35 Years On – Reflections on the Anniversary of the ADA

COURTNEY WILLIAMS, HOST: From KVMR and in partnership with FREED, this is Disability Rap.

AMI HYTEN: We had these laws and these resources from the 1970s, but they really didn't seem to pick up steam and get the wind under them that they needed until the Americans with Disabilities Act.

WILLIAMS: Today, reflections on the Americans with Disabilities Act, 35 years after it was passed.

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EDDIE YTUARTE: I strongly, strongly believe that those things don't happen because of the goodwill of politicians or bureaucrats. What really gives it the force is our work as the work of the disability community itself.

WILLIAMS: That's all coming up on Disability Rap. Stay tuned.

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WILLIAMS: Welcome to Disability Rap. I'm Courtney Williams, Disability Rap's production assistant, sitting in for Carl Sigmond and Lindsey Wells.

This month we are celebrating 35 years since the historic signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law on July 26th, 1990. Back in 2020, we aired a show celebrating the 30th anniversary of the ADA with FREED's then executive director, Ana Acton, and our current host, Carl Sigmond, along with a round table of guests who joined us to share their personal stories of how this landmark legislation impacted their lives and communities.

The show was so remarkable, we're bringing you the highlights for this episode. Our guest, Geeta Dardick, and her husband, Sam, were lifelong residents and farmers in Nevada County, and with encouragement from Ed Roberts, helped to start FREED in the 1980s. Geeta and Sam were present in Washington DC to witness President George H.W. Bush sign the ADA.

Mark Fenicle, longtime FREED Board member and current chair of the FREED Board, also joined us. Mark was a student at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s as part of the Physically Disabled Students Program, and later went on to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs for 31 years. We also heard from Eddie Ytuarte of Oakland, a producer with the Pushing Limits radio collective at KPFA, where he's been working on disability-related content since 2003. Eddie served on the Oakland Mayor's Commission on Persons with Disabilities and served for six years on the board of what is now Disability Rights California.

From Topeka, Kansas, Ami Hyten was with us. At the time of the show, Ami was the executive director at the Topeka Independent Living Resource Center. She's currently the director of the Lois Curtis Center, a disability resource center also in Topeka. She has been involved in grassroots disability organizing for a quarter of a century as a member of ADAPT and with the Disability Rights Action Coalition in Housing. Let's go right to the start of the show. Ana will get things going.

ANA ACTON, HOST: We wanted to get right into it. Geeta, I want to start with you and just to get the conversation going. Geeta, you are a founding member of FREED. The vision of FREED was five years before the ADA was passed. Can you take us back? What was it like living in Nevada County for Sam, your family, you before the ADA and before FREED?

GEETA DARDICK: Well, there weren't any disability rights at all. There was no blue curbs. There was no access into buildings. They'd say things like, "Well, no one comes to my store." We'd say, "Well, they can't." That was something else. We started FREED with a man named Tom Solinsky, who was wonderful, and my husband, Sam, and me. We started it and it was very exciting. We had our first board of directors. It was nine members, George Elliot, who was deaf, Marilyn Beckwith, who was blind, Sam and me, Sam was a wheelchair user, and Al Dover was a lawyer in town. He named it FREED, which has been the name that stuck with us all this time. We went to the signing of the ADA in Washington, DC, and it was so exciting. I was up next to Teddy Kennedy, and George and Barbara Bush.

CARL SIGMOND, HOST: Here now, we actually have a clip from that day. This is a clip of George H.W. Bush right before he signed the ADA into law.

PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: Three weeks ago, we celebrated our nation's Independence Day, and today we're here to rejoice in and celebrate another Independence Day, one that is long overdue. With today's signing of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, 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.

As I look around at all these joyous faces, I remember clearly how many years of dedicated commitment have gone into making this historic new Civil Rights Act a reality. It's been the work of a true coalition, a strong and inspiring coalition of people who have shared both a dream and a passionate determination to make that dream come true.

DARDICK: It was just thrilling. There were several hundred people there, and they represented every disability. I've never seen so many disabled people, and it was really exciting.

SIGMOND: Yes, and I want to bring Ami in here now-- with disabilities before the ADA and before Section 504 of the Rehab Act.

HYTEN: I actually graduated high school in 1990 when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. I, through my young adulthood and college career, had a number of jobs, but most significantly, I had a job at a group home with a large group home provider in Kansas. It was in a time when the state was closing down a lot of our large bed institutions for folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities and moving them into these group home settings.

These providers thought of themselves as being very progressive. They were putting people in the least restrictive environment, they were only living with seven unrelated other individuals. I worked at this place and for a while, but I kept saying, "Here I am, I'm in my early 20s, I'm working with people who are 30, 40, 50, 70 years old who've lived their entire lives in institutions that are now in this different institution," I kept saying, "Man, come on, there's got to be a better way, right? This can't be it for us. We can surely do better."

