SILENT NO MORE

...From these modest beginnings grew an international organization that now boasts 170 independent-living centers in the United States, England, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and Australia...

...Acting Press Secretary Larry Speakes was blocked on his way out by a wheelchair...

...If you don't have basic rights, you are not going to get the rest of your freedoms...

...The demonstrators stayed four more days, however, to review the rules and make sure that they had not been weakened...

...The movement of the disabled is alive and well," says Ed Roberts, director of the World Institute on Disability...

...He reportedly told her that because of her disability, she probably would never find work within her field"—social work...

...Lyn Thompson's story—and the problems of people in similar situations—were later recounted in two books...

...With independent living," says Roberts, "there are several concepts, and one is that rights are not to be compromised...

...To symbolize their struggle for freedom, members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) wear name tags that say My Name Is Rosa Parks when they attend meetings and demonstrations...

...Thompson, who feared she had no choice but to enter a nursing home, committed suicide...

...Though rights cannot be balanced against costs, aiding the disabled turns out to be a wise "investment": Every dollar allocated for disability rehabilitation generates $10.41 in earning power, according to Government statistics...

...Elizabeth Bouvia, severely disabled with cerebral palsy, made front-page news this year when she asked a judge for permission to starve to death...

...We try to teach people to fight for themselves, to become their own advocates," explains Roberts...

...But less than 1 per cent of Federal health-related expenditures goes toward rehabilitation research and development...

...The movement aims to secure basic rights—especially the right to live independently and have access to public facilities...

...Some argue that it means full participation in the community at large...

...She continued to work as a telephone dispatcher at a health-care firm, earning $500 a month...

...We sent dozens of carbon-copied letters and made dozens of telephone calls...

...According to medical testimony at her trial, Mrs...

...When ADAPT activists attended a meeting of the Chicago Transit Authority, the chief of the agency dismissed them as "the special interest group here with us today...

...One of the centers, Access Living in Chicago, teaches its clients about comparative shopping, budgeting, house-cleaning, and cooking...

...Others contend that severely disabled persons who require 'round-the-clock attendants and retarded people who must live in sheltered environments can also live independently—if they have the opportunity to make their own decisions and even their own mistakes...

...Most clients, says Vicky Conley, the educational coordinator, have never lived on their own before...

...ADAPT wants the Chicago Transit Authority to install wheelchair lifts on new buses, a demand that has been met with only vague promises...

...They had amazingly old ideas of what disabled people could do or not do...

...The Berkeley activists reached out into the community to "those disabled people who'll never even get a chance to go to school because they can't even deal with just living independently," says Phil Draper, one of the original participants...

...11 In Chicago, ADAPT members received disorderly conduct citations for forming a wheelchair chain that disrupted downtown traffic...

...The concept of "independent living" is not easily defined...

...But Cathy died at thirty-five, never having had the chance to live the kind of life she wanted to live...

...Such an attitude persists on the local level as well...

...The University had begun to admit disabled students in 1968, but the newcomers found the campus inaccessible and the special facilities clinically cold...

...Volunteer medical workers came regularly...

...As the cases of Bouvia and Thompson demonstrate, it is not the existence of disabilities but the way disabilities are viewed that prevents disabled persons from living full and independent lives...

...She had muscular dystrophy and lived in a halfway house with other disabled people—some confined to wheelchairs, others blind, deaf, senile, or mentally retarded...

...To shake the Government out of its lethargy, disabled activists occupied state offices of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and refused to leave until HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed the regulations to enforce the antidiscrimination statute...

...Bou-via's graduate school dean delivered the Diane O'Neill, a graduate student at Columbia College in Chicago, is a member of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) and a board member of the Coordinating Council for Handicapped Children...

...Thompson was sent a letter terminating her financial and medical benefits and requesting the return of $10,000 in past payments...

...Some of the money for supplies and secretarial expenses was raised at poker games...

...He looked embarrassed, recalls Ed Roberts...

...Members of the Black Panthers brought the California demonstrators meals each day, and area grocery stores supplied the food...

...Agencies were supposed to help us become independent and they had no concept of what independence meant," he adds...

...The emphasis on economy instead of rights has been elevated to principle by the Reagan Administration, which has rationalized deep cuts in disability benefits-hundreds of thousands of individuals were taken off the rolls—as a cost-saving measure...

...The food was barely edible, the place smelled of urine, and the snow outside was rarely shoveled...

...The first grant, $250, came from the local Rotary Club...

...It is this attitudinal barrier between the able-bodied and the disabled that must be overcome...

...She studied psychology at Chicago's Truman College, dreamed of becoming a counselor, and wanted to write her own life story...

