980s.  Its passage in September, following
introduc tion of the ADA in April, gave a big boost to the ADA. 
Second, it afforded people with disabilities another opportunity
to work with the civil rights community on one of its top
priorities.  But now, for the first time, disability was an
important component in a major civil rights legislative
initiative.  Moreover, the disability community formed a close
alliance with organizations advocating the rights of persons with
the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), who were protected under this
act as persons with disabilities.  Third, the Fair Housing
Amendments Act broke new ground with respect to civil rights for
persons with disabilities by incorporating provisions that
applied to the private business sector as well as to recipients
of federal funding.  And Fourth, the act provided an important
foundation for the ADA by building on the Arline decision: it
provided that unless an individual with a contagious disease
posed a  direct threat  to the health and safety of others,
discriminatory practices against such persons was unlawful. 
     Enactment of the Fair Housing Amendments Act on September
13, 1988, marked the end of a string of national, legislative
victories during the 1980s.  These accomplishments were crucial
for the ADA s success.  As Mayerson explained:  The respect for
the legal, organizational, and negotiation skills gained during
these legislative efforts formed the basis of working
relationships with members of Congress and officials of the
administration that proved indispensable in passing the ADA.     
                      Grass Roots Activism
     Although the legal battles won in Washington were of
critical importance, equally important activities were taking
place around the nation.  As Mayerson writes, the history of the
ADA began  in cities and towns throughout the United States when
persons with disabilities began to challenge societal barriers
that excluded them from their communities, and when parents of
persons with disabilities began to fight against the exclusion
and segregation of their children.  It began with the
establishment of local groups to advocate for the rights of
persons with disabilities.   While the 1970s witnessed the
creation of the disability rights movement, the 1980s experienced
its blossom ing, which came with a flurry of grass roots
activism.
     Thousands of people around the country contributed to the
disability rights movement.  For many people with disabilities,
college was a life-changing experience that marked the beginning
of political action and underscored the importance of community. 
Roland Sykes, a student at Wright State University in Dayton,
Ohio, was one example.  He selected Wright State after his spinal
cord injury because the university made concerted attempts to
achieve campus accessibility.  There Sykes joined with over 20
other students with disabilities who, as Ed Roberts had done at
Berkeley, promoted a more accessible campus.  This affirmed an
important lesson Sykes had learned as a member of United Mine
Workers of America: the power of collective bargaining.  Joining
with others not only provided emotional support, it added
leverage in dealing with campus administra tors.  For example,
students at Wright State helped create an adapted athletic
program for persons with disabilities.   If it had been one
person against [the] system, that never would have happened, 
Sykes said.  Students also succeeded in starting a pilot program
for persons with disabilities.  After all, the school was named
after the famous Wright brothers who made history by taking to
the air. People with disabilities had the same desire to fly. 
     Another example was the  disability community growing at
Brooklyn College in New York, where Denise Figueroa gained a
better understanding of living with polio by interacting with
other students.  At Brooklyn College she participated in her
first demonstration: a protest against President Nixon s veto of
the Rehabilitation Act.  She and her peers were also able to use
student government funds to send students to the annual meeting
of the President s Committee on the Employment of the
Handicapped.  This provided an opportunity to make contacts with
students from other college campuses who were also developing
their own disability communities and fostering local activism. 
Even if students did not network directly with disabled students
at other campuses, simply knowing that others shared the same
goals was empowering.
     While Figueroa relished the opportunities college provided,
she realized that she could not always rely on its architectural
accessibility.   If I ever wanted to leave the campus and be able
to participate in the community, we had to change the community
too,  she observed.  This understanding led many people to take
their community-based activism beyond the college campus. In
1976, for example, students at Wright State University sued the
city of Dayton under the Urban Mass Transit Act, which said that
public transportation should service all citizens, including
people with disabilities and the elderly.  Disabled activists won
the case and secured a mandate that all transportation vehicles
had to be accessible.  Had it not been for the mobilization of
the disability community, however, the transit authorities simply
would not have taken the initiative.
     Outside of college campuses, the growing network of
independent living centers served as crucial  community gathering
places,  as Mark Johnson called them.  Among other things, they
fostered emotional support through peer counseling and thereby
spread the  gospel  of disability rights and local action. 
Charlie Carr, for example, said that Fred Fay, who visited Carr
at a hospital that he resided in while attending Massachusetts
Bay Community College,  put a fire under me.  Fay demonstrated
that a person with quadriplegia could be mobile, have one s own
apartment, drive a car, get married, have children, and earn a
Ph.D.  all the things that I would lay in bed and look up at the
ceiling and think that I would never have,  Carr said.  As a
founding member of the Boston Center for Independent Living and
one of the first to use its services, Carr obtained his own
housing, attendant care, and became an ardent activist.
     Perhaps no single group epitomized grass roots activism more
than people who considered themselves members of ADAPT American
Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation.Independent living
centers drew on the learning experiences of other centers.  In
Den ver, Colorado, the center known as Atlantis set an example of
taking sledgehammers to side walks for fashioning curb cuts. 
Under the leadership of Wade Blank, Atlantis members also took
busses hostage overnight to demand accessible transportation. 
Such demonstrations could be an effective tactic, as they were in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example.  After becoming Executive Director
of the independent living center Ability Resources, in 1983,
Sykes joined with Woody Osburn and others to organize Tulsans for
Accessible Public Transportation (TAPT).  Since they were unable
to find an attorney willing to pursue litigation, they decided to
use public opinion as an alternative and pressured local mayoral
candidates and members of the transit board to promote accessible
transportation.  Between 1984 and 1988, by using such dramatic
tactics as chaining themselves to buses, members of TAPT helped
swing elections to mayoral candidates who supported their cause. 
