Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act

The Disability Community in 1988

Although the 1980s began by putting the disability community and the broader civil rights community on the defensive, Wright, Kemp, Neas, Funk, Mayerson, and many other leaders were able to achieve significant victories. “Piece by piece we put together a decade of legislative success,” Neas observed.⁷⁴ In fact, he said, while the going was tough in dealing with the policies and practices of the courts and the Reagan administration, in Congress the “the 1980s, in all honesty, . . . were a bipartisan reaffirmation of civil rights and a bipartisan rejection of right-wing philosophy."⁷⁵

Many people in the disability community, as well as such organizations as DREDF, aimed for the implementation of comprehensive civil rights protections for persons with disabilities. But a record of legislative success, coalition-forming, and grass roots organizing had to be established first. And in the decade between the Section 504 demonstrations and passage of the Fair Housing Amendments Act, the disability community laid the necessary foundation. It earned the respect of the civil rights community. Talented leaders such as Wright proved their negotiation and legislative skills. People with disabilities formed an extensive and indispensable network of contacts with Congress and the administration. Through such disability rights attorneys as Mayerson, Burgdorf, Feldblum, Weisman, Tim Cook (with the National Disability Action Center), Bonnie Milstein (with the Mental Health Law Project), and Karen Peltz-Strauss (with the National Center for Law and the Deaf), the disability community reached new levels of legal sophistication. And throughout the country, hundreds of communities organized to improve the lives of disabled Americans by winning local battles: pockets of the United States were crafting stronger protections and providing greater access for persons with disabilities. These developments had a profound impact. “By friend and foe alike,” observed Mayerson, “the disability community was taken seriously—it had become a political force to be reckoned with in Congress, in the voting booth, and in the media."⁷⁶

No single activity or single event accounts for this success. Rather, it was due to the combined effect of the disability community’s efforts. “No one particular tactic is more valuable than another,” Mark Johnson said of his campaigns to achieve transportation accessibility. “If you’re an activist and an organizer, you have a fully developed strategy."⁷⁷ Indeed, the genius of the disability community’s political mobilization was that it pushed for change in so many different ways, by so many different people. The diverse efforts were not necessarily coordinated, but the cumulative effect was the creation of fertile soil in which an ADA seed could flourish. As Mayerson aptly concludes: “The ADA owes its birthright not to any one person or any few, but to the many thousands of people who make up the disability rights movement—people who have worked for years organizing and attending protests, licking envelopes, sending out alerts, drafting legislation, speaking, testifying, negotiating, lobbying, filing lawsuits, and being arrested—doing whatever they could for a cause in which they believed."⁷⁸

74. Neas, interview, January 21, 1994.

75. Neas, interview, December 10, 1993.

76. Mayerson, “The History of the ADA,” p. 21.

77. Johnson, interview, March 7, 1997.

78. Mayerson, “The History of the ADA,” p. 17.