Interview: Lex Frieden

On this episode we explore the untold history of the ADA with Dr. Lex Frieden, one of its architects. Curious how the space shuttle Challenger, a New York prisoners union, and Oral Roberts helped shape the ADA? Find out in this episode! 

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Transcript

00:11 Boris: Well, thank you for joining us today. With me is Dr. Lex Frieden and many people consider you to be one of the founders of the Independent Living Movement in the United States. Can you recall the moment that you heard that call to be an advocate?

 

00:32 Lex Frieden: Well, yeah, I think that was shortly after I broke my neck. I was in a car wreck in 1967, I was a freshman in college at Oklahoma State University, I had been there just a few weeks, and it was coming up to the Thanksgiving break. I had not been home, my home was only about two and a half hours away, but I'd not been back home since I'd been away at college and was looking forward to the break. Typically, most students would take a week off there, even though Thanksgiving fell I think on a Thursday. And on Friday, as most of us were getting ready to go home, I went to my psychology class and the instructor there said that she was gonna fail anybody who didn't show up to her class next Monday. Most people were gonna ditch whatever classes they had that week to spend the whole week away at home, but she said anybody who missed her class would fail the class. Not just lose the points for the day, but she'd fail them because she felt like she had to be there and therefore, the students had to be there and she didn't want anybody to skip on her class.

 

01:51 LF: So we were kind of upset about that, everybody who was in her class that afternoon were kinda upset. She did do us the favor of saying, she... Then we can come to any of our sections. If we wanted to show up at her 8 o'clock morning section, then we could go there and leave for our vacation, but that meant there were two days that we missed of the vacation and we had to stay there at school. So a few of us decided, as adult 18-year-olds might do, that we were gonna spend the weekend without going to bed and drinking our way through the various bars in the town that sold to underaged students. And we made it to about midnight on Sunday when we had a head-on collision with another car and everybody jumped out of the car, I was in the middle of the back seat and I couldn't move, I couldn't move my arms, I couldn't move my legs, I thought I had two broken legs and two broken arms. That was a bummer.

 

02:55 LF: I learned shortly after that, that I had a broken neck and wound up going through surgery and rehabilitation and so on. I had the good fortune to be rehabilitated at TIRR Memorial Hermann, where I now have a laboratory and where we have our independent living research utilization program and I was a patient there at TIRR for three months. And when I left I applied, not to go back to Stillwater because the campus there was totally inaccessible but there was a new college in the town, Tulsa, where I lived. And it had been built new, built from scratch by the evangelist Oral Roberts, and it was totally level entrances everywhere, wheelchair access, elevators in every building. They were even, and this was remarkable at the time, video taping all their courses. And I thought, "Well, if I have to miss class one day, that's gonna be a perfect opportunity for me to watch one of the video tapes and catch up.

 

04:33 LF: So I applied to go to school there and received a letter stating that I was not to be admitted and I called the dean Of Admissions who spoke to me and I said, "I think perhaps you got my... I got a letter that came off the wrong stack. I know you process these quickly. And perhaps an assistant, a secretary might have picked the wrong one up and put it in my envelope." And he said, "I'll get your file." And he said, "No, no, Mr. Frieden," he said, "You've got the right letter. You'll not be admitted to our school." And I said, "Well, if I could, did you get my grades from high school?" He said, "Yes," he said, "I saw you were a good student." I said, "Did you see I was valedictorian of my class? I had straight As." He said, "Yes, yes, yes, good student," he said. And I said, "Well, did you see my college admission scores? I was in the top 5% elimination." And he said, "Well, you're a good test-taker, too, Mr. Frieden." And I got to thinking, "What could possibly be wrong?"

 

05:45 LF: I said, "Did you see that I had a scholarship, the presidential scholarship that'll pay my way through college?" You don't have to be concerned about my family not being able to pay the tuition." And he said, "No, no," he said, "that's good that you have that scholarship." And I said, "Well, are you sure you gave me the right letter?" And he said, "No, no, I'm sure." I thought about it for a minute and then I thought, "Well, it may be they're trying to dissuade students from coming there, who are gonna be distractions to the other students or maybe they're dissuading students who might need help from the other students and therefore distract them from their studies. And I said to him, "You know, I have many friends who are students there on the campus, classmates and friends who would be happy to help push me from one building to the other if my motor stopped and who would be glad to help me." And he said, No, that's not the point. The point is you don't meet our qualifications for admission to the university. And I, at that point, I dropped the telephone; I was holding a phone that was connected to the wall. When I dropped the phone, it fell on the floor. I didn't speak to that person again. My mother walked by me, I was in the kitchen, she said, "You need me to pick up the phone?" And I just shook my head, I couldn't speak to her. I couldn't tell my mother, my father, my sister, I couldn't tell anybody that I had been turned down for admission to the university because I had a disability.

 

08:13 LF: It was embarrassing to me, at that point, it was disheartening, it was frightening, it was a pit in the stomach. And I've often said, particularly to groups, and I'm speaking of people who I presume must have experienced discrimination because of their race or other characteristics. I've often said, "I don't honestly believe people can understand or appreciate discrimination, unless they felt it in their gut." It's not something you can describe and articulate with words and that's what I felt. It just, at some point, you can say, it left an empty spot. At other points, you can say it was disheartening but you can't describe that feeling. And that was the first time in my life that I ever felt... I was told that I couldn't do something that I knew I could do on a basis of a characteristic for which I had no control. And that's probably the best definition I can give for discrimination, people are prevented from doing something that they can do simply because of a characteristic that they have about which they have no control.

 

09:37 LF: So I was depressed, I was... I didn't know what I was gonna do. A couple of weeks later, my father, who just mentioned this experience at his workplace, came home and he said, "We ought to go and explore the University of Tulsa," which was across