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ED AYERS: In July of 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. This landmark law prohibits any employer from discriminating on the basis of disability. At the signing ceremony, President Bush hailed the legislation as an unambiguous civil rights achievement.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH: [applause] Three weeks ago, we celebrated our nation’s independence day, and, today, we’re here to rejoice in and celebrate another independence day, one that is long overdue, and with today’s signing of the landmark…

ED AYERS: Long overdue because the ADA was the result of a decades-long civil rights battle. We’re going to end today with a look back at a key moment in that struggle.

BRIAN BALOGH: In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act. It mostly applied to veterans, but it included a clause, Section 504, that prohibited any federally-funded institution from discriminating against anyone based on disability. But there was a hitch. In order for Section 504 to be enforced, regulations had to be drafted, and—

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: They needed a signature from the head of Health, Education, and Welfare.

BRIAN BALOGH: This is Emily Smith-Beitiks, associate director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability. She says President Nixon’s Health, Education and Welfare secretary never signed the 504 regulations. When Jimmy Carter took office, his secretary, a man named Joseph Califano, didn’t sign, either.

Without those regulations, people with disabilities continued to face rampant discrimination and unemployment. By 1977, they weren’t going to take it any longer.

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: Protests in 10 cities across the U.S. were helped at Health, Education, and Welfare offices to demand the signing of 504 regulations on April 5, 1977.

BRIAN BALOGH: In San Francisco, disability rights activists occupied a federal building for nearly a month. Although protesters didn’t know it when they showed up in the morning, leaders in the movement planned to stay until they got that signature. Emily Smith-Beitiks collected oral histories from those involved in that protest.

NEWS ANNOUNCER: It all started this morning here at the old federal building on 50 Fulton…

SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: Somebody said to me, “There’s a demonstration at the federal building tomorrow.”

JOE QUINN: “It’s going to be outside from blah to blah time. We’re inviting deaf people to come, so we need an interpreter. Can you interpret?”

[MUSIC]

SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: So, we were just going around in a big circle with signs and chanting different slogans and singing songs, and it was hot, and the third hour into it, I was thinking, “I need to go home,” and that was when the organizers said—

JOE QUINN: [whispers] “Tell the deaf people we’re going inside.”

I was like, “What?”

“We’re going into the building. We’re going to take over the building.”

NEWS ANNOUNCER: [crowd singing in the background] Immediately after their demonstration this morning, the handicapped started invading the building.

JUDY HEUMANN: We were let into the building. Nobody charged into the building unwelcomed, but we just didn’t leave.

DENNIS BILLUPS: I was surrounded by 200 people or more. I had my cane in hand, and I was saying [clapping], “504, 504,” and then it [crowd chanting in the background] started it. “504, 504.”

JOE QUINN: There was a chant, “Sign 504, sign 504, sign 504,” [laughs] and I remember, like, this sea of deaf people signing that.

DENNIS BILLUPS: And then I says, “We won’t move. We won’t move. We won’t move.”

NEWS ANNOUNCER: I’ve just gotten word, too, these people are now locked into the building…

BARRY RYAN: And we stayed that night, and we continued to stay, but we had no idea how long we were going to be there.

SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: And, if we starved in there, that’s what was going to happen. If we got sick in there, we’d get sick in there. Whatever was going to happen, we were just going to be in there until this thing got resolved.

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: And the protesters stayed in the building for 26 days.

[MUSIC]

KITTY CONE: I mean, I remember the first night, trying to decide what to do when they came to arrest us, because we were sure that they were going to come to arrest us. And we were surprised that they hadn’t taken us out already.

BARRY RYAN: I don’t think they’d seen so many disabled people acting up, I suppose, is the term. I mean, what could they do? They were afraid if they picked someone up, they might hurt them. They were just completely lost and confused.

BONNIE REGINA: You know, the image of disabled people up until that time had been that we were all little, pathetic children with individual tragedies and, well, none of that was true.

[MUSIC]

BARRY RYAN: We were sleeping wherever there was free space, so we had the large conference room, we had the hallway, and some were around the elevator, and I slept under one of the large desks.

KITTY CONE: I think probably everybody was in pain. A lot of us had physical disabilities, and sleeping on the floor is just… First of all, you’ve got to get down there, and then you’ve got to get up, so a lot of blind people came and helped us get on the floor and get up in the morning.

