#capitol crawl

On March 12, 1990, to get the ADA passed, many wheelchair users and people who use other mobility aids cast aside said mobility aids and climbed up the steps of the State Capitol in Washington D.C., demonstrating the inaccessibility of the world.

The youngest person to take part was Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins. She was 8 years old at the time. As she was climbing, she, very famously yelled. (quote) "I'll take all night if I have to!" (end quote)

Imagine climbing up 83 steps. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a big deal—but that’s likely because you’d be walking. What would you do, though, if you couldn’t?  That was the premise behind the Capitol Crawl, a now-iconic protest to demand the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA was a landmark civil rights bill aimed at providing basic amenities and protections to some 40 million mentally and physically disabled citizens. Today we take many of the ADA’s changes to society—curb cuts in sidewalks and closed captioning on entertainment, to name just two examples—for granted. But the act’s passage, in 1990, was anything but guaranteed. By spring of that year, the ADA had been trapped in legislative limbo for months. Despite the strong support of then-President George H.W. Bush, the act was languishing in Congress, caught in the deliberations of House subcommittees. Many U.S. Representatives balked at the expense and complication posed by the ADA’s requirements. Enter ADAPT—American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit—a grassroots disability rights organization that had been staging protests across the country even before its official founding in 1983. On March 12, 1990, ADAPT led a procession of more than 500 marchers, including other disability activists and lobbyists, from the White House to the west side of the U.S. Capitol. There, in the kind of guerrilla civic action for which the organization had become known, scores of marchers dropped to the ground and began the long journey up the hard marble stairs leading to the “People’s House.” They climbed backwards or on their hands and knees, step-by-painstaking-step. “As I’m seeing the people around me,” recalled Anita Cameron, one of the ADAPT activists who made her way up that day, “I'm like, ‘whoa, we are doing it. We are really doing it. We’re, like, crawling into history.’” Rolled up in their pockets, protestors carried copies of the Declaration of Independence. Once they finally summitted the stairs, ADAPT reps delivered those scrolls to members of Congress as a reminder of the ADA’s importance. And while media coverage of the event wasn’t extensive, but the publicity that was garnered by the Crawl was impactful. “The pictures were striking,” said The New York Times several days later, “just as they were intended to be: Children paralyzed from the waist down crawling up the steps of the Capitol.” Six months later, following the bill’s now-remarkably swift passage through the House, President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA into law. “We did it to show that we disabled people, as second class citizens, needed change. And the vehicle for how it was going to change was the ADA,” Cameron told American Experience, reflecting on the Capitol Crawl’s significance. “But I think a lot of people forget that the ADA was the floor. It was not the ceiling. So it was the beginning of rights for us, but it was not the end.”

(ALT Text used)

Today's the anniversary of the Capitol Crawl - on March 12th, 1990, the disability rights organization, ADAPT, which is still actively fighting for disability rights today (adapt.org) rallied around one thousand disabled people to climb the steps of the, at the time, inaccessible US Capitol Building, to protest the delayed signing of The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). These protests gained a lot of media attention and public support, which directly led to President George H.W. Bush signing the ADA in July, 1990.

Many people may know this story (it has luckily been shared across multiple sources and media formats, including the Netflix documentary, Crip Camp), but what many do not know is that approximately one hundred people were arrested during these protests, five of whom showed up to the Washington DC probation office ... and the probation office was inaccessible. You can't make this stuff up. In fact, here are sources:

A great article on the Capitol Crawl: https://issuu.com/faircountmedia/docs/ada25_complete_book/s/145488

Link to ADAPT's Archive: adaptmuseum.net

[Image description: White rectangles filled with text overlaid on a photo of the Capitol Crawl that took place on March 12, 1990. The photo shows a blonde eight-year-old named Jennifer Keelan, who has cerebral palsy, walking on hands and knees as she leads a group of physically disabled people in crawling and walking up the stone steps leading to the austere white Capitol building in Washington, D.C.