Transcript of ‘We want to ride’: the 1978 protest that sparked the disability rights movement

I'm Ayesha Rascoe. This is the Sunday Story from Up First. Let's go back in time to this exact day 36 years ago. It's when President George H.W. Bush picked up his pen and signed a landmark piece of legislation.

And welcome to every one of you out there in this splendid scene of hope spread across the South Lawn of the White House.

The legislation was the Americans with Disabilities Act. An immense civil rights law. Disabled people could no longer be excluded from jobs, public transit, restaurants, stores, and hotels. As he put his name on the law, President Bush thanked the biggest stakeholders, who were perhaps the loudest in advocating for the bill, the tens of millions of Americans with disabilities.

And to all of you, I just want to say your triumph is that your bill will now be law. And that this day belongs to you. And on behalf of our nation, thank you very, very much.

One major act of inclusion the law provided involved independence. The ADA opened the door to Americans with disabilities to live and receive care in their own homes, to live within their community rather than in a nursing home or institution. It's a hard-fought right gained after years of activism. Today on The Sunday Story, NPR's Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolff of Colorado Public Radio are going to share their reporting on this bedrock of disability rights in the U.S. We'll be right back.

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We're back with the Sunday Story and an episode about the disability rights movement in America. Now I'm going to hand it over to NPR's Joseph Shapiro and Colorado Public Radio's Stephanie Wolff.

I was on the South Lawn of the White House 36 years ago today as a reporter to cover the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. People came from all over the country with every kind of disability It was a celebration.

Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down. God bless you all.

I've covered the disability rights movement for decades now. The ADA and all those protections won by the disability community, they're all tied to this right for independent living. And that's the idea that disabled people want the same lives as everyone else. To go to school, to get jobs, to live with family and friends, to be part of their community. They didn't want to live in institutions and nursing homes where, before the ADA, people often lived if they needed daily medical and personal care. Independent living is about getting that care in their own homes.

And that's why we want to start our story by telling you about Nikki Bishop. Bishop has a neuromuscular condition called spinal muscular atrophy type 2.

I was diagnosed when I was about 5 years old, and basically the person just gets progressively weaker as they age.

Bishop's 39. She was just a kid when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. So she grew up in a world where so much more was possible for her as a person with significant disabilities. She has a full life now. She's a licensed clinical social worker in the Denver area and a disability advocate. I've run into her at the Colorado State Capitol before as she lobbied in support of different disability rights bills.

So I could walk until I was about 9 years old, but always had sort of struggle walking and then just progressively got weaker as I aged to the point where I have really limited upper mobility, cannot walk at all.

So Bishop relies on attendants who come to her house to help her live this very full life. They help her get out of bed, get dressed, bathed, and ready for work. Because Bishop can't move her body on her own, she depends on aides about 23 hours a day. It's expensive care—hundreds of thousands of dollars a year if she had to pay for it herself. Private insurance, the kind you get through your job, doesn't pay for it. But Medicaid does. That's the government health insurance program for the poor and disabled. It allows Bishop to have not just her full-time career— Oh, wow. But also to be a parent to a 9-year-old.

This is my son Adrian. Hi, nice to meet you.

Without the disability civil rights movement, Bishop thinks she'd probably be in a nursing home today.

Just the amount of opportunities that I've had, you know, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. But like with the Gang of 19 and, you know, that generation of advocates, they paved the way for me so that I could be successful.

The Gang of 19. This nearly forgotten group of activists is a big reason Bishop is where she is today. In 1978, in Denver, this gang, really it was just a small group of young people in wheelchairs, carried out an extraordinary act of civil disobedience. It helped set in motion an era of activism that won rights, like getting Congress to pass the ADA. We want a ride!

We want a ride!

We want a ride! It's a fierce title. The Gang of 19. But the group of young people met in a place where they had almost no power, a suburban Denver nursing home, and not a good one.

No activities, nothing to do, warehoused, physical injuries, bedsores, lot of bedsores.

This is Denver civil rights attorney John Holland talking to us about that nursing home, Heritage House.

It was a cesspool. I mean, they had cockroaches in cereals. Debbie Tracy, I had a photograph of her with flies in her face. She couldn't move her arms, just covered in flies.

