The Other
Movement That Rosa Parks Inspired
By Sitting Down, She Made Room for People with Disabilities
Charles Wilson, The Washington Post, October 30, 2005
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On an
unseasonably warm September day in 1984, about a dozen men and
women rolled their wheelchairs in front of a city bus that was
pulling onto State Street in Chicago. Then they sat there and
didn't move. The group had no secret agenda; they simply wanted
to make a point. Days before, the Chicago Transit Authority had
announced that it was purchasing 363 new public buses -- and
that none of them would be equipped with wheelchair lifts to
serve disabled passengers because the lifts had been deemed too
expensive. This ragtag group of wheelchair riders, who were
affiliated with a disability rights organization called ADAPT,
or Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, decided to
protest that decision by obstructing a bus until the police
carted them away. Every one of them wore a simple paper name
tag, the sort that you would normally see at a meet-and-greet.
They all said: "My name is Rosa Parks."
Rosa Parks's act of courage in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 did
more than dismantle the system of racial segregation on public
transportation. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man
also created a legacy she never could have foreseen. It was
through Parks's example that the disabled community transformed
its own often disorganized cause into a unified disability
rights movement. "Had it not been for Parks and the bus boycott,
there is no question that the disability rights movement would
have been light-years behind, if it would have ever occurred,"
says Michael Auberger, a disability rights activist who was one
of the first ! to place his wheelchair in front of a bus in the
early 1980s. "Her genius was that she saw the bus as the great
integrator: It took you to work, it took you to play, it took
you to places that you were never before seen. We began to see
the bus the same way, too, and it empowered a group of people
who had been just as disenfranchised as African Americans."
The disability rights movement could in no sense have been
called a movement when Parks refused to yield her seat. At that
time, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities reached
over 70 percent, and organizations that rallied for rights for
people with disabilities focused on solutions that were specific
to a single disorder. "The disability community was fragmented,"
says Bob Kafka, a quadriplegic who broke his neck in 1973 and
who was an early organizer for ADAPT. "The deaf community wanted
interpreters. People with mobility issues wanted curb cuts. The
blind wanted more sensory communication. Everyone saw themselves
as a deaf person, or a blind person, or a mental health person.
We were tossed salad, not fondue."
Parks's action offered these separate communities a strategy
that unified their various wishes. "Rosa Parks energized us in
that she was the perfect symbol for when the meek become
militant," says Kafka. "She was someone who was willing to cross
the line." And the fight for accessible public transportation
was to be the single issue that catalyzed disparate disability
groups into a common cause.
By the 1960s and '70s, many cities had introduced paratransit
services that picked up disabled patients. The officials who
controlled city budgets, though, typically stipulated that these
buses could be used by an individual only a few times a month
and that the buses could be used only by appointment. So, in the
late '70s and early '80s, some activists began to extend the
logic of Parks's silent act of defiance to their own cause:
Buses that divided people into separate categories, they said,
were inherently unequal. Disabled people shouldn't be limited to
using paratransit buses. They deserved to ride the city buses,
just like everyone else.
"How could you go to school, or go on a date, or volunteer
somewhere if the only trips deemed worth funding for you were
medical trips?" wrote ADAPT member Stephanie Thomas in her
introduction to "To Ride the Public's Buses," a collection of
articles about the early bus actions that appeared in Disability
Rag. "How could you get a job if you could only get 3 rides a
week? If you were never on time?"
Parks's method of dissent -- sitting still -- was well suited to
a community in which many people found themselves having to do
that very thing all day long. Within two decades of her refusal
to give up her seat, disabled people in cities across the
country began staging their own "sit-ins" by parking their
wheelchairs in front of ill-equipped city buses -- or,
alternatively, by ditching their wheelchairs and crawling onto
the stairs of the bus vestibules.
Some of the sit-ins were individual acts of defiance. In
Hartford, Conn., 63-year-old Edith Harris parked her wheelchair
in front of 10 separate local buses on a single day after
waiting nearly two hours for an accessible bus. Increasingly,
though, the sit-ins were organized by ADAPT and involved many
wheelchair users at a single location.
