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In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, which expanded funding for vocational rehabilitation services for disabled people. Section 504 of the law included an anti-discrimination clause which outlawed bias based on disability in a similar manner to bias based on race. But during the presidencies of Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Section 504 was never implemented, with the business lobby and others citing<\/a> the supposedly prohibitive cost that providing special accommodations for disabled people would place on taxpayers and businesses. But the legal precedent set by Section 504 planted the seed for what became a twenty-year struggle on the part of disabled activists to codify their full and rightful place in society, culminating in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.<\/p>\n Thirty-five years after its passage, Jim LeBrecht\u2019s new nonfiction film<\/a>, Change, Not Charity: The Americans With Disabilities Act<\/em>, documents how disabled people across the country drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and, tired of being ostracized, began organizing for legal recognition of their rights. LeBrecht, a filmmaker who uses a wheelchair and whose 2020 film<\/a> Crip Camp<\/em> received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, flips the script on ableist narratives in his depiction of the disability rights movement\u2019s evolution. As one rousing movement slogan quoted by activist Stephanie Thomas in the film\u2019s opening moments goes, \u201cAccess is a civil right!\u201d<\/p>\n But, as Change, Not Charity<\/em> shows, this was not always a widely accepted view: For ages, physically and mentally disabled people were stereotyped as \u201cthe least among us,\u201d sidelined, and kept out of sight, out of mind. LeBrecht intercuts footage from the 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame<\/em>\u2014in which a heavily made-up Charles Laughton\u2019s Quasimodo is presented as a \u201cmisshapen,\u201d monstrous outcast cut off from everyday life and consigned to the shadows\u2014to demonstrate how popular culture perpetuated this pervasive exclusionary mindset. Clips from the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon<\/em>, an annual TV event beginning in 1966 that raised funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, show children<\/a> with muscular dystrophy being portrayed as objects of pity, much like the March of Dimes <\/em>campaign portrayed children with polio a generation earlier. The film also includes a clip of Geraldo Rivera\u2019s 1972 expos\u00e9<\/a> of Willowbrook State School, an infamous Staten Island institution where thousands of children with intellectual disabilities were warehoused and subjected to horrific conditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alongside this archival footage, LeBrecht includes original interviews with disability rights advocates such as Mary Lou Breslin, who describes the indignity of needing to use the bathroom in high school at a time when stalls weren\u2019t equipped for the functional needs of people in wheelchairs\u2014a challenge that, along with other obstacles such as boarding and exiting public transport, can make daily life daunting for wheelchair users. Judy Heumann, a wheelchair user who became a leader in the disability rights movement after she sued<\/a> the New York Board of Education for denying her a teaching license, is shown in footage summarizing the movement\u2019s goal: \u201cWe demand entry into the mainstream of American life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 provided hope of attaining this egalitarian goal, disabled activists and their allies launched a remarkable series of acts of civil disobedience and direct actions. Demonstrations took place at the Washington, D.C., headquarters and regional offices of what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW; now the Department of Health and Human Services). In April 1977, about 100 protesters marched to San Francisco\u2019s Federal Building and occupied a floor for weeks. During what became<\/a> the longest occupation of a federal building in U.S. history, the Black Panthers\u2014who, like disability activists, were often represented in the media as violent\u2014brought food, clothing, and medical supplies to the \u201cmulti-culti\u201d occupiers in an act of solidarity.<\/p>\n Back in D.C., when HEW Secretary Joe Califano declined to support the proper implementation of Section 504, protesters staged candlelight vigils at his home. Califano, enraged, finally signed the statute, only for the U.S. Supreme Court to weaken 504 in a series of rulings beginning in 1979. When the austerity-minded Reagan Administration came to power in 1981, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush insisted, \u201cWe\u2019ve gone too far in the federal government in regulating things,\u201d and Section 504 languished.<\/p>\n At this point, disability rights activists stepped up their game. In 1990, attorney Arlene Mayerson of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund conceived of what is described in Change, Not Charity <\/em>as \u201can overarching piece of legislation\u201d to enshrine the movement\u2019s demands into legislation: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Throughout the Reagan Administration and into the George H.W. Bush Administration, disability activists engaged in both legislative advocacy and public protest. In Congress, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Ted Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, along with U.S. Representatives Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, and Steve Bartlett, Republican of Texas, sponsored the ADA.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The legislation was spurred on by letter writing campaigns to legislators and activists\u2019 more daring public acts of defiance, such as a demonstration in which members of Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) chained<\/a> their wheelchairs to buses and used the chairs to block traffic. One jaw-dropping scene shows more than 700 demonstrators marching on March 12, 1990 from the White House to the U.S. Capitol, where at the bottom of the steps, they descend from their wheelchairs to climb their way<\/a> up the eighty-three steps on all fours. \u201cWe\u2019re crawling into history,\u201d participant Anita Cameron says in an interview for the film. The day after the \u201cCapitol Crawl,\u201d the Rotunda was occupied by the undaunted protesters, 104 of whom<\/a> were arrested by Capitol police for insisting upon their dignity and full and equal rights as human beings.<\/p>\n Senator Harkin, who was interviewed for the film, advocated for the ADA<\/a> in the first Senate floor speech ever made<\/a> in American Sign Language; he dedicated the address to his deaf brother. When former President Bush (who had initially resisted fully implementing Section 504) finally signed the bill into law on July 26, 1990, at a ceremony on the White House lawn attended by 3,000 cheering people, he declared<\/a>, \u201cLet the shameful wall of exclusion come tumbling down.\u201d In an interview for the documentary, Ralph Neas, a civil rights attorney and former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, calls the ADA \u201cthe most important civil rights bill since 1965.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a moving documentary about being a \u201cpart of an organization moving mountains,\u201d as Anita Cameron proudly tells the filmmakers. It demonstrates what Justin Dart, who contracted polio when he was eighteen and is regarded<\/a> as the \u201cfather\u201d of the ADA, asserts: \u201cNobody is going to give us rights. We\u2019re going to take our rights.\u201d The film derives much of its power and authenticity from the fact that it is not only helmed by a disabled director, but that its narrator is the four-time Emmy Award winner for Game of Thrones<\/em>, Peter Dinklage. The beautiful Change, Not Charity <\/em>chronicles how activism empowered the so-called \u201cleast\u201d to be first.\u00a0<\/p>\n Change, Not Charity: The Americans With Disabilities Act premieres on March 25 on <\/em>PBS\/ AMERICAN EXPERIENCE,<\/em> streaming for free simultaneously with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms.\u00a0The film will be broadcast with open captions and audio description. Viewers who stream via <\/em>PBS.org<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and on the\u00a0<\/em>PBS app<\/em><\/a>\u00a0will have access to versions with: closed captions, interpreted with American Sign Language and open captions; with extended audio description; and with Spanish language closed captions.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, which expanded funding for vocational rehabilitation services for disabled people. Section 504 of the law included an anti-discrimination clause which outlawed bias based on disability in a similar manner to bias based on race. But during the presidencies of Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Section 504 was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":160236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[17807,31977,58582,16930,47507,40268],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-160235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-ada","tag-disabilities","tag-disability-rights","tag-dispatches","tag-ed-rampell","tag-film-review"],"yoast_head":"\n