ADA at 25: Years After Landmark Civil Rights Law, Some Wonder, 'Where's the Equality?'
As events this week mark 25 years since the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), rights advocates stress that a tremendous amount of work still needs to be done towards reaching equality.
President George H.W. Bush signed the act into law in 1990 following decades of work by activists to make it happen.
The impact of the civil rights law has been huge—according to the U.S. Census Bureau there were 56.7 million disabled people in 2010, and the law ushered in sweeping changes to transportation systems, public accommodations, and employment practices.
Disability rights scholar Robert L. Burgdorf Jr., who first drafted the legislation, writes in an op-ed at the Washington Post Friday: “The ADA was a response to an appalling problem: widespread, systemic, inhumane discrimination against people with disabilities.” Indeed, for those who’ve grown up in a post-ADA world, the barriers before the legislation may be shocking.
Burgdorf writes that before the law, “Large numbers of children with disabilities were systematically excluded from American public school”; “State residential treatment institutions for people with disabilities were generally abysmal”; “Most public transportation systems made few, if any, accommodations for persons with disabilities”; and “People with disabilities were routinely denied rights that most members of our society take for granted, including the right to vote (sometimes by state law, other times by inaccessible polling places), to obtain a driver’s license, to enter the courts and to hold public office.”
And such treatment was met with protests. As the Philadelphia Daily News reports:
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