These actions began to change both how disabled people were
perceived and how they perceived themselves. "Without the
history of Parks and Martin Luther King, the only argument that
the disability community had was the Jerry Lewis Principle,"
explains Auberger. "The Poor Pathetic Cripple Principle. But if
you take a single disabled person and you show them that they
can stop a bus, you've empowered that person. And you've made
them feel they had rights."
The sit-ins also began to bring about concrete changes in the
policies of urban transportation boards. In 1983, the city of
Denver gave up its initial resistance and retrofitted all 250 of
its buses with lifts after 45 wheelchair users blocked buses at
the downtown intersection of Colfax Avenue and Broadway. Similar
moves were made by Washington's Metro board in 1986 and by
Chicago's transit authority in 1989. And in 1990, when the
landmark Americans With Disabilities Act cleared Congress, the
only provisions that went into effect immediately were those
that mandated accessible public transportation.
If Rosa Parks left a lasting legacy on the disability rights
movement, it is important to recognize that it is a legacy that
is largely unfinished. A restored version of the bus that Rosa
Parks rode in Montgomery recently went on display at the Henry
Ford Museum near Detroit, the city where Parks lived her last
decades and died last Monday. Detroit's mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick,
who is up for reelection on Nov. 8, memorialized Parks by saying
that "she stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here
because of her."
Kilpatrick failed to mention a further irony, though: The
Justice Department joined a suit against his city in March. It
was initially filed in August 2004, by Richard Bernstein, a
blind 31-year-old lawyer from the Detroit suburb of Farmington
Hills, on behalf of four disabled inner-city clients. His
plaintiffs said that they routinely waited three to four hours
in severe cold for a bus with a working lift. Their complaint
cited evidence that half of the lifts on the city's bus fleet
were routinely broken. The complaint did not ask for
compensation. It demanded only that the Motor City comply with
the Americans With Disabilities Act. The city recently purchased
more accessible buses, but the mayor didn't offer a plan for
making sure the buses stayed in good working order. He has
publicly disparaged Bernstein on radio as an example of
"suburban guys coming into our community trying to raise up the
concerns of people when this administration is going to the wall
on this issue of disabled riders."
Mayor Kilpatrick is not going to the wall, and neither are many
other mayors in this country. A 2002 federal Bureau of
Transportation Statistics study found that 6 million Americans
with disabilities still have trouble obtaining the
transportation they need. Many civic leaders and officials at
transit organizations have made arguments about the economic
difficulty of installing lifts on buses and maintaining them.
But they are seeing only one side of the argument: More people
in the disability community would pursue jobs and pay more taxes
if they could only trust that they could get to work and back
safely.
Public officials who offered elaborate eulogies to Parks's
memory last week should evaluate whether they are truly living
up to the power of her ideas. During a visit to Detroit in
August to speak to disabled transit riders for a project I was
working on, I met Robert Harvey, who last winter hurled his
wheelchair in front of a bus pulling onto Woodward Avenue after
four drivers in a row had passed him by. (He was knocked to the
curb.) I met Carolyn Reed, who has spina bifida and had lost a
job because she could rarely find a bus that would get her to
work on time. Her able-bodied friends had also recently stopped
inviting her to the movies. She guessed why: A few times over
the past months, they had found themselves waiting late at night
with her for hours to catch a bus with a working lift. "I'd say,
'Go ahead, go ahead, I'll be all right,' " she told me. "And
they'd say, 'We're n! ot leaving you out here.' " I also met
Willie Cochran, a double amputee who once waited six hours in
freezing temperatures for a bus that would take him home from
dialysis treatment.
None of this should be happening in America. "Rosa Parks could
get on the bus to protest," says Roger McCarville, a veteran in
Detroit who once chained himself to a bus. "We still can't get
on the bus." A true tribute to Parks would be to ensure that
every American can.
Charles Wilson, a writer who lives in New York City, has been
doing research for a book about the disability rights movement.
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