A History of the ADA

A History of the ADA

Story By Josie Byzek

On July 26, 1990, as he signed the sweeping civil rights legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), into law, President George H. W. Bush declared, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”

He said more than that, of course. He thanked Evan Kemp and Justin Dart, who flanked him during the signing, and he cited the mighty coalition that succeeded in getting the ADA before him to sign. He noted there were too many instrumental people to name, a salute to how robust the movement to pass the civil rights law was.

It was the most powerful coalition of people with disabilities and their allies ever assembled. They all had a stake in getting this law signed, from the mother who testified to Congress that she could not find an undertaker to bury her child who died of AIDS to the Vietnam War vet who could not freely leave his housing project because the sidewalks were not accessible for his wheelchair.

There would be no ADA without thinkers like law professor Chai Feldblum, currently serving a second term as a commissioner with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), who was the lead attorney on the team that drafted the ADA, or Patrisha Wright of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), nicknamed “the General” for how well she kept the lobbying heat on in Congress. Or without leaders like Lex Frieden, executive director of the National Council on Disability (NCD) at the time, who oversaw early drafts of the law.

In fact, Feldblum, Wright, and Frieden’s experience speak to how sweeping the ADA is, as all three of their rights as people with disabilities are covered even though one has an anxiety disorder, one has a visual impairment, and one has quadriplegia. These disabilities may seem dissimilar, but the discrimination faced as a result of each was effectively the same.

Evan Kemp speaks at the Rally before the Capitol Crawl in Washington, D.C. Kemp, the disability movement’s “inside man,” was an influential advocate who helped to ensure the ADA’s passage.

Tom Oli Photography

But when telling the tale of the ADA, most agree that the two men who flanked Bush while he signed the law deserve special recognition. On his right sat Kemp, who had muscular dystrophy, and on his left sat Dart, who had polio.

Evan Kemp, the Inside Man

Kemp was the disability movement’s “inside man.” In the 1970s, Kemp worked as an attorney in Washington, D.C., and struck up a friendship with C. Boyden Gray, who years later would become Bush’s chief counsel when he was vice president and then continue in that position through his presidency. Through Gray, Kemp also became friends with Bush, for whom Kemp wrote speeches for disability-related events. Kemp, a wheelchair user, was a tremendous advocate for disability issues. He pushed back against the Ronald Reagan administration when it tried to weaken disability-related regulations in the early 1980s and later served as the chair of the EEOC.

Like many with disabilities, Kemp was no stranger to the indignities of discrimination. Diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy when he was 12, he walked with a pronounced gait, and private law firms wouldn’t hire a man with a disability. So he worked for the federal government. At first he held a position with the Internal Revenue Service, and then moved to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He became a wheelchair user in 1971 when a garage door at the SEC slammed on his leg, fracturing it so badly that even after it healed he could no longer walk. ‘’When I was walking, I had the same disability,” he once said. “But when I was in a wheelchair it was more visible.” Formerly in line for a promotion, he was told a wheelchair user could not hold a supervisory position. “The SEC told me my disability precluded me from supervising three people. President Bush appointed me to supervise over 3,000 employees when he made me chair of EEOC,” explained Kemp.

In 1977, Kemp was able to sue for job discrimination — and won. But he had had enough of being denied positions for which he was immensely qualified. So he left the government in 1980, took over as director of the Disability Rights Center, and became Washington, D.C.’s most prominent disability rights advocate.

Protesters march in Washington, D.C., in March 1990 as part of a campaign to urge representatives in the House of Representatives to move ADA legislation out of committee.

Tom Olin Photography

From his friendship with Gray and Bush to his experience working within government to his intimate knowledge of being excluded because of a disability, Kemp, a Republican, was in exactly the right place at the right time to help shepherd the ADA toward passage.

“Even the Cleveland Browns football team played a role in building the coalition necessary to move the ADA into law,” stated Janine Bertram Kemp, Evan’s widow. “ADAPT leader Wade Blank and Evan were both avid Browns fans and it brought them together so that the grassroots had a line to the White House and visa versa,” she explained. Evan also had close ties to the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL). An example of this unity came into play in the summer of 1990. Although the president wanted to sign an ADA bill into law, his chief of staff tried to torpedo the bill. Evan Kemp called Blank and Marca Bristo, then-president of the NCIL, and they strategized an evening march to the White House. That gave the president the excuse to ask why protesters were angry with the administration and send another strong message to White House staff that he wanted ADA. “Veterans of the movement call that the plastic bag march because it was pouring rain and ADAPT distributed black plastic trash bags to marchers to serve as rain gear,” said Bertram Kemp.

