From: Julie Dawson 
Subject: Equality of Opportunity -- HISTORY.TXT  (fwd)
mission of NCIL.  But as the network grew, the name was changed
to DIMENET Disabled Individuals Movement for Equality Network. 
DIMENET helped people with disabilities get online at the advent
of the information age, giving them easy and inexpensive access
to computer networking.  By dialing into a local computer, and
paying only for long-distance charges, callers could open
electronic mail accounts, join discussion groups, and post files. 
It gave independent living centers a cen tral clearing-house for
information about the experiences of other centers and enabled
them to download files.  DIMENET was also a means to linking
disability advocates in Wash ington to people with disabilities
around the country.
     NCIL and ADAPT were not alone in fostering grass roots
networking during the 1980s. Other disability-specific
organizations, including NFB, ARC, NAD, and PVA, continued to
expand their own membership.  Consequently, by the time the ADA
was introduced in Congress, dozens of mailing lists were
available to serve as links between developments in Washington
and the rest of the country.  Moreover, the face of the
disability community was changing.  The Education for Handicapped
Children Act was helping to raise a generation of persons with
disabilities who expected to attain a respected place in society. 
Technical assistance training contracts such as those with DREDF
helped arm individuals with legal knowledge.  And such
organizations as NCIL, ADAPT, ARC, UCPA, NAD, and NFB helped
people with disabilities unite as a collective voice.
                The Disability Community in 1988 
     Although the 1980s began by putting the disability community
and the broader civil rights community on the defensive, Wright,
Kemp, Neas, Funk, Mayerson, and many other leaders were able to
achieve significant victories.   Piece by piece we put together a
decade of legislative success,  Neas observed.  In fact, he said,
while the going was tough in dealing with the policies and
practices of the courts and the Reagan administration, in
Congress the  the 1980s, in all honesty, . . . were a bipartisan
reaffirmation of civil rights and a bipartisan rejection of
right-wing philosophy.   
     Many people in the disability community, as well as such
organizations as DREDF, aimed for the implementation of
comprehensive civil rights protections for persons with
disabilities.  But a record of legislative success,
coalition-forming, and grass roots organizing had to be
established first.  And in the decade between the Section 504
demonstrations and passage of the Fair Housing Amendments Act,
the disability community laid the necessary foundation.  It
earned the respect of the civil rights community.  Talented
leaders such as Wright proved their negotiation and legislative
skills.  People with disabilities formed an extensive and
indispensable network of contacts with Congress and the
administration.  Through such disability-rights attorneys as
Mayerson, Burgdorf, Feldblum, Weisman, Tim Cook (with the
National Disability Action Center), Bonnie Milstein (with the
Mental Health Law Project), and Karen Peltz-Strauss (with the
National Center for Law and the Deaf), the disability community
reached new levels of legal sophistication.  And throughout the
country, hundreds of communities organized to improve the lives
of disabled Americans by winning local battles: pockets of the
United States were crafting stronger protections and providing
greater access for persons with disabilities.  These developments
had a profound impact.   By friend and foe alike,  observed
Mayerson,  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.   
     No single activity or single event accounts for this
success.  Rather, it was due to the combined effect of the
disability community s efforts.   No one particular tactic is
more valuable than another,  Mark Johnson said of his campaigns
to achieve transportation accessibility.   If you re an activist
and an organizer, you have a fully developed strategy.   Indeed,
the genius of the disability community s political mobilization
was that it pushed for change in so many different ways, by so
many different people.  The diverse efforts were not necessarily
coordinated, but the cumulative effect was the creation of
fertile soil in which an ADA seed could flourish.  As Mayerson
aptly concludes:  The ADA owes its birthright not to any one
person or any few, but to the many thousands of people who make
up the disability rights movement people who have worked for
years organizing and attending protests, licking envelopes,
sending out alerts, drafting legislation, speaking, testifying,
negotiating, lobbying, filing lawsuits, and being arrested doing
whatever they could for a cause in which they believed. 

