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THE CAPITOL CRAWL activists brought social and physical obstacles to light to help pass the ada Story by craig collins
B
y March 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) had made significant progress on its way to becoming law. It had already passed the Senate by a 76-8 vote months earlier, and it had powerful sponsors and supporters in both the House and the Senate, in both the Republican and Democratic parties. However, it had stalled in the House, grinding its way through several committees. Given other abandonments of legal recognition of the civil rights of people with disabilities, like the implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and writing of regulations, people within the disability community were not entirely optimistic that things would work out well in the end. The uncertain future of the ADA legislation explains why Capitol Hill became the setting for one of American history’s most extraordinary public protests – why 60 people with disabilities cast aside their wheelchairs, crutches, and walkers to crawl or drag themselves, step by step, up the 78 marble stairs of the Capitol’s West Front on March 12, 1990. The Capitol Crawl, as the protest came to be known, was intended to bring to light the obstacles, physical and social, that people with disabilities faced daily in their efforts just to proceed with their lives. By
openly illustrating the struggles that people in the disabilities community faced, the protesters hoped to spur Congress to pass the ADA and protect the civil rights of people with disabilities. The protest on the steps of the Capitol was not without precedent. Before there was a campaign to pass the ADA, there was a campaign to ride public buses. It began in Denver, in 1974, when a radical minister by the name of Wade Blank, after being fired from his job as a nursing home aide for repeated acts of rebellion against the dehumanization of the nursing home residents, established Colorado’s first independent living center, the Atlantis Community; it was also one of the first independent living centers in the nation. Within a few years, it became obvious to Blank and the other members of the Atlantis Community that it would be impossible for people with disabilities to live independently if they couldn’t move about freely – and they couldn’t move about freely if operators such as local transit authorities continued to delay making the modifications, including wheelchair lifts on buses, required by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The residents formed an organization modeled after the grassroots, nonviolent direct-action groups that had achieved so much during the civil rights movement.
Atlantis staged its first protest on July 5 and 6, 1978, when Blank and a group known as the “Gang of 19” surrounded two inaccessible buses operated by Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), boxing them in for 24 hours. These first activists – like the Greensboro Four who sparked the nationwide campaign to integrate public lunch counters in 1960 – inspired further action. As their battle for access to RTD continued, they took steps to address the transportation accessibility problem in communities across the nation. Atlantis began the Access Institute and recruited disability activists from around the country. These individuals eventually formed ADAPT, American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit. Protesters blocked buses and crawled up the stairs of buses to illustrate the absurdity of the operators’ refusal to comply with federal law. In 1982, Denver’s Regional Transit District conceded, ordering 89 new accessible buses. ADAPT’s Denver success led it to form chapters in other cities. For the next seven years, the organization mobilized protests at biannual conventions of the American Public Transit Association, or APTA (now American Public Transportation Association), the trade association for public transportation providers.
