My First National ADAPT ACTION!

By Louis Patrick

EDITORS NOTE: Read more about MCIL, ADAPT and disability rights in the recent edition of MCIL's quarterly newsletter, The Declaration! 

I’ve been a champion of ADAPT since I first saw Wade Blank, Stephanie Thomas and Bob Kafka at an American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities convention in the early eighties. I’ve been a contributor and have participated in a number of direct actions locally and one in Nashville that resulted in arrest. Nothing, however, would satisfy Deborah and Randy until I went to one of the national ADAPT actions held each year in the capitol. They were right. There’s nothing like a national ADAPT action.

ADAPT on the long March across Washington DC to Sen. Frist's home. As a board member of MCIL, I’ve had access for years, not just to Tom Olin’s wonderful photos of the actions, but to hundreds of photos and a few videos taken by Tim Wheat and Mike Heinrich. I’ve seen picture after picture of hundreds of wheelchair users and others marching along the streets of D.C., Seattle and other places. I thought I was bound to be jaded at the sight live and in person. Ain’t no way!

The first action was Sunday, September 18th. ADAPT was to pay a mass, slightly raucous visit to the Senate Majority Leader’s home in Washington, Tennessee’s own Sen. Bill Frist. The group was marching over five miles from its base of operations near L’Enfant Plaza. Those of us unable to push the entire distance were shuttled to a park beside the Omni Shoreham Hotel, just over the Rock Creek Bridge, at Connecticut and Calvert.

As I said, I thought I was prepared for the sight of my brothers and sisters streaming down Connecticut, taking the left onto Calvert. Hundreds and hundreds of them. But I just wasn’t; you can’t be.

I thought I was steeled against the sight, from close to the back of the line of demonstrators, of those hundreds stretching out straight before me over a mile long as Calvert rose in front of me, just before we made the left into the Senator’s neighborhood. 

But I wasn’t.

And, packed in near the Senator’s strong iron gates, surrounded by those hundreds, I started to see something I hadn’t really expected to see, not nearly so fully and completely realized. I saw that ADAPT has become exactly what its name promises: America’s Disabled. African-American, Hispanic, Asian, white, wheelchair users, walking wounded, brothers and sisters with visual, cognitive and hearing impairments, all packed together, chanting and singing in front of the Senator’s home, right along with our more or less able-bodied partners in crime.

Hundreds of protestors gather in front of Frist's home. The other major thing I was really unprepared for is how incredibly well-organized ADAPT is. Anyone who’s ever tried to organize an event with even just a few wheelchair users knows how completely daunting the logistics of arranging transportation, getting people up and taken care of by their attendants, and on and on can be. ADAPT makes it look like a piece of cake. That, of course, is thanks to years of experience, incomparably intelligent, unbelievably thorough planning, flawless execution and volunteers passionately dedicated beyond belief to the cause.

Allow me to shift gears. ADAPT has focused its efforts on only two goals in its history: Getting wheelchair lifts on public buses and getting people out of nursing homes. They achieved their first goal, and I have no doubt they will achieve their second one.

I know many people disagree with ADAPT’s methods. They ask the same questions that Birmingham’s more cautious clergy asked of Dr. King: "’Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?’" And Dr. King’s is still the proper answer: “Nonviolent direct action seeks….so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored….to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

Perhaps many of us focus too much on those exhilarating pictures of ADAPT in the streets, marching and chanting. We don’t talk enough about the endless hours of behind-the-scenes negotiating, the organizing, building email networks, the letter-writing, the quiet, patient diplomacy that go on before, during and after an action. But all that effort is there nonetheless. But it has to be backed up by direct action.

Don’t be fooled. Power concedes nothing. Vested interests look out for themselves and themselves alone. That’s all they’re paid, and paid handsomely, to do. Those who think otherwise delude themselves. And advocates who think otherwise are in the wrong business.

Mass transit in America was very nearly a dead issue in the eighties when ADAPT begin its campaign to see that every bus, public and private, is equipped with a wheelchair lift. I think there can be little doubt that, beleaguered as public transit was at the time, that that industry would not have been able, on its own, to command the public resources needed to get lifts on buses. It took the long, long years of action after direct action, of ADAPT attacking the power centers in Washington and haunting every convention of the American Public Transit Association, of dogging them wherever and whenever they gathered—before ADAPT achieved its first goal.

I have no doubt that they would not have achieved that goal without direct action. The nursing home industry has grown like a toxic weed since the federal government first started channeling funds to it through the Medicare and Medicaid programs in the sixties. Like most industries, it has learned to defend itself, to hedge itself about with hordes of lobbyists and self-interested investors, and it nourishes its legislative supporters with mountains of campaign contributions. The stranglehold which the industry currently has on public resources is not going to be broken by scarcely paid citizen lobbyists, polite conversation and mannerly protests alone.

Most assuredly, wheelchair users, white cane users and ASL signers wearing suits need to roam the corridors of power in our nation’s capitol, every state’s capitol, every county seat and every city. Relentlessly. But manners, connections and elegant dress—without tons of cold, cold, hard cash—ain’t gonna cut it. And disabled folks ain’t got them kind of resources. We’re gonna have to pour out into the streets and push open those doors to negotiation.

The people of ADAPT will be there, spending their money and time, chanting, yelling, screaming, expending their passion, exercising their wit and intelligence, interposing their bodies between their brothers and sisters and the institutions that would suck them dry—’til the last dog dies.

Louis Patrick
MCIL Board President