Heritage House was not a place where these young people could thrive. After all, Holland would later sue that nursing home for mistreatment and neglect. But the nursing home would also prove to be a turning point in their lives. That's where they met a man named Wade Blank, and he would show them they were capable of extraordinary things. Blank, who died in 1993, wasn't disabled. He was a Presbyterian minister who turned to political action. Blank was a student in seminary in Chicago when he marched with Martin Luther King at Selma. He did civil rights work in big cities, and he was a chaplain at Kent State. But after 4 students were shot during a protest against the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, Blanc said he felt burned out. He needed a change. He moved to Denver and he took a job at Heritage House, the nursing home on the wing with the young residents. He was horrified by conditions there. So was his colleague Barry Rosenberg.

Most of the people who were there were not there because they wanted to be there, that there was no place for them.

The young residents of the nursing home received support through Medicaid. Back then, it only paid for long-term medical and personal care inside nursing homes. Institutionalization of Americans with disabilities of all ages was common back then.

We realized that some of it was a civil rights issue, you know.

Wade Blank, with the help of Rosenberg, began taking these young people out into the community. They went to rock concerts and on camping trips.

I had this Volkswagen van and I took people everywhere.

It was a taste of freedom, and Blank kept pushing for more. He wanted the nursing home to feel more like a college dorm for these young residents. He got them to register to vote. He wanted them to make decisions for themselves, like what they wanted to eat and when they wanted to go to sleep. He wanted them to have more agency over their own lives. He challenged the way things were done. Blank had this idea, which some viewed as radical, that these young people should live in their own homes and get their care there. The nursing home eventually fired him.

That same year in 1975, Blank co-founded a Denver group to help find housing and provide other services, including attendant care for these young people who'd been stuck at the nursing home. They called it Atlantis Community.

Wade felt that there was people who were lost and were brilliant people who lived and were undiscovered.

Blank convinced the city to lease public housing to residents leaving the nursing home. But once these young people in wheelchairs were living out in the community, they quickly learned getting around town was tough. Sidewalks lacked curb cuts, those sloped ramps down from the sidewalk to the roadway you see in most intersections today. So those with physical disabilities couldn't easily and safely get from one block to another. And even if they could, city buses weren't accessible.

Wade Blank understood that riding a bus was a symbol of American civil rights. Here's Blank speaking to that in an old interview with a TV news outlet.

You can measure how a society views an oppressed group by how they treat them in public accommodations. And you can't say hire the handicapped and then not have public transit be wheelchair accessible.

Things came to a head when civil rights attorney John Holland learned that the Denver Metro Transit Agency was going to purchase more than 100 new buses, and they were not going to make them wheelchair accessible, although lifts had been invented.

Holland immediately called Wade Blank, and I said, you hear about the buses? He said, I did. I said, well, how would you like to be a plaintiff?

They sued but lost in court. Blank felt they needed a new tactic. He was a student of the civil rights movement end up civil disobedience. So in that summer of 1978, just days after they lost their court case, he asked the disabled people he'd met at the nursing home to take their fight to the streets of downtown Denver, to one of the busiest intersections in the city, at a bus stop near the state Capitol building.

We have a right to ride on the buses, so I think that probably it'd be a good idea to go out and, and board a few buses and Blank directed one of them, a man named George Roberts, to get in line for the bus in his wheelchair. So on July 5th, George Roberts sat patiently at the bus stop waiting for the next bus to come.

When the doors opened, he said, "Can I get on?" This is Blank at a commemoration event for the protest. He recalled that since there was no wheelchair lift, the driver was confused.

And when the bus driver closed the door, saying no to George, we gave a hand signal and all the other 18 moved into the streets and blocked that bus.

I mean, it was incredibly easy as long as you had the will to do it.

Bryan McLeod is one of the last living disabled activists from this demonstration.

Once the bus was stopped, you had somebody immediately go to the door of the bus A second person rolled their wheelchair in front of the bus. And then have a third person go to the side of the bus where the driver can't pull out and go on his way. So he's basically trapped. He knows he's screwed. He can't move anywhere.

19 people in wheelchairs surrounded the two city buses. They held signs that said things like "Taxation without transportation," and they chanted in the streets. We want a ride!

