Wills & Trusts News

Americans With Disabilities Act Transforms Lives

Washington -- While court decisions since Brown v. Board of Education and laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 assured that African-American Rosa Parks could ride in the front of the bus, they did not secure any seat for Judith Heumann. Brown found racial segregation a violation of the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Act set federal authority squarely against legal discrimination "on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin." But Heumann was a victim of polio, confined to a wheelchair, and unable to navigate her chair up the bus stairs.

“It's not my disability that handicaps me," she told the Washington Post in 1980. "It is society that handicaps me and my disabled brothers and sisters by building inaccessible schools, theaters, buses, house and on and on and on."

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 represents a national consensus to protect the full and equal civil rights of those Americans -- by Congress' count some 43 million of them in 1990 -- who suffer from physical or mental impairment.

In the United States and elsewhere, efforts were made for many years to "rehabilitate" the disabled. By the 1970s, however, many physically and developmentally challenged Americans argued instead that society should remove barriers preventing them from participating more fully in civic life. They sought full access to public and private buildings through wheelchair ramps, automatic doors and similar improvements. More broadly, the emerging disability-rights movement sought guarantees of the same fundamental rights that their predecessor in the civil rights movement had fought for and won.

A number of federal laws gradually expanded those guarantees. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 barred discrimination "under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance," while the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 defined and guaranteed students with disabilities "a free appropriate public education."

The Americans with Disabilities Act extended these legal guarantees to private employment and access to public facilities. As adopted by Congress in 1990, it mirrors substantially the protections of the Civil Rights Act. Read more at: www.usinfo.state.gov

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