...Congress restored them last spring only after it found that scores of people died, some as suicides, soon after the Government cut off their checks...

...One Government employee told Cathy that she couldn't get money to live independently because she wasn't living independently...

...We designed a program to meet our own needs...

...But disability-rights activists are increasingly challenging discriminatory policies and perceptions...

...But "we needed to do something that was going to be visible...

...Meanwhile, the Chicagoland Disabled Coalition is pressing for accessible polling places...

...Federal Supplemental Security Income benefits helped pay for her attendants and an apartment...

...Reagan's Department of Justice holds that Section 504 does not require an agency to "take any action that it can demonstrate would result in a fundamental alteration in the nature of the program or in undue financial or administrative burden...

...Government policies and public sentiments relegate the disabled to neglect, dependency, and mar-ginality...

...The responsibility for funding attendant care had recently been transferred from one state agency to another, which, in turn, was being reorganized into a third department...

...But Cathy and I entered a labyrinth of red tape and Catch-22s...

...But the tragic lesson seemed to go right by the Government, which slashed disability benefits in 1981...

...Draper and Roberts helped found the Center for Independent Living in 1972...

...It began operations with nothing more than a borrowed telephone...

...We were told by a legal assistance bureau that Cathy should apply for Federally subsidized housing...

...But Thompson's independent arrangement did not go over well with the Social Security Administration, which did not consider someone making more than $200 a month to be disabled...

...shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...

...Four years after the law was passed, regulations to enforce it had still not been issued...

...The Chicago Transit Authority recently purchased 363 buses without wheelchair lifts...

...a two-day blockade of a McDonald's outlet in the same city a month later forced corporate officials to reexamine their inconsiderate architecture...

...H Last August, nine disability-rights activists infiltrated a press conference at the Western White House to present Ronald Reagan with a trophy inscribed, To President Reagan for snuffing out the spirit of the Olympic torch through your abandonment of america's disabled...

...They're living in institutions or they're living with parents...

...That was in 1978...

...Discrimination against the disabled is prohibited by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973: "No otherwise qualified handicapped individual...

...He failed to be able to recognize it as a civil rights issue, in and of itself, and equated costs where he didn't equate costs with other civil rights issues...

...Once it has been hurdled, inaccessible facilities, bureaucratic callousness, discriminatory policies—all will fall away...

...The disability-rights movement began in the 1960s at the Berkeley campus of the University of California...

...It graduated to a cramped, roach-infested two-bedroom apartment, and eventually moved up to the second and fourth floors of a building equipped with a rickety elevator that had a habit of stopping unexpectedly...

...The protests lasted one night, except in California, where 150 demonstrators, forty of them in wheelchairs, stayed for almost a month...

...Silent No More The disabled move to the front of the bus BY DIANE O'NEILL We deserve a break today We deserve a seat today We deserve a ramp today at McDonald's —sung by disabled persons blockading a Denver McDonald's Lyn Thompson had her legs amputated when she could no longer endure the pain of muscular dystrophy...

...She decided to find an apartment with attendant care...

...It also holds seminars on voter education, sexuality, and self-defense...

...decisive blow to her will to live," The New York Times observed...

...Unfortunately, able-bodied Americans have a tendency either to shun the disabled, perhaps out of fear, or to patronize them since charity comes easier than empathy...

...Why was HEW so reluctant to enforce Section 504...

...The movement has adopted a grassroots approach to political action: 11 A wheelchair blockade of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Denver last April compelled the company to make all its stores accessible...

...We didn't envision a demonstration that was going to take twenty-eight days," says Judy Heumann, one of the protesters and an associate director of the World Institute on Disability...

...My friend, whom I'll call Cathy, wanted to leave the halfway house and live independently...

...People were tired of not being able to find what they needed in housing, in their futures, and in planning their own lives," remembers Ed Roberts...

...Califano thought of the cost issue," says Heumann...

...She left a tape-recorded farewell in which she told her family and friends that she loved them and blamed her death on the Social Security Administration...

...Finally, on April 28, 1977, the regulations were signed...

...Solidarity demonstrations were held outside the HEW building once or twice a week...

...for the same price, it could have purchased 320 wheelchair-equipped buses, says ADAPT coordinator Kent Jones...

...The Chicago Tribune editorialized that the Transit Authority "must not be stampeded into spending more money on its existing programs to mollify a special interest group when cheaper alternatives are available...

...I had a friend who knew this...

...A social worker advised Cathy that it was hopeless, suggesting she try for a "better" nursing home...

...The trophy was dedicated to the more than two dozen persons who committed suicide because of cutbacks in disability benefits...