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           Putting the ADA on the Legislative Agenda:
               The National Council on Disability
When Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. (R-CT) and Congressman Tony
Coelho (D-CA) first introduced the Americans with Disabilities
Act in April, 1988, many persons in and out of the disability
community did not give it a fighting chance.  During the 1980s
the disability community was primarily on the
defensive withstanding a number of assaults and hoping simply to
maintain its legislative and financial ground.  Taking the
offensive and introducing comprehen sive civil rights
legislation, when existing laws were not even adequately
enforced, seemed unrealistic.  In 1985, for example, when
disability activist Duane French encountered people who talked
about the need for comprehensive civil rights for people with
disabilities, his response was:  Not in my lifetime, pal!   Where
did the idea for the ADA come from?  How did it make its way to
Congress as a viable policy option?  And why at this particular
moment?
     Accounting for why some issues and not others make their way
to the legislative agenda is a favorite pastime of political
scientists.  Although no legislation follows a generic model
precisely, one compelling analysis is useful in understanding the
ADA s development.  John Kingdon describes the Federal Government
as an  organized anarchy.   According to Kingdon, public policies
are not created through a systematic, orderly process of
establishing goals, identifying problems, analyzing alternatives,
and making rational choices.  Nor is there an incremental,
inexorable development over time.  Rather, the process is messy. 
Kingdon contends that at any given moment three independent
 policy streams  are active: problems (conditions that demand
corrective attention), policies (proposals made by various
academics, government staff members, and lobbying groups), and
politics (swings in national mood, elections, a new
administration, and ideological distribution shifts).  Problems
emerge and recede; pet solutions are developed even where there
is no concrete problem; and the political landscape constantly
shifts.  However, at particular, limited moments in time  windows
of opportunity  each of these streams merge and offer the
potential for action:  A problem is recognized, a solution is
available, the political climate makes the time right for change,
and the constraints do not prohibit action. 
     Asked to explain why the ADA succeeded, numerous
participants in the deliberative process asserted that the
 timing  was right.  Indeed, the ADA appears to have occurred
during a window of opportunity.  We have seen how during the
1980s a disability rights movement blossomed, characterized by
grass roots political activism, important networking, and
tangible legislative success.  This developed fertile soil where
a civil rights seed might flourish.  But that was only part of
the equation.  There needed to be a clearly defined problem (for
society, not just isolated individuals), coupled with a concrete
solution, and a political climate to legitimate it.  This
complicated process also took shape during the 1980s.  Although
numerous sources helped give life to the ADA, the vehicle that
united these elements and brought the bill to Congress was a
little- known federal agency called the National Council on the
Handicapped (NCD).
               National Council on the Handicapped
     The history of NCD dates to 1972, when Congress proposed an
Office for the Handicapped as part of the Rehabilitation Act. 
Its purpose would be to review the programs of the Rehabilitation
Services Administration (RSA) and evaluate and coordinate all
federal programs affecting persons with disabilities.  But
Congress eliminated the Office in the compromise with President
Nixon.  The idea resurfaced in May, 1977, when delegates from
every state gathered at the White House Conference on Handicapped
Individuals.  The participants reviewed federal disability policy
and offered legislative recommendations.  Among their conclusions
was that the incoherence and intrinsic tensions of various
disability policies required an agency to bring it to order.  The
Carter administration afforded Congress to take action.  Congress
passed legislation creating the National Institute of Handicapped
Research (NIHR, now NIDRR), the Title VII independent living
program, and the  projects with industries  program to assist
disabled persons starting their own businesses. Congress also
used the shift in political climate to implement the White House
Conference s recommendation by passing legislation that created
NCD. 