TAPT also targeted transit board members, who were volunteers,
and had demonstrators follow them around town, compelling many to
resign.  Progress in achieving transportation accessibility,
though slow, was real.  And it illustrated the power of community
action.
     Public demonstrations were fruitful in other contexts as
well.  Johnson, for example, gained his first taste of activism
through the Metrolina Independent Living Center in Charlotte,
North Carolina.  It was 1980, and Metrolina activists learned
that a local mall was developing an inaccessible theater.  After
seeking to work with the architects to no avail, Johnson and
others staged a protest as a media event.  Mall administrators
responded in just a few weeks by installing a wheelchair lift. 
Public, media-oriented protests were not the only manifestation
of grass roots activism.  Subtler actions included placing
warning cards on the windshields of cars illegally parked in
spaces reserved for people with disabilities.
     Perhaps no single group epitomized grass roots activism more
than people who considered themselves members of ADAPT American
Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation.  The groundwork
for ADAPT was laid by the Atlantis community in Denver in the
early 1980s.  Atlantis activists decided they wanted to develop a
national effort to promote transportation accessibility through
public protests.  They approached NCIL to coordinate and sponsor
the activities.  Although NCIL publicly stated its support of
accessible transportation, it was unwilling to advocate nation
wide civil disobedience.  People at Atlantis and other
independent living centers, for example Bob Kafka and Stephanie
Thomas in Houston, Texas, thus decided to organize their own
grass roots organization.  They made it radically decentralized. 
 It s not incorporated,  Johnson explained:  no board, no
president, no budget.   Rather, people from around the country
identified themselves with ADAPT informally, based on their trust
of others associated with the group.  ADAPT s activities were the
product of volunteers and relied on networks of activists who
could join its efforts. 
     ADAPT s most significant undertakings were its
demonstrations at the annual meetings of the American Public
Transit Association (APTA), held each fall in a different city. 
ADAPT targeted APTA because it was singularly most responsible
for opposing accessible transportation. APTA had won a law suit
against the Department of Transportation and thereby overruled
the department s Section 504 regulations.  These regulations had
required the purchase of accessible vehicles.  But, according to
the court decision, each local transit authority could determine
the extent to which it made its services accessible.  Members of
ADAPT basically decided to shadow APTA until federal
transportation laws changed.  They began by disrupting APTA s
conference in Denver in 1983.  ADAPT rallied the following year
in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles in 1985, in Detroit in 1986,
and in San Francisco in 1987, coincidentally on the tenth
anniversary of the Section 504 protests.  ADAPT also surprised
APTA by traveling all the way to Canada for one of its meetings. 
By the 1989 deliberations of the ADA, APTA had largely resigned
itself to equipping buses with lifts for public transportation. 
ADAPT had played a significant role in this change of heart.
     ADAPT s efforts at coordinated action on the national level
reflected a significant trend toward establishing vast networks
for collective action, which accelerated during the 1980s.  ACCD
had been the first organization to develop a broad,
cross-disability network.  Under the authorship of Frank Bowe,
ACCD published books to facilitate this growth.  Coalition
Building: A Report on a Feasibility Study to Develop a National
Model for Cross-Disability Communication and Cooperation appeared
in 1978.  The next year, Planning Effective Advocacy Programs
became available to fledgling organizations seeking integration
into the ACCD network.  In the 1980s, however, ACCD began to
unravel.  Fiscal restraint imposed by the Reagan administration
reduced the levels of available grant money, on which ACCD
depended.  In the absence of private funding, ACCD could not
sustain its operations.  Member organizations also felt the
budget crunch, which caused many to turn inward and focus more on
their own survival.  Furthermore, internal conflicts over the
focus of ACCD s mission, predominantly concerning the degree of
attention devoted to advocacy, reduced ACCD s effectiveness.  In
1985, ACCD officially closed its doors.
     Other organizations tried to fulfill some of ACCD s
functions.  Shortly after the establish ment of the Title VII
Independent Living Program in 1978, RSA convened a meeting of all
centers supported by the grant.  Marca Bristo, Director of Access
Living in Chicago, described it as a  magical  time in which
people from around the country were able to share their
experiences. There was a  sense of excitement,  she said, and a
 thirstiness  for greater levels of interaction. This laid the
groundwork for the founding of NCIL in 1982, by Bristo, Max
Starkloff, Bob Williams, Jim DeJong, and others.  Starkloff was
the first president and Bristo the first vice president.  In
1986, Bristo became president of NCIL.
     NCIL s main purpose was to facilitate the creation and
maintenance of independent living centers.  Throughout the 1980s,
NCIL, as ADAPT, had no centralized headquarters, but rather
coordinated its efforts through networking and the contributions
of volunteers from local centers and other organizations.  NCIL
presented itself as the only cross-disability, national
grassroots organization that was run by and for people with
disabilities.  For example, at least 51 percent of all
independent living center staff had to be people with
disabilities to qualify for membership.  NCIL offered a national
voice to the philosophy of independent living by promoting the
rights, empower ment, and self-direction of people with
disabilities.  Its first major challenged involved working with
the Federal Government to implement standards for the creation
and operation of independent living centers.  Consumer control
was the major issue, and it took years for NCIL to compel the
Federal Government to adopt its proposals.  As NCIL battled
Washington, it also established grass roots networks throughout
the country, through which NCIL could funnel information to
members and solicit advocacy for political initiatives.
     By friend and foe alike, the disability community was taken
seriously it had become a political force to be reckoned with in
Congress, in the voting booth, and in the media. 
          Arlene Mayerson     In 1985, Sykes augmented NCIL s
networking by creating a computer network.  The network was
started as the NCIL Computer Network and received funds from
NCIL.  Its purpose was to facilitate the information-intensive
---
---------------