They would become known as the Gang of 19, and they were demanding access to get onto the bus and ride.

And we stayed in the streets all night until 10 o'clock the next day, July 6th. That was our shot heard around the world.

When the police came after the buses were occupied, they— the police came and they shouted and they got in people's face and no one budged.

This is Barry Rosenberg again. He came to the demonstration to help the protesters. No one spoke, no one talked back.

They just sat and were quiet.

The Gang of 19 had been taught how to do civil disobedience by Wade Blank. They knew to stand their ground, and that created a problem for the police.

Well, they weren't going to arrest anybody in a wheelchair. That, that was pretty obvious.

Bill Rome was a personal care attendant.

Not only would the optics look bad, but the actual process of trying to get them off the street and getting them into wheelchair-inaccessible vans to take to the police station, I just don't think that was on their itinerary.

The police could not figure out how to arrest people in wheelchairs. Buses weren't accessible, nor police vans, the jail, or the courthouse. So instead, they began detaining the aides assisting those in wheelchairs.

Lisa Wheeler, one of those attendants, challenged the officers.

Why are you arresting the able-bodied person? This person, this person in the wheelchair has been here for longer than I have, and it's, you know, it's their fight. Arrest them. Why won't you do that? He said, you know, he told me I needed to be quiet and I'm going to be charged with resisting arrest. Then he, you know, I got handcuffed.

Wheeler and Rome were not disabled, nor were they protesting. As attendants, their role was to help the disabled protesters eat, take medicines, empty catheters. In other words, to ensure those people in wheelchairs were healthy and safe.

I moved to dismiss the charges on the grounds of equal protection violation.

Attorney John Holland went to court to get the charges against the attendants dropped.

What lesson were they teaching? The lesson was, you don't even deserve to have a civil rights movement, which pissed everybody off.

Holland argued that the disabled members of the Gang of 19 had been denied their civil right to be arrested.

The right to be arrested for protesting is an odd right, but it is a right. You have the right to be taken seriously, and you don't get that right If they don't.

The judge agreed. The Gang of 19 protesters won the right to be arrested and treated like any other protest group. And they achieved their biggest goal. The Denver Metro Transit Agency eventually agreed to pay for wheelchair lifts on the new fleet of buses. Disabled people could now get around town. It made the city a nationally recognized leader in having accessible buses.

The right to be in the world. That's what the movement was about. That is what the movement is about. Shunned, excluded, barred, and barricaded. You know, the right sought was the right to be included.

Bobby Simpson, another surviving member, says it was important, and that's why he did it.

It kind of scared me a little bit. You proud of it now, though? Yeah. It changed lives.

You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. On the streets of Denver, 19 disabled protesters block buses to demand accessible transportation.

The right to be in the world. That's what the movement was about.

On The Sunday Story, how an often forgotten group of activists in 1978 helped spark the modern-day disability rights movement. Listen now to The Sunday Story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app. This is Tonya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air.

Don't miss my interview with writer Jia Tolentino. We talk about plastic surgery and how current beauty standards are changing our relationship to reality. It seems more explicitly anti-human right now than ever before. There seemed to be something that's dovetailing with the age of AI. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back with the Sunday Story and reporting from Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolff about 19 disabled young people. In 1983, they became founding members of a national grassroots advocacy group called ADAPT. At first, their mission was to get wheelchair lifts on all public buses across the country. But eventually, they started fighting for a wide range of disability rights.

Adapt became known for its very in-your-face, theatrical style of protesting. They'd go to public transit conventions and chain themselves to the building or buses, or organize sit-ins at government offices, demanding to talk with officials and policymakers.

Adapt members also began demonstrating for the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. The new federal legislation to protect people with disabilities.

By the time Congress was debating the ADA, it had been more than a decade since the Gang of 19 had blocked the buses. ADAPT had grown its ranks and there were chapters around the country. So in March of 1990, ADAPT members caravaned from different parts of the U.S. to Washington, D.C. They organized a rally of hundreds near the U.S. Capitol building.

Civil rights law for people with disabilities.

I was there that day in 1990 when about 3 dozen people came out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the 83 marble steps of the U.S. Capitol. Each carried a scrolled paper to give the members of Congress with the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.