Eventually, I decided to go to law school and applied actually for-- the agency that I work for now used to have a legal department that sort of worked behind the protection and advocacy agency for our state. The very first day of law school, I managed to get a job here as a law clerk. I tell people the story. The first thing that happened is I get my first case assignment, and it is a woman who lives in a community in Kansas. She lives, literally, on one side of the railroad tracks, but every public service she needs, the grocery store, city hall, the post office, everything is on the other side of that railroad track, but there's no sidewalk. She uses a scooter. She's literally trapped in her own home because there are no sidewalks in this community.

The lawyer that I worked for at the agency said, "Ami, go do this research." I went to the law school, and I did the research thing. I tell people, literally, when I went to the library at the law school, there was one shelf of disability law books. That was it. Not one bookshelf, but one shelf within a bookshelf. That was the sum total of all the disability treatises that they had. I was like, "Well, okay, it's just one shelf." I literally began at one end and read my way, every single page through, to the far end of every one of those books. I just treated them as if they were the Harry Potter series.

Read all the way through, came back to the office three days later, and said to the lawyer, "What the hell? This isn't an ADA thing. This is something that these people should've been working on since 1973. I was born in 1972. The fact that we have places in Kansas where folks are trapped in their homes because we don't have sidewalks, completely inexcusable."

It's fantastic here because that was Ed's story, where he goes to college and you're trapped. You have to live in this place, you have to live in the infirmary in order to go to college.

It's our story time and time again, even though we have these laws that start and listening to the birth story of FREED, the same kind of thing, where we had these laws and these resources from the 1970s, but they really didn't seem to pick up steam and get the wind under them that they needed until the Americans with Disabilities Act.

SIGMOND: I want to bring Eddie into the conversation. Could you share a bit of your story and what the ADA and independent living movement has meant to you?

YTUARTE: Thank you, Carl. I wasn't really too politically involved. I knew I had a disability. I was aware of it. I was conscious of it. I had polio at a year-and-a-half. Right now, I use two crutches and a brace. I'm 75 years old. Luckily, around 1970, I went to Cal State LA to study to be a teacher, oddly enough. That didn't out too good, but I was lucky enough to be involved and got to know some very progressive, mostly Latino activists who some were socialists and some were quite progressive.

I think that my real education began with those individuals. I started doing some political orientated work around the campus, Cal State LA. I worked there. It was just a very good learning experience and an introduction to me to be involved in community/political work. From there, I moved to the Bay Area. I've been up here ever since the mid-'70s. Meantime, I saw the growth of the disability awareness and movement begin in Berkeley, but it could've began in other cities. There's nothing magical about Berkeley. It could've began in Topeka, New York City, or whatever.

Luckily enough, it came near me in Berkeley. I became conscious as a person with a disability and started being aware of issues and problems affecting the disability community. I began working with the-- I got a spot on the Mayor's Commission with people with disabilities around the mid-'90s, and that impelled me to do disability work. All in all, I ended up being on Pushing Limits radio program on KPFA, which is one of the five stations from the Pacifica network in the country, KPFA, and we are called Pushing Limits.

The other question about the ADA and 504 and those achievements, I strongly, strongly believe that those things don't happen because of the goodwill of politicians or bureaucrats, but what really gives it the force is our work, is the work of the disability community itself. These great things wouldn't happen if it wasn't because of our efforts collectively.

ACTON: Well, thank you so much, Eddie, for mentioning that. This is a question for any of you that want to weigh in. It's interesting to me when I talk to people with significant disabilities, even today and throughout my career, the biggest barrier that individuals will say that they experience is the stigma and discrimination. We can pass laws like the ADA, they guarantee equal access and rights for us, but it doesn't necessarily change the heart of the nation, I guess I would say, or the way that people see disability. Can one of you speak to that about, how do you make real societal change? We're in the middle of a racial justice movement that's happening right here. I see a lot of parallels with any civil rights movement. How do we get to a point where we actually-- society sees people with disabilities differently?

DARDICK: Well, Sam Dardick was definitely a go-getter. This is an example. We went out to dinner in Nevada City, and there was no accessibility to the bathroom. We didn't know what to do because he couldn't get in. He got out of his chair onto the floor and crawled to the bathroom. Later, I wrote it up. I was a professional writer, and I wrote it up, and it did very well that article because it was just so shocking. I think that my husband was very active and didn't put up with stuff. He really taught people a lot about disability.

ACTON: That is a great example. It reminds me, too, Ami, there was the Capitol Crawl that happened. It's like, how was people getting out of their wheelchairs physically and crawling up the Capitol an important piece in the passage of the ADA?

HYTEN: It's like I tell people, that if there had not been-- if we had not learned that the drama of lunch counter sit-ins or the visual image of people having fire hoses turned on them when they were peacefully assembling, if we don't have the groundwork of those racial justice movements, then we don't have the Capitol Crawl. The combined courage and creativity of people like Sam and the understanding that that imagery, that that ingenuity is something that can be harnessed to create collective power, that's what builds the power behind the 504.

The 504 takeovers in San Francisco, the Capitol Crawl, quite frankly, those of us who were there getting dragged out of Mitch McConnell's office in 2016 and 2017. The disability rights movement has built on the shoulder and the framework that has been established for us by racial justice movements in dramatizing the severity that we experience when these barriers are allowed to continue to exist.