     In addition to directing NCD to establish policies for NIHR
and advise the RSA Commissioner about RSA policies, Congress
charged NCD to  review and evaluate on a continuing basis all
[federal] policies, programs, and activities  concerning persons
with disabilities, and to report on its activities.  NCD would be
composed of fifteen presidential appointees, each serving
three-year terms and with five new members each year.  NCD could
hire up to seven technical and professional staff, conduct
hearings, and appoint advisory committees.  It was housed in the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
     NCD s activities prior to 1984 are not well documented.  But
the skeletal framework for the ADA was laid in 1983.  After
President Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981, he decided to
disband the existing council and appoint all new members.  On
October 4, 1982, he selected Joe Dusenbury, previously the
Commissioner of the South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation
Services and President of the National Rehabilitation
Association, as NCD Chairperson.  NCD apparently had a mixed
record, and the Education Department urged Dusenbury to submit a
credible annual report, on time, to help improve NCD s
reputation.  To help direct NCD activities, Dusenbury appointed
two Vice-chairpersons: Justin Dart and Sandra Parrino.  Dart was
the only NCD member Dusenbury knew before joining NCD; they had
worked together on the President s Committee on the Employment of
the Handicapped.  NCD members turned immediately to the task of
the report, and decided that, in meeting NCD duties, they should
prepare an ambitious proposal for disability policy. 
     They also decided that if the report were to have any
legitimacy, it needed to be the product of a nationwide effort. 
Thus began Justin Dart s famous public forums.  Authorized by
Dusenbury and using his own funds, Dart traveled to every single
state to discuss disability policy and obtain feedback for NCD s
policy report.  Dart, who had contracted polio in his teens, went
in his wheelchair and with his trademark cowboy hat.  On this
campaign he met with over 2,000 people, including persons and
parents of persons with disabilities, government officials, and
disability professionals.  Among the most frequently-cited
problems were discrimination and the inadequacy of laws to
protect the rights of persons with disabilities.  This was by no
means Dart s introduction to civil rights issues.  On the
contrary, Dart had become an impassioned advocate for the civil
rights of African Americans as a student at the University of
Houston, where he argued that black students should be allowed to
attend the all-white university.  By the 1980s, Dart viewed
disability rights in a broader context of human rights and as a
logical and necessary extension of the civil rights guaranteed
for African Americans.
     In matters of fundamental human rights, there must be no
retreat. 
          National Council on DisabilityDart and Dusenbury took
the feedback obtained at public forums to heart in designing the
NCD report, in which the spirit and content of human rights,
civil rights, and disability rights are pervasive.  Persons
throughout the nation reviewed the various iterations of the
document, so the final product was truly national in origin.
Issued in August, 1983, the National Policy on Disability built
on the independent living philosophy: pursuit of  maximum
independence, self-reliance, productivity, quality of life
potential and equitable mainstream social participation.   While
individuals must assume primary responsibility for their lives,
the report said, the Federal Government had a critical role to
play. This included 22 different policy areas in need of
attention, ranging from accessibility issues, to employment,
education, and research.   Part of the government s obligation,
contended the report, was  to develop a comprehensive, internally
unified body of disability-related law which guarantees and
enforces equal rights and provides opportunities for individuals
with disabilities,  including integrating persons with
disabilities into all existing civil rights legislation.   In
matters of fundamental human rights,  the report declared in
vintage Dart form,  there must be no retreat. 
     This was not the first call for a comprehensive body of
civil rights law protecting persons with disabilities.  State and
local governments throughout the nation were passing a multitude
of laws and constitutional amendments some amending civil rights
legislation, others creating new disability-specific provisions. 
Others in the disability community had talked about it.  The NCD
report, however, was a powerful declaration that also had the
backing of a federal agency.
     Unfortunately for NCD, the Reagan administration did not
take well to the document.  In fact, Dusenbury had to fund the
printing and distribution of the document with private funds
because the administration would not support it.  NCD did not
circulate the document widely, distributing it primarily to state
and national legislators, and little action was taken by
legislatures. Dusenbury subsequently drew the ire of the Reagan
administration when he refused to support its introduction of
legislation to disband the vocational rehabilitation program. 
Later that year, the White House asked Dusenbury to step down
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