In March 1990, when the ADA looked like it was stuck in committee, ADAPT (then called American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) held a march from the White House to the steps of the Capitol, using a makeshift ramp to get to the marble steps. ADAPT held a rally and then members crawled up the Capitol steps. The media reported the action as disabled people demanding rights. A “tour” of the Capitol that ADAPT had arranged turned into a meeting in the Capitol Rotunda between ADAPT and the House Speaker and the House Minority Leader and subsequent arrests – 104 of them – in the rotunda. The grassroots and insiders pushed the stuck bill out of committee.

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., left; Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, wiping a tear of joy; Justin Dart, chairman of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, wearing his trademark cowboy hat; and Yoshiko Dart, clapping her hands behind Justin, show their emotions while celebrating the passage of the ADA on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 1990.

AP Photography/John Duricka

Justin Dart, the “Father of the ADA”

While Kemp and other advocates in Washington, D.C., kept the heat on Gray and Bush from inside the Beltway, Dart, a wealthy man from a wealthy family, used his fortune to fire up the grassroots. Dart’s father, Justin Whitlock Dart, Sr., was president of Dart Industries — the company’s most famous product is probably Tupperware — and his mother, Ruth Walgreen Dart, was the daughter of Charles R. Walgreen, of Walgreens pharmacies.

Dart contracted polio in 1948 as he was preparing to enter the University of Houston. He earned degrees in history and education, but the university wouldn’t give him a teaching certificate because he was disabled. Today the university is home to the Justin Dart, Jr. Center for Students with Disabilities, which assists all students with disabilities to achieve their academic goals.

After graduating, Dart’s father sent him overseas to launch Tupperware™ Japan, a company that he grew from four employees to 25,000. He embraced the “corporate playboy” lifestyle — chasing booze, women, and money.

He founded a greeting card company staffed by employees with disabilities during this time period, but said he felt like a fraud, as if he’d fallen off the “Gandhi track” to race along the “Donald Trump” track.

This all changed dramatically when he came face to face with the evils of institutionalization. In 1966, he toured a facility for children with polio in Saigon, Vietnam. “The floor of the whole place was covered with children ages 4 to 10, with bloated stomachs and matchstick limbs,” he told New Mobility magazine. “They were starving to death and lying in their own urine and feces, covered with flies. A little girl reached up to me and looked into my eyes. I automatically took her hand and my photographer took pictures. She had the most serene look I have ever seen — and it penetrated to the deepest part of my consciousness. I thought, here is a person almost dead, and she knows it. She’s reaching out for God and has found a counterfeit saint doing a photo op. I was engulfed by the devastating perception that I have met real evil, and I am part of it. The way I’m living and dealing with disability is killing this little girl. I’m going to go to my hotel, drink Johnnie Walker, eat a steak, and this picture is going to be in some magazine. I told [my fiancée] Yoshiko, ‘We cannot go on as we have been. Our lives have got to mean something. We have got to get into this fight and stop this evil.’”

When Dart and Yoshiko moved back to the United States, he began serving the public in high-level roles, including being appointed by Reagan in 1981 to be vice chair of the NCD. Dart, like Kemp, was a high-profile Republican with a visible disability — and it didn’t hurt that Reagan was a close friend of the Dart family.

While vice chair of NCD, Dart used his own money to tour every state and territory to meet with all who were interested in disability policy. The tour allowed Dart to meet face to face with people who had every type of disability and hear their concerns. This trip took place in pre-ADA America, a time period where there were no guarantees of accessible hotel rooms or transportation. When Dart returned to Washington, D.C., he shared these conversations with his fellow council members and NCD drafted a report, “Toward Independence,” calling for a law that would protect the civil rights of people with disabilities. This would eventually lead to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tom Olin Photography

Lois Curtis (top) and Elaine Wilson (bottom) were the plaintiffs in the landmark case Olmstead v. L.C. and E.W., in which they sued the state of Georgia for forcing them to live in an institution even though state assessments indicated they would be better served with community based living and treatment. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that, under the ADA, people with disabilities have the right to live in the community rather than in institutions.

Tom Olin Photography

These tours of the nation and the subsequent personal connection to the grassroots of the young disability rights movement led to Dart becoming known as the “Father of the ADA.”

Those in power, too, connected Dart with the ADA. Once, when he saw Dart wearing his iconic cowboy hat at a White House reception, Bush introduced him as “the ADA man.” That hat is now lodged in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; Dart’s basic steel-framed manual wheelchair resides at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia. Although he could afford the finest equipment, Dart insisted on using the same type of wheelchair as impoverished Americans with disabilities.

