[AI] Re: the other movement that Rosa Parks inspired
- From: "rajesh Asudani" <rajeshasudani@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <accessindia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 11:21:19 +0530
Of course, legacy for such acts of Satyagrah as that of Rosa Parks, was set
by Mahatma Gandhi, when he refused to give up his place in first class in an
African train. It is a pity that so-called democracy like USA had to have
Rosa Parks in 1955 initiate the movement to cast aside such obnoxious
practices as racism.
----- Original Message -----
From: "rajesh Asudani" <rajeshasudani@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <accessindia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 11:14 AM
Subject: [AI] the other movement that Rosa Parks inspired
>
> The Other Movement That Rosa Parks Inspired
> by Sitting Down, She Made Room for the Disabled
> By Charles Wilson
> Sunday, October 30, 2005
>
> On an unseasonably warm September day in 1984, about a dozen men and women
> rolled their wheelchairs in front of a city bus that was pulling onto
> State Street in Chicago. Then they sat there and didn't move. The group
> had no secret agenda; they simply wanted to make a point. Days before,
> the Chicago Transit Authority had announced that it was purchasing 363 new
> public
> buses -- and that none of them would be equipped with wheelchair lifts to
> serve
> disabled passengers because the lifts had been deemed too expensive. This
> ragtag group of wheelchair riders, who were affiliated with a disability
> rights organization called ADAPT, or Americans Disabled for Accessible
> Public Transit, decided to protest that decision by obstructing
> a bus until thepolice carted them away. Every one of them wore a
> simple paper name tag, the sort that you would normally see at a
> meet-and-greet. They all said: "My name is Rosa Parks."
>
> Rosa Parks's act of courage in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 did more than
> dismantle the system of racial segregation on public transportation. Her
> refusal to give up her seat to a white man also created a legacy she
> never could have foreseen. It was Rosa Parks's act of courage in
> Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 did more than dismantle the system of racial
> segregation on public transportation. Her refusal to give up her seat
> to a white man also created a legacy she never could have foreseen.
> It was through Parks's example that the disabled community transformed
> its own often disorganized cause into a unified disability rights
movement.
> "Had it not been for Parks and the bus boycott, there is no question
> that the disability rights movement would have been light-years behind,
> if it would have ever occurred," says Michael Auberger, a disability
> rights activist who was one of the first to place his wheelchair in
> front of a bus in the early 1980s. "Her genius was that she saw the
> bus as the great integrator: It took you to work, it took you to play,
> it took you to places that you were never before seen. We began to
> see the bus the same way, too, and it empowered a group of people
> who had been just as disenfranchised as African Americans."
>
> The disability rights movement could in no sense have been called
> a movement when Parks refused to yield her seat. At that time, the
> unemployment rate for people with disabilities reached over 70
> percent, and organizations that rallied for rights for people
> with disabilities focused on solutions that were specific to a
> single disorder. "The disability community was time, the
> unemployment rate for people with disabilities reached over 70
> percent, and organizations that rallied for rights
> for people with disabilities focused on solutions that were
> specific to a single disorder. "The disability community was
> fragmented," says Bob Kafka, a quadriplegic who broke his neck
> in 1973 and who was an early organizer for ADAPT. "The deaf
> community wanted interpreters. People with mobility issues
> wanted curb cuts. The blind wanted more sensory communication.
> Everyone saw themselves as a deaf person, or a blind person, or
> a mental health person. We were tossed salad, not fondue."
>
> Parks's action offered these separate communities a strategy
> that unified their various wishes. "Rosa Parks energized us in
> that she was the perfect symbol for when the meek become
> militant," says Kafka. "She was someone who was willing to
> cross the line." And the fight for accessible public transportation
> was to be the single issue that catalyzed disparate disability
> groups into a common cause.
>
> By the 1960s and '70s, many cities had introduced paratransit
> services that picked up disabled patients. The officials who
> controlled city budgets, though, typically stipulated that these
> buses could be used by an individual only a few times a month
> and that the buses could be used only by appointment. So,
> the late '70s and early '80s, some activists began to extend the
> logic of Parks's silent act of defiance to their
> own cause: Buses that divided people into separate categories,
> they said, were inherently unequal. Disabled
> people shouldn't be limited to using paratransit buses. They
> deserved to ride the city buses, just like everyone else.
>
> "How could you go to school, or go on a date, or volunteer
> somewhere if the only trips deemed worth funding for you were
> medical trips?" wrote ADAPT member Stephanie Thomas in her
> introduction to "To Ride the Public's Buses," a collection of articles
> about the early bus actions that appeared in Disability Rag.
> "How could you get a job if you could only get 3 rides a week? If you
> were never on time?"