JOE QUINN: There were certainly [laughs] romances that bloomed in the building, and I actually had created a tent out of a big chenille bedspread that I had, so it was one of the few fairly private spaces, and people would come to me and say, “Um, could I… could I use your tent?” [laughs]

It was like, “Sure, yeah,” just being a friend. Just being a friend.

[MUSIC]

JUDY HEUMANN: It was pretty amazing that we had three meals a day.

BARRY RYAN: They couldn’t stop food coming in. They couldn’t starve ’em. That would look even worse. [laughs]

BONNIE REGINA: The Black Panther party was there every day bringing us really good food.

SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: And the people with the guns at the doors said, “You can’t come in,” and they said, “Either you let us in, or we’re going to come back with our guys, with our guns.” And they let them in.

[MUSIC]

SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: The media was our main weapon.

NEWS ANNOUNCER: The scene at San Francisco’s HEW headquarters now is in its third day, and 125 disabled and…

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: At one point, the building, trying to figure out how to get these people out of their [laughs] federal building, said, “Well, let’s turn off the phones. If they can’t reach the press, their power will be weakened.”

SWAMI SUDDHANANDA: There were huge windows in the federal building, and there were people signing the press releases—

KITTY CONE: To people on the outside, and then interpreters would interpret what was being said on each end.

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So much so that, within a day, the building said, “Ugh, give them the phones back. It’s not making a difference anyways.”

NEWS ANNOUNCER: And 125 disabled and handicapped are pledging they’ll continue the sit-in through tomorrow night, if not longer.

NEWS ANNOUNCER: But the problem on this, the fourth day, is still the same as it was on Tuesday: trying to get the attention of Washington.

[MUSIC]

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So, after the protesters had been in the building for a couple weeks, they started to get antsy that Washington, D.C. was not adequately aware of what was happening.

KITTY CONE: We had an election to choose who went to Washington, D.C.

JUDY HEUMANN: We looked at the amount of money we had [laughs] and the kind of support that we would need, so we had personal assistants and sign language interpreters, and we wanted a diversified group of people that was racially diverse, that was disability diverse.

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: In D.C., conditions were very similar to what they had been back in San Francisco. They stayed in a church basement. They were, again, sleeping on the floor. But what infuriated the protesters is that Califano, head of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Jimmy Carter, would not meet with them.

KITTY CONE: I think the first night, we went and had a vigil outside of Califano’s house, and he left by the back door, and we went to Carter’s church, and left by the back door. So, this was part of our tactic, was to say, “This is not an open door administration.”

NEWS ANNOUNCER: And, in the meantime, the group of handicapped people are sticking to their guns here in San Francisco. Today starts the third week of their sit-in at the old federal building…

EMILY SMITH-BEITIKS: So, the protests continued in this way with a group in San Francisco still in the federal building, and a group in D.C., and, on the 24th day of the occupation, word reached them that the 504 regulations had finally—finally—been signed.

[MUSIC]

JOE QUINN: And I remember when we heard, there was just this really joyous explosion.

BARRY RYAN: We’d won.

KITTY CONE: We just—I mean, I think the overwhelming feeling that everybody had was just pride.

BONNIE REGINA: Pride, and power.

JOE QUINN: And the whole group starts singing “We Shall Overcome,” and [crowd singing in the background] because there were so many deaf people involved and interpreters there, a lot of people had learned the sign for this particular song, and the whole room was signing, [sings] “We shall overcome,” and it was just this beautiful, beautiful moment.

[MUSIC: “We Shall Overcome”]

PETER ONUF: When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, it bore the imprint of the 504 protests. The ADA itself echoed and expanded the 504 regulations, extending the guarantee of civil rights to the private sector.

[MUSIC]

PETER ONUF: But it was the history of civil protest that was most on the display when the first President Bush spoke at the law’s signing ceremony.

PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: It’s been the work of a true coalition of people who have shared both a dream and a passionate determination to make that dream come true.

[MUSIC]

BRIAN BALOGH: Emily Smith-Beitiks is the associate director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. She collected these oral histories as part of a project celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ADA. It’s called Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights. You can find a link to the exhibit on our website.

We heard from protesters Kitty Cone, Barry Ryan, Bonnie Regina, Joe Quinn, Judy Heumann, Dennis Billups, and Swami Suddhananda.

We had help from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

[MUSIC: “Body Language” by the Jackson 5]