Section 504 – The Accidental Civil Rights Law

These early origin stories of the ADA are stirring and dramatic — all the more because they’re true. But they can give the mistaken impression that America was a disability rights wasteland, and then along came the ADA. Certainly the nation was much less accessible, yet the ADA was built upon the solid work of earlier pieces of legislation. Part of its brilliance is how it took those earlier laws and wove them together into one comprehensive act.

Probably the most important precursor to the ADA was Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It is very short, a tiny part of the overall law: “No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States, shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Nixon refused to sign the rehabilitation act into law, as it called for new funding for independent living programs, a new idea back then. The law came before him twice, and twice he would not sign it. The third time it hit his desk, it was watered down and most of the funding for independent living was removed. So he signed it, without understanding that the language in the law’s Section 504 would usher in civil rights for people with disabilities.

Disability rights activists congregate in San Francisco’s U.N. Plaza (City Hall is visible in the background) in 1977 to protest the failure of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act’s Section 504 regulations to be released.

Anthony Tusler, 1977

And this is where it gets interesting.

Dr. James L. Cherry, a veteran with quadriplegia who was a research patient at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, read Section 504 and asked the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) when the regulations would be promulgated. HEW told him never, since it was just a policy statement.

“I aggressively disagreed,” wrote Cherry in The Ragged Edge. “I didn’t see mere ‘policy’ — I saw legal rights and power; and I wanted both.”

Cherry sought support from disability groups to push for regulations to be written, but didn’t have much luck. Finally, he convinced attorneys from the Georgetown University Law Center to help him file a federal lawsuit, Cherry v. Mathews, on Feb. 13, 1976. He won his case and HEW was ordered to develop regulations. At the same time, and unknown to Cherry, the new American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities was also lobbying HEW for Section 504 regulations.

In 1974, Linda Pedro, from New Mexico, sued under 504 for the right to stay in her own home and raise her son. Pedro became quadriplegic after sustaining a spinal cord injury in a car accident. Her husband left her with a young son. Rather than provide services and supports, the state planned to break up her family by forcing her into a nursing home and placing her son, Daniel, in foster care. She sued under Section 504 and won, setting an early stage for ADA and later the Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C. and E.W., which many term the disability movement’s Brown v. Board of Education, that gave people with disabilities the right to live in the least restrictive environment.

In April 1977, activists demanding that Section 504 regulations be issued staged a sit-in at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) building in San Francisco, California, that lasted 28 days. Sit-in organizer Judy Heumann (far right) speaks with fellow protesters from inside the HEW building.

Photo by Hollynn D'Lil

Sit-in participants slept on the HEW building floor during the course of the demonstration.

Photo by Hollynn D'Lil

In 1977, the regulations were written, but HEW Secretary David Mathews refused to sign them, even though he was held in contempt. He was outgoing anyway, as President Jimmy Carter was just taking office and had already appointed Joseph Califano as secretary of HEW. But Califano also did not want to sign off on them.

By this time, there was a groundswell movement among people with disabilities demanding those regulations be signed. “If the regulations were not signed by April 4 in the form they were in when Califano took office, there would be nonviolent demonstrations in HEW offices nationwide,” wrote David Pfeiffer in Disability Studies Quarterly, which he edited. Pfeiffer was organizing demonstrations for the regulations in Boston, Massachusetts, and warned that demonstrations in San Francisco, California, and Washington, D.C., would be large.

And thus the stage was set for the longest sit-in in U.S. history until the 2011 Occupy movement broke its record. The demonstration in San Francisco began on April 5, 1977, as activists filed into the city’s HEW building and refused to leave until the regulations were signed. With the help of the Black Panthers, local church groups, and even local politicians who donated mattresses, they stayed 28 days. Finally, Washington, D.C, invited a contingent of the activists to the Capitol for negotiations and the regulations were signed soon after.

A polling place with accommodations for people with disabilities enables members of the disability community to exercise their right to vote. Passage of the ADA was significant in that it defined access – physical and social – for people with disabilities as a civil right, not a privilege or favor.

Contributed By Rocky Mountain ADA Center, a project of Meeting the Challenge Inc.

“We, who are considered the weakest, the most helpless people in our society, are the strongest and will not tolerate segregation, will not tolerate a society which sees us as less than whole people,” said Ed Roberts, who, along with Judy Heumann, is credited with organizing San Francisco’s sit-in. Roberts and Heumann are both well-known figures in the disability movement for founding and nurturing the independent living movement.

