MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
To write his signature on the Declaration of Independence, Stephen Hopkins used his left hand to steady his right. Historians say Hopkins had a disability, what we now call cerebral palsy, or maybe Parkinson's. As he signed, the delegate from Rhode Island said, my hand trembles, but my heart does not. It wasn't until the 20th century that people with disabilities began demanding their rights to the Declaration's promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For the series we are calling America in Pursuit to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, NPR correspondent Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolf of Colorado Public Radio tell the forgotten story of one group of disabled Americans and an extraordinary act of civil disobedience.
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JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: It's one of the busiest intersections in downtown Denver where Broadway crosses wide Colfax Avenue, where the Colorado State Capital, with its gleaming gold dome, towers against the dull winter sky. Cars rush by and buses. This is a hub for city buses.
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SHAPIRO: The bus driver spots Dawn Russell (ph) in her wheelchair and lowers the automatic wheelchair lift.
UNIDENTIFIED DRIVER: Hi.
DAWN RUSSELL: Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED DRIVER: I know it's for you.
RUSSELL: I would've been all right with you...
Every time that lift goes down, what does that feel like?
STEPHANIE WOLF, BYLINE: Russell is the disability rights activist. She wants us to see how easy it is for her to ride a city bus now.
RUSSELL: You never get on it - not once - without thinking about them. So when you think about The 19, it's every time that lift goes down.
WOLF: The 19 - she's talking about a group of disabled people called the Gang of 19 and their little remembered act of civil disobedience at this bus stop almost 50 years ago. It was a protest that led to this wheelchair lift on this bus.
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GANG OF 19: (Chanting) We want to ride. We want to ride. We want to ride.
SHAPIRO: In 1978, on the day after the Fourth of July, a group of mostly young people who use wheelchairs surrounded and blocked two city buses.
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GANG OF 19: (Chanting) We want to ride.
SHAPIRO: The standoff lasted through the night and into the next day. That Gang of 19 was demanding that Denver's transit agency put wheelchair lifts on buses. They wanted the ability to get onto a bus and ride, too.
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GANG OF 19: (Chanting) We want to ride. We want to ride.
SHAPIRO: Disability wasn't understood as a civil rights issue back then. So on that hot July day in 1978, those disabled people blocking the buses were doing something disabled people were not expected to do.
WOLF: Especially for this group because just a few years earlier, as young adults, teens and even preteens, almost all of them were living in a nursing home.
JOHN HOLLAND: No activities, nothing to do, warehoused, physical injuries, bed sores, a lot of bed sores.
WOLF: Denver attorney John Holland.
HOLLAND: 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, right? Just covered in flies.
WOLF: Holland sued that nursing home with the help of a man named Wade Blank. Blank worked at the nursing home on the wing with the young residents. He was horrified by conditions there and started a group that moved those young people into their own homes and apartments.
SHAPIRO: Blank, who died in 1993, wasn't disabled. He was a Presbyterian minister. He'd marched with Martin Luther King at Selma. He understood that riding a bus was a symbol of American civil rights. He told the Gang of 19 to show up on that busy street corner and directed one of them, George Roberts, in his wheelchair, to get in line for the bus.
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WADE BLANK: So on July 5, 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?
SHAPIRO: Here's Blank years later, recalling how that confused the bus driver.
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BLANK: 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 and as that...
BRIAN MCCLOUD: I mean, it was incredibly easy as long as you had the will to do it.
WOLF: Brian McCloud.
MCCLOUD: Once the bus is stopped, you have somebody immediately go to the door of the bus.
WOLF: He's one of the last living members of the Gang of 19.
MCCLOUD: And then have a third person go to the side of the bus, where the driver can't pull out. So he's basically trapped. He knows he's screwed. He can't move anywhere.
BARRY ROSENBERG: When the police came after the buses were occupied (laughter) - the police came, and they shouted, and they got in people's face, and no one budged.
WOLF: Barry Rosenberg worked with Wade Blank and helped at the protest.
ROSENBERG: No one spoke. No one talked back. They just sat and were quiet.
SHAPIRO: The Gang of 19 had been taught how to do civil disobedience by Wade Blank. That created a problem for the police.
BILL ROEM: Well, they weren't going to arrest anybody in a wheelchair. That was pretty obvious.
SHAPIRO: Bill Roem was an attendant there to feed and empty the catheters of the people in wheelchairs.
ROEM: Not only would the optics look bad, but the actual process of trying to get them off the street.
SHAPIRO: The police couldn't figure out how to arrest people in wheelchairs. Buses weren't accessible, nor police vans, the jail or the courthouse.
WOLF: Another attendant, Lisa Wheeler, saw the officers' uncertainty and challenged them.
LISA WHEELER: Why aren't you arresting him? Are you afraid of him? You don't want to touch him? You know, stuff like that, I guess (laughter).
WOLF: So the police arrested Lisa Wheeler and Bill Roem, the two attendants who weren't disabled, instead.
HOLLAND: I moved to dismiss the charges on the grounds of equal protection violation.
SHAPIRO: John Holland, the lawyer, went to court to get the charges against the attendants dismissed. He argued that the disabled members of the Gang of 19 had been denied their civil right to be arrested.
HOLLAND: And I'll never forget saying to the judge, how are we going to have a civil rights movement if we can't even be arrested? So maybe a little more eloquently like that.
SHAPIRO: The judge agreed. The Gang of 19 won the right to be arrested and treated like any other protest group.
WOLF: And they won a lot more. The transit agency agreed to pay for wheelchair lifts on over 200 new buses. The Gang of 19 became the core of a disability civil rights group called ADAPT. Its members used civil disobedience and got arrested across the country to fight for accessible transit, a right that was then written into the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
SHAPIRO: We're back at the corner of Colfax and Broadway with Dawn Russell, who showed us how she gets on a bus with a wheelchair lift. She joined ADAPT in 1996. She's been arrested dozens of times. She's lost count.
RUSSELL: And we are the misfits of the misfits, and look at where we are now. Are you kidding me?
SHAPIRO: After buses, ADAPT members began protesting all over the U.S. for laws to help disabled people live outside of nursing homes and institutions, to live in their own homes, and to pursue the promise of the Declaration of Independence to enjoy the same choices and chances given to all Americans.
WOLF: For NPR News, I'm Stephanie Wolf.
SHAPIRO: And I'm Joseph Shapiro.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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