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This Week's Disability Factoid Friday
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This Week's Disability Factoid Friday
Time for another Friday Factoid!
Last week we remembered the passing of Justin Dart, Jr. most commonly known as the Father of the ADA. This week, I thought we could let Justin’s words tell us the story of our Disability History Factoid for this week.
The following is an excerpt taken from Justin Dart’s comments at a Wade Blank (founder of ADAPT) memorial service shortly following his death in 1993:
“In the tradition of Martin Luther King, Wade made equal access to
bus transport the symbol of full equality: "Rosa Parks protested
the indignity of being forced to sit in the back of the bus. We
can't get on the bus at all." On July 5th and 6th, 1978, he and
nineteen people with disabilities illegally detained an
inaccessible bus at the intersection of Broadway and Colfax in
Denver. ADAPT was born - American Disabled for Accessible Public
Transit. During the next twelve years hundreds of ADAPT
activists blocked buses, streets, hotels and government buildings
across North America. They filled the police records of the
jails of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Little Rock,
Philadelphia, Phoenix, Reno, Montreal and Washington, DC….”
To read Justin’s comments in their entirety, go to:
http://www.mwcil.org/home/files/wblank.pdf
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