Like the Declaration of Independence, ADA will pave the way for the emancipation —of hundreds of millions throughout the world.

The demonstration became known as the U.S. Capitol Crawl, a visual protest of the barriers faced by people with disabilities. There was also effective behind-the-scenes lobbying from national disability groups. Every member of Congress got visits from constituents—parents of disabled kids, disabled veterans, disabled people explaining why they needed a civil rights law.

Vote now! Vote now! Vote now!

Soon after, Congress passed the ADA with large bipartisan majorities. It was a huge victory. Still, advocates felt the ADA was the floor, not the ceiling. I went to Denver's Central Library Branch to look through its archives on ADAPT's history and found documents showing that after the ADA passed, ADAPT members still found plenty to protest about. And get arrested over. It's why their slogan became "Free Our People." Free our brothers!

Free our sisters! One of ADAPT's big goals was to recreate what Wade Blank had done in Denver to get disabled people out of nursing homes and other institutions, but now all over the country. That meant finding the funding for attendant care, an aide to help a disabled person get in and out of their wheelchair, out of bed, to get dressed, make meals. That assistance was key to living in the community.

It's become the real undercurrent of what they advocate for: support for people to not get stuck in nursing homes.

Then in Georgia, two women with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities who lived in state hospitals sued to get out. Their case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1999, in what's called the Olmsted decision, The high court ruled that disabled people who need long-term care have a right to get it in the community. This was huge. It forced states to create services and provide funding to help disabled people live in their own homes, not in institutions.

But in the last year, disabled people say the Trump administration has put much of that progress and funding in jeopardy.

A recently released Justice Department memo questions decades of protections for Americans with disabilities.

They point to cuts in Medicaid and new work requirements to even qualify for Medicaid. And in June, the Justice Department issued a legal memo that suggests states no longer have that obligation to make sure disabled people can live in their own homes. That has set up a potential legal fight down the road. Now, many people in the disability community worry that they'll need to get their care in nursing homes.

I mean, we are talking about life and death, right? Not just, oh, you know, some frivolous policy.

Nikki Bishop, the Denver area mother and licensed clinical social worker who has a disability and relies on nearly round-the-clock at-home care, is worried all of this independence she's worked so hard to build is at risk. That's because if the federal government isn't acting as a watchdog, She's concerned states will start to chip away at programs that provide in-home support services in order to save money and balance budgets.

Olmstead is so fundamentally important for the rights of individuals with disability that it ultimately determines our survival in our community. And so without those programs, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be able to live.

Those cutbacks are already starting to happen in Colorado. In a tough budget year, the state legislature capped paid Medicaid hours for caregivers. Bishop still has professional care coming to her home most days a week, but her dad Roy has stepped in to fill the gaps.

Yeah, my alarm went off at right at 11, so dad's helping me out with some Medication management.

It's getting harder. Still, Nikki Bishop shows what's possible for people with significant disabilities. She can work, she can be a mom, she can live in her community. And yes, care for someone with a disability can be expensive, but on average, it costs less to care for someone like Nikki Bishop in her own home than in a nursing home. So here we are, On the 36th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and disabled people fear the rights they won with that law are under attack.

Advocates I've spoken to, including Bishop, had hoped that by 2026 they'd be pushing for stronger and new protections versus affirming already existing ones.

I'm devastated to watch all of this happening and to witness this after we've come so far over the last 50 years. At the same time, I also feel a sense of resiliency from my community and persons with disabilities in general. We are very adaptable. We have to constantly think on our feet. We have to constantly think outside of the box and how to solve complex problems on a daily basis, at times for survival.

Bishop says as the disability rights movement faces these new challenges, she's looking back to the Gang of 19 and is ready to take up the mantle to protest, to fight, to be loud, and to protect those hard-won rights for disabled people to live in their communities like everybody else.

That was NPR's Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolff of Colorado Public Radio. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Ben Rapoport with help from Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Archival audio from the U.S. Capitol crawl is courtesy of documentary filmmaker Linda Litowski. Engineering by Anh Le Hoang. The rest of The Sunday Story team includes Sharon Maschiehi, Justine Yan, and Liana Simstrom. Our executive producer is Producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and Up First will be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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