Why were these regulations so resisted? Discrimination against people with disabilities at the time was so common and so insidious that even many people with disabilities didn’t understand it for what it was. “People with disabilities ourselves didn’t think the issues we faced in our daily lives were the product of prejudice and discrimination,” wrote Kitty Cone in her article, “Short History of the 504 Sit-in.” “Disability had been defined by the medical model of rehabilitation, charity and paternalism. If I thought about why I couldn’t attend a university that was inaccessible, I would have said it was because I couldn’t walk, my own personal problem. Before Section 504, responsibility for the consequences of disability rested only on the shoulders of the person with a disability rather than being understood as a societal responsibility. Section 504 dramatically changed that societal and legal perception.”

Yet, like the ADA, Section 504 did not just spring into being from nothing. In 1968, the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) was signed, requiring federal buildings and federally funded buildings to be accessible to the public. This meant a way in, a way out, and — very important — accessible restrooms. Because of this law, Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards (UFAS) were developed by an Access Board, which still revises both UFAS and the ADA Accessibility Guidelines.

The ABA owes its existence to historian and author Hugh Gallagher, who, at the time, worked as legislative aide for Democratic Sen. E.L. Bartlett of Alaska. Gallagher, a wheelchair user since age 19 due to polio, shared his frustrations of trying to simply do his job, but being unable to access many federal buildings. About the law, Gallagher said, “I wanted it to be simple. I wanted accessibility to be one of the items on the checklist of designers and builders.”

Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., a supporter of the ADA, wrote, “Hugh’s most outstanding contribution to the quality of life of people with disabilities was to successfully place disability on the agenda of the Congress for the first time.”

The Right Place at the Right Time

Many other disability-related civil rights laws were passed in the years leading up to the ADA. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, was passed in 1975 with the intent of ensuring students with disabilities receive equal access to education. This act included students with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, which was important in building a crossdisability movement. The Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 and the Fair Housing Act Amendments of 1988 made it easier to travel and to have a home. And the rights of people with disabilities to live in the community also had begun to be recognized.

All of these laws, and many more not listed, had their own groups of supporters, and the ADA could not have been passed in as strong a form as it did without all of these efforts.

Who’s idea was the ADA? In a sense, it was everyone’s who was active in disability rights at the time. It was born in the Washington, D.C. Beltway in discussions between Evan Kemp and Phil Calkins, who dreamed about such a thing while holding trainings for the Disability Rights Center. It was born on the interstate highways connecting the public forums held by Justin and Yoshiko Dart. It was fought for in the HEW building in San Francisco and yearned for by young Judy Heumann, who demanded the right to teach school in New York City — the first wheelchair user to do so.

People march to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 11, 1988, during the Deaf President Now movement to name I. King Jordan president of Gallaudet University.

Gallaudet University Archives

The 1988 Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet University had a profound effect on the ADA in that it put disability in the mind and heart of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. The Gallaudet board of trustees was about to name Elisabeth Zinser, a hearing person who did not speak sign language, president of the university. In the history of the university, there had never been a deaf president. Students said they wanted I. King Jordan named president. Jordan was an educator who was deaf and part of the Gallaudet community. The students took over the university in protest. Kemp heard about the protest early on, went to Gallaudet, and got Bush to send a letter supporting Jordan as president. This connected the deaf and disability community to the vice president and also put disability discrimination in the future president’s consciousness.

When the ADA was signed on July 26, 1990, the president was flanked by two men, but those two men were flanked by thousands more. Held on the South Lawn of the White House, it was the largest signing ceremony in White House history, with more than 3,400 people in attendance. And certainly the ADA was one-of-akind legislation, comprehensively granting broad civil rights to citizens with disabilities, but it came about because of a long history of legislative action.

When Bush proclaimed the shameful walls of exclusion finally were falling down, thousands of activists nationwide felt a strong sense of accomplishment. But the ADA was neither a start nor an ending. Disability rights laws were passed before the ADA and have been passed since the ADA. The movement for full recognition of the civil rights of people with disabilities has come a long, long way, and the 25th anniversary of the ADA deserves to be celebrated, as do those who helped to make it possible. But like those activists who have come before us, we must continually look to what can come next. And once we achieve that, we must reach for more until every person with a disability has full and equal access to all our great society has to offer, until full inclusion is no longer a dream but a reality.

Youth attending a conference staged by the Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living cheer during a stop made by the ADA Legacy Tour, an exhibition traveling around the country to raise awareness and excitement in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the ADA.

Photo by Jon Wick

Josie Byzek is a longtime disability rights advocate who is currently the managing editor of New Mobility magazine. She became active in September 1990, two months after the ADA was signed, making her one of the first post-ADA advocates.