An American Minority’s Road to Rights
It may be the least-publicized revolution of our time but the one whose impact ultimately reaches the furthest, affecting the way our buildings and buses are built, the way our schools are structured, the way our businesses conduct hiring and outfit their work stations. It’s the disability-rights movement, and “Lives Worth Living,” a Thursday “Independent Lens” on PBS, reconstructs how it emerged and eventually pushed through the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.
The film opens with images from the past that are chillingly grim, especially those from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities on Staten Island, a nightmarish place exposed by, among others, a young television reporter named Geraldo Rivera in 1972. (Recent headlines have made clear that, four decades later, such problems persist in some places.) “There was a belief,” Ann Ford, director of the Illinois chapter of the National Council on Independent Living, says bluntly, “that if you had a disability, you didn’t have any desire to live a life.”
It was the return of injured veterans from World War II that began to shake that assumption. The veterans, viewed as heroes, were not being written off, and those born with disabilities started to think that they shouldn’t be either. The filmmakers interview some of the central figures in the formation of the movement, who talk about learning from the feminist and civil rights causes. Oddly, buses were again important, as Bob Kafka of the group Adapt notes.
“We didn’t want separate paratransit,” he says. “We wanted for people to be able to go to the bus stop like everybody else and get on a bus.” That simple demand, he says, evolved into the idea of access as a civil right.
It’s easy to forget that many of the changes made to benefit people with disabilities are quite recent. Frederick A. Fay, another early leader of the movement (he died in August), recalls what it was like to navigate the streets of Washington when he was younger.
“Downtown D.C., every single corner had a curb and no ramp,” he says. “And it was like the Berlin Wall at every corner for someone in a wheelchair.”
The film is not always clear as to where and when the protests it revisits are taking place. When it gets to the landmark legislation, though, the politics of opportunity and compromise are nicely delineated (and you’re left to wonder what would have happened to the Americans With Disabilities Act had it been introduced in the current political climate).
Patricia Wright of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund tells a lovely anecdote about sitting next to Senator Edward M. Kennedy while President George H. W. Bush was signing the act in July 1990.
“Kennedy leaned over to me, and he said, ‘Ah, Pat?,’ ” she says. “ ‘Yes, Senator?’ ‘What happens if he reads the bill before he signs it?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, he won’t.’ I mean, the senator knew that nobody really understood the impact of what this piece of legislation was going to do.”
That impact, of course, is still being sorted out. But for people with disabilities, as several note here, it was their Emancipation Proclamation.
#Source: The New York Times Television Review by Neil Genzlinger
http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/arts/television/lives-worth-living-on-independent-lens-review.html
Watch the full episode. See more Independent Lens.
INDEPENDENT LENS
Lives Worth Living
On PBS stations on Thursday night Oct 27, 2011 8 PM Central
Produced by Storyline Motion Pictures, LLC and the Independent Television Service. Directed by Eric Neudel; Mr. Neudel, producer; Alison Gilkey, associate producer.
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