They are the single is professor of arts and sciences. The professor of the disabilities and human and in addition hes the director of the project cultures that focuses on the look between medical sciences and Cultural Studies professor davis is the author of several books on disability including enforcing normalcy, disability and the body in which he won the 1996 and the award for the scholarship on the subject of north america. His memoir my sense of silence is chosen for the Chicago Tribune for 2000. Davis has been a guest on npr and the articles in the New York Times, the nations Chicago Tribune and the chronicle of higher education. Please join me in welcoming Leonard Davis at the National Archives. [applause] thank you for coming. Its interesting when i started introducing hes got the title of the Hidden History in the story and i was just thinking today by one to focus on this for the National Archives is the difference between the story and history. Lets see i just did something totally wrong. So thats the book. In the u. S. And in many places around the world, the heroes and their narratives of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are well known. The images and events are in the imaginary, the world history. But we know little about the Civil Rights Act of 1990. Also known as the ada. So i wrote this book to talk about that history. And you know, the images that we have from the 1964 Civil Rights Act are in place and in the culture and Everybody Knows who rosa parks is and just a recent film that was nominated for the Academy Award one thing we might forget is that actually there was the Church Bombing and said so there was a disability that was the result of a lot of the actions and activities for the Civil Rights Movement of 64. Here we have Sarah Jane Collins who was one of the survivors, 12yearsold and blinded by the dynamite that killed her sister in birmingham and here she is now a blind disabled woman and we tend to forget the history of the disabled in the past or we kind of make special heroes out of people like beethoven. But my interest in writing the americans with disabilities act is to also remind us of the historical events that happened in the lead up and i will talk about this particular march later on and of course the one that led to the capital crawled. Some of you may be familiar with this image taken by tom of people with disabilities calling up the steps of the capitol in progress or the lack of progress. So anyway, my interest in writing the americans with disabilities act comes from having grown up in a family to hear my parents. Both of my parents had zero hearing and were sign language users as well as lip readers trained and spoken aloud. It showed me how bad an impact discrimination on people with disabilities could be. As a child, i witnessed countless instances of hearing people, talented and athletic. He wasnt world class race walker, treating them as if they were lesser beings. From cringing when somebody called my father and a dumb to being excluded in the conversations and the family holiday gatherings i felt the isolation and the denigration by hearing people. My parents before the major decision relating to the disability past were difficult. There was no telecommunication devices that a lot of them take phone calls and every visit required a postcard sent in return and with the place, date and time arranged. For the travel agent to book a flight, no one ever discussed and there were no sign Language Interpreters available for the doctors visits, hospital stays or court stays or the religious services for that matter. They couldnt go to any of these because they couldnt follow the conversations that were going on. Conversations in all settings have to be written out on scraps of paper. They had no captions, television had no captioning. So my parents ended up going exclusively to the theater on 42nd street in new york where they could understand the subtitles but he couldnt really understand they couldnt really understand the existential plots into situations which is the sickly all they could watch. My parents were routinely excluded in the account patients. We lived in the bronx and when they applied it to the upscale Housing Development the application was turned down. Now that people were allowed in. My father was a worldclass athlete was provided admittance to the club for being deaf and jewish. If my parents wanted to drive a car they would have needed an elaborate set of beers in the car but even this accommodation was impossible since Insurance Companies charged exorbitant rates even though they have over rates of accidents than hearing people. Actually this was something on facebook today of a man that wants to be a truck driver. He was being denied the right to do that. Was insults, denigration and exclusions that they had to express. It was only in their community they were appreciated. The same was true for people with disabilities into the 20th century. Before the legislation for people with disabilities there is a huge catalog of abusive barriers. As the largest minority people with disabilities are among the poor, least employed in the least educated of all minorities. People who have disabilities are nearly twice as likely as people without disabilities to have an annual Household Income of 15,000 or less. Moreover 58 of people over 65 have some type of disability. If you have a severe disability that prevented you from taking care of yourself and getting around in the past, you have only two choices. Be taken care of by your family, or go to an institution. If you have a mobility impairment you couldnt use local Public Transportation. Where the buses like greyhound. And of course you couldnt drive since automobiles were not get easily equipped with hand controls. You essentially are confined to your house. You might try to go around your neighborhood you can only do so if you can propel a wheelchair since the power chairs were not widely used with no cuts or ramps most ramps most streets are impossible to navigate and most buildings are inaccessible. You were left in the position of only being able to go around the block. You couldnt even go to restaurants, movies or stores. If you went to school you were segregated with other children with disabilities. Youve are disseminated against in college and university interviews and if you got into the College University couldnt stay in the dorms since they were not accessible. If you were deaf or hard of hearing actually i just saw something again on facebook of an article where someone was recounting that when they went to college they were forced to live in isolation because they were told their disability would be troubling to their roommates in college. If you are deaf or hard of hearing, attending classes in any university is difficult or impossible since sign language interpretation or realtime Transcription Services were not provided. And if he were a very skilled with reader you would only get 50 of what they said. Very little material was published. If you are a person with down syndrome, autism or other kinds of disabilities, unless you have a lot of money, you were shipped off to a nightmare institution. In places like this the chances were good but it would be sitting in your own pcs or rocking back and forth to comfort herself in the midst of neglect. I could go on. But i know you know what im talking about. It is a much reduced if not reprehensibly deprived of life. Living like anyone else was a right denied to you and keeping up with the joneses is beyond imagination. So the political reality of the social view along with those problems. They are not allowed at the dignities of work friendsfor children to advance education and profession. No one cared about the plight of society ignored. It essentially did not exist. This invisibility is all the more ironic since close to 20 of the population are people with disabilities. One out of five people have disabilities. But the disabilities are hiding in plain sight. Some disabilities like diabetes, muscular squid process and depression can be invisible. Others like deafness or vision loss are not immediately noticeable. Some chronic illness like the tightest c. Or hiv are not apparent to other people. Many people with disabilities are kept out of sight in special schools and institutions. Its kind of a magic act. How do you disappear if its that the population. The history of the treatment of people with disabilities is intimately related to charity. At the height of this was as many of you remember were the television marathons or as i recall telephone to the 1950s. And these disabled children of course because they were the most childlike. They were trotted out on the Television Stage to raise money for organizations like the march of dimes, for Polio Victims or the muscular dystrophy association. I find this a kind of fascinating picture of Marilyn Monroe with disabled children, so the icon of american beauty and physicality with the children that are supposed to be pitied in the march of dimes. Jerry lewis pranced around the children with a potential future while in fact lowering their selfesteem and those of their peers to get past poster children have spoken out about their humiliating experiences such largescale media events further diminished the rights of people with disabilities by indicating that they were a group that needed to charity and different from us. How could they ever be a group that would share something as basic as the civil rights with us. By the way the Association Just announced Association Just announced that the telephone is officially over. So, now we talk about the story is a little bit. Theres no structure to stories. In politics it helps us reconstruct and tell the future generations and to ourselves not only what happened, but the morality meaning the impact of what happened. How you told the narrative structures to recession and interpretation of the story. Its important in the political and religious movement that the story is not open to interpretation. No fancy interpretation necessary. Just open the passage of the story and add water. The bill is passed with accompanying television and sense of victory. But thats the story. They told the story a few times. The early versions were around a group called adapt demonstrated to get the Public Transportation up to speed. One is the initial law of 1973 and the story is told that nixon vetoed the bill twice and then congress under pressure from people with disabilities. The clips might illustrate this. They now have a legal base to push through the reforms that were overdue. They are just words. It takes the committed individuals to see that they are enforced [inaudible] [inaudible] we decided that we wanted to do something [inaudible] a demonstration that started in manhattan as the federal building. Weve done that before to the federal building. Its on this Little Island and we had this demonstration and these great flyers and there were people being killed by the Nixon Administration and the next thing we know asking out came the city police that he drove up in the car. Do you know that you are trespassing on federal property and are you going to leave and i said no. We expected the world to end. So he walked away and we decided that it wasnt making the impact that we wanted to and we were going to stop traffic. So we did. But as i said there were hardly any cars coming by. Then we [inaudible] we got out of the car and we decided what we were going to do a sitdown sort 4 30 in the afternoon we cut off but i was too scary. So it is like a crazy city. So we decided we would go to one straight [inaudible] stop traffic in manhattan and they got a representative and they wanted to know what we wanted. We want a public debate on national tv to reach out. He just walked away going youre crazy, youre crazy. That is one of the biggest ones in washingtons history. Many people came down from new york city and basically visited older congressmen and all that had voted against it and they built up enough support for the congressional override. Finally on september 23, 1973, nixon signed a variability shellacked [inaudible] these are the stories that are told that didnt happen. And i think that being a National Archive is important because my job as a person that wrote a history is sometimes if you are a writer you find yourself in conflict with the public story so the public story here as he said is nixon vetoed twice which is true that we have asked that contained section 504 for those of you that are not familiar it is part of the act that very few people knew and that little section basically gave them the ability. And many people still dont know who put that in. It in. Its just stuck way in the back. But nixon vetoed twice because he didnt like the fact that it was for the vietnamese u. S. Soldiers and contained money for independent living and independent living is a very important part of the whole disability activist movement and the idea that you could live independently. So, there was no override. There was never an overriding the veto. What happened is that nixon won and got section that funded the independent living was taken out and it was voting for the act as a is devoted to times before that section. I want to talk about why that happens. But i want to tell you a couple of other stories and then sort of draw this. So i begindoublequote the confrontation between senator ted kennedy and john senator. I will read a little bit of this and then that is from the book. In an upstairs room in the capitol, senator ted kennedy slammed his hand down on the table. His hefty body now raised from the seat angled across the solid wooden surface as he glared at president george h. W. Bush chief of staff john senator. Their heads and shes a part. Kennedy screamed at him. You want to fight, fight with me. You want to yell, yell at me. His face was red with anger. He suddenly became pale and quiet and backed down. So at the table they were all sort of major senators involved in the act. And the meeting was called together because after ten weeks of the staff level negotiations between the white house and the senate, some progress had been made but the deadlock was apparent. The heavyweight who are orrin hatch, tom harkin, bob dole, the attorney general thornburgh and others got together to see what could be done. Only one by one they came in and harkin brought along his aid who was one of the people that trusted they were discussing as a lawyer. After some chit chat principles began their own discussion and sununu served as the point person for the white house and was known to be a hardliner and an official bad cop. He leaned over and whispered you watch in 15 minutes you will see how impassioned kennedy is about this bill. And you know that he was cognitive disabled and his son lost a leg to cancer. Many of the republicans also in the room even though they were conservatives were before the bill because they themselves also had family members involved. Silverstein had large classes into the abyss of the pages upon pages of legislation had been silently noting and mentally rebutting the objections. He cautioned sununu. But he continued picking away. What if there was a barbershop on the Second Quarter of an existing floor of an existing building in New Hampshire would you expect the barber to install an elevator and to accommodate some customer in need of a haircut . But he kept rebutting these kind of objections and he began to get irritated. He spoke to silverstein in silverstein in a controlled voice but worked his way up to the more impassioned tones. Every time i see something you bring something up. I dont want to hear from you anymore. Harkin, sitting between silverstein and kennedy was shoveling his papers trying to think how to defend his own aid when he jumped to his feet his frame created a seismic jolt as they crashed against the table. The hours of negotiation and the years of maneuvering to get a bill through congress were taking their toll. I thought kennedy was going to grab him by the collar. He pointed his finger at his face is that if you want to yell you yell at me or senator harkin. You dont go after the staff. You go after the big boys. If you have something to say safe to me. In a moment of disgust he then suggested that the room be cleared of their staff and elected members of congress tuesday. His response, i said fine. His face was drained of color in i was reading this from so many people. Thats the story and its a nice story because it shows. Its not true that was the decisive moment. This is kennedy with a group at the day of the signing. What i wanted to get to. It was going on between the different parties and these were some of the people involved. They were called at the bagel breakfast held with the women with the lurch shoulder pads and then it really was ten weeks of negotiating there that produced the results that the senate was able to pass. The story is a good illustration but its a lot less complicated than it really happened. Im going to skip one other story and there were many stories in the book that are both stories we know and those that may be different from the stories we know. Its a, the capital call three at how many of you know about the capital call blacks the majority of you dont which is interesting that but in the circle of the disability activism, its like the big moment. Its like the disability activism. The first of all let me just show you what we are talking about. [inaudible] see what people have to do to get to the top of the building. I just remembered the night before, just all of these ideas going through my head like all the years of fighting for disability rights, all the meetings as this big moment i was going to be able to. Probably about the same way i am now. Im not in that