>
> Parks's method of dissent -- sitting still -- was well suited to a
> community in which many people found themselves having to do that very
> thing all day long. Within two decades of her refusal to give up
> her seat, disabled people in cities across the country began staging their
> own "sit-ins" by parking their wheelchairs in front of ill-equipped city
> buses -- or, alternatively, by ditching their wheelchairs and crawling
> onto the stairs of the bus vestibules.
>
> Some of the sit-ins were individual acts of defiance. In Hartford, Conn.,
> 63-year-old Edith Harris parked her wheelchair in front of 10 separate
> local buses on a single day after waiting nearly two hours for
> an accessible bus. Increasingly, though, the sit-ins were organized
> by ADAPT and involved many wheelchair users at a single location.
>
> These actions began to change both how disabled people were
> perceived and how they perceived themselves. "Without the history of Parks
> and Martin Luther King, the only argument that the disability
> community had was the Jerry Lewis Principle," explains Auberger. "The
> Poor Pathetic Cripple Principle. But if you take a single disabled person
> and you show them that they can stop a bus, you've empowered that person.
> And you've made them feel they had rights."
>
> The sit-ins also began to bring about concrete changes in the policies
> of urban transportation boards. In 1983, the city of Denver gave up
> its initial resistance and retrofitted all 250 of its buses with lifts
> after 45 wheelchair users blocked buses at the downtown intersection of
> Colfax Avenue and Broadway. Similar moves were made by Washington's Metro
> board in 1986 and by Chicago's transit authority in 1989. And in 1990,
> when the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act cleared Congress,
> the only provisions that went into effect immediately were those that
> mandated accessible public transportation.
>
> If Rosa Parks left a lasting legacy on the disability rights movement,
> it is important to recognize at Rosa Parks rode in
> Montgomery recently went on display at the Henry Ford Museum near
> Detroit, the city where Parks lived her last decades and died last
> Monday. Detroit's mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who is up for reelection
> on Nov. 8, memorialized Parks by saying that "she stood up by sitting
down.
> I'm only standing here because of her."
>
> Kilpatrick failed to mention a further irony, though: The Justice
> Department joined a suit against his city in March. It was initially
> filed in August 2004, by Richard Bernstein, a blind 31-year-old lawyer
> from the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, on behalf of four disabled
> inner-city clients. His plaintiffs said that they routinely waited
> three to four hours in severe cold for a bus with a working lift.
> Their complaint cited evidence that half of the lifts on the city's
> bus fleet were routinely broken. The complaint did not ask for
> compensation. It demanded only that the Motor City comply with the
> Americans With Disabilities Act. The city recently purchased more
> accessible buses, but the mayor didn't offer a plan for making sure
> the buses stayed in good working order. He has publicly disparaged
> Bernstein on radio as an example of "suburban guys coming into our
> community trying to raise up the concerns of people when this
> administration is going to the wall on this issue of disabled riders."
>
> Mayor Kilpatrick is not going to the wall, and neither are many other
> mayors in this country. A 2002 federal Bureau of Transportation
> Statistics study found that 6 million Americans with disabilities still
> have trouble obtaining the transportation they need. Many civic leaders
> and officials at transit organizations have made arguments about the
> economic difficulty of installing lifts on buses and maintaining them.
> But they are seeing only one side of the argument: More people in the
> disability community would pursue jobs and pay more taxes if they could
> only trust that they could get to work and back safely.
>
> Public officials who offered elaborate eulogies to Parks's memory last
> week should evaluate whether they are truly living up to the power
> of her ideas. During a visit to Detroit in August to speak to disabled
> transit riders for a project I was working on, I met Robert Harvey,
> who last winter hurled his wheelchair in front of a bus pulling onto
> Woodward Avenue after four drivers in a row had passed him by. (He was
> knocked to the curb.) I met Carolyn Reed, who has spina bifida and
> had lost a job because she could rarely find a bus that would get her
> to work on time. Her able-bodied friends had also recently stopped
> inviting her to the movies. She guessed why: A few times over the past
> months, they had found themselves waiting late at night with her for hours
> to catch a bus with a working lift. "I'd say, 'Go ahead, go ahead, I'll
> be all right,' " she told me. "And they'd say, 'We're not leaving you out
> here.' " I also met Willie Cochran, a double amputee who once waited six
> hours in freezing temperatures for a bus that would take him home from
> dialysis treatment.
>
> None of this should be happening in America. "Rosa Parks could get on
> the bus to protest," says Roger McCarville, a veteran in Detroit who
> once chained himself to a bus. "We still can't get on the bus." A true
> tribute to Parks would be to ensure that every American can.
>
> Author's e-mail:
> shepherdstown@xxxxxxxxx
> Charles Wilson, a writer who lives in New York City, has been doing
> research for a book about the disability rights movement.
> (c) 2005 The Washington Post Company
>
> # # #
>
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