SIGMOND: Mark, I want to bring you in here. For our listeners who may not be familiar with the 504 takeover or Capitol Crawl or even the protest for Medicaid a few years ago, could you just give a bird's eye view sketch of those direct actions and what they meant for our movement?

MARK FENICLE: Well, just to step back in time, some of the things that I noticed when I first arrived in Berkeley, I went down Telegraph Avenue, passed a mom and pop store with a big sign right in front of the door that said, "No wheelchairs." This is one of the most progressive cities in the world, and they were allowed to have signs that said no wheelchairs. This is also after Ed and John, and all the folks had gone to city council and worked their tails off to get things done. Some of the attendants were pouring asphalt on curbs to make their own curb cuts.

It's a long, hard road. The 504, the Capitol Crawl, all of those types of things, they get attention. I'll just put it in plain language. One of the things you want to do is shame our public officials and embarrass them so that all the world can see just how obstructionist that they are. That's a start. The environment we find ourselves in now, it seems that people are proud of being obstructionists. I don't know how we fight that, but that's one of the things that we need to address. 

One of the other things I would say, too, that from my own personal experience, prior to going to Berkeley, I had very little to do with any other disabled people. When I got to Berkeley, got in with the Physically Disabled Students Program, I was surrounded with people of so many different, diverse types of disabilities. It opened my eyes, and it made me lose a lot of the shame that I had for looking like such a spectacle when I was walking on my crutches and the like. It taught me that I wasn't the only disabled person who had a brain, and I wasn't the only person who had experienced having to have my mother go to bat for me to get me back into public school after I had polio. Ed went through the same thing before my time. We just have to persist. You have to just keep after them. Use whatever tools you can find.

ACTON: Thank you, Mark. Thank you for sharing that. That's powerful. I have a question for Eddie, but I just want to take a moment, Ami, if you could just briefly, for those that are listening, what was the 504 sit-in, and what was the Capitol Crawl?

HYTEN: Laws don't actually mean anything until the regulations that implement and enforce those laws are written. In the 504 sit-in, what had happened was, the law had been passed, but the person responsible for making those regulations had not done their job. They were sort of languishing, and so a group of disabled activists decided that they would visit his office and wait him out. Wait him out, they did. To this day, it was the longest occupation of a federal office building in the history of our country. It was led, organized, run by a group of people with disabilities and supported, in very large part, by the Black Panthers.

In 1989, 1990, the barrier was our landmark civil rights legislation was literally in the final days, or should have been in its final days for passage to say, people with disabilities should have access to all aspects of community life and for whatever reason, the bill had encountered a barrier, it wasn't moving forward. A group of activists got together and decided that they would all dramatically crawl up the steps to the Capitol with the press there, with the cameras rolling, and create the visual image of the barrier and our willingness to literally drag our bodies across these stairs to overcome these barriers.

ACTON: I'm just going to ask one last question of any of you that would like to answer this before we wrap it up. Imagine we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the ADA. What would you say, where are we as a movement? As a nation, where are we with the 40th anniversary of the ADA we accomplished?

YTUARTE: I'll start briefly. This is Eddie.

ACTON: Thank you.

YTUARTE: ADA was the beginning. It's up to us to follow through and make it work.

FENICLE: This is Mark. As I had talked with Carl about a couple of weeks ago, the ADA is a good start. It's been a long, hard road getting to that point, and I'm afraid it's going to be a long, hard road from this point on. It brought to the attention a lot of the things that disabled people live with and need from society, and we just need to keep after it to let ourselves be seen, which actually is a huge thing that has happened with disabled people. It was a long period in history where we were invisible. They even had laws keeping us from being on the streets. That's a huge change. It's a very positive change, but we have to keep after it.

HYTEN: In my world, my ideal ADA nirvana is, we have eliminated the institutional bias so that congregate living and congregate services, or services and living provided in those types of settings, are the exception, not the rule. That guardianship is nearly, if not completely, eliminated so that people can self-actualize, use supportive decision making, and be as self-determining as possible, and parenting with a disability receives parity and the respect and the honor that it deserves.

ACTON: Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much. I really appreciate your time today and joining us on Disability Rap. Thank you, Geeta Dardick, for joining. Ami Hyten, Mark Fenicle, and Eddie Ytuarte for joining us today on Disability Rap.

WILLIAMS: That was an excerpt of our show, reflecting on the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, hosted by Ana Acton and Carl Sigmond.

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WILLIAMS: That does it for the show. Disability Rap is produced and edited by Carl Sigmond and me, Courtney Williams. You can go to our website, disabilityrap.org, to listen to past shows, read transcripts, and subscribe to the Disability Rap podcast. You can also subscribe to our podcast by searching Disability Rap on any of the major podcast platforms. We're brought to you by KVMR in partnership with FREED, and we're distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. For Carl Sigmond and Lindsey Wells, I'm Courtney Williams with another edition of Disability Rap.

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