Today we take many of the ADA’s changes to society — curb cuts in sidewalks and closed captioning on entertainment, to name just two examples — for granted. But the act’s passage was anything but guaranteed.
By spring of 1990, the ADA had been trapped in legislative limbo for months. Despite the strong support of then-president George H.W. Bush, the act was languishing in Congress, caught in the deliberations of House subcommittees. Many U.S. Representatives balked at the expense and complication posed by the ADA’s requirements.
Enter ADAPT — American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit — a grassroots disability rights organization that had been staging protests across the country even before its official founding in 1983. On March 12, 1990, ADAPT led a procession of more than 500 marchers, including other disability activists and lobbyists, from the White House to the west side of the U.S. Capitol.
There, in the kind of guerrilla civic action for which the organization had become known, scores of marchers dropped to the ground and began the long journey up the hard marble stairs leading to the “People’s House.” They climbed backwards or on their hands and knees, step-by-painstaking-step. “As I’m seeing the people around me,” recalled Anita Cameron, one of the ADAPT activists who made her way up that day, “I'm like, ‘whoa, we are doing it. We are really doing it. We’re, like, crawling into history.’”
📖 The civil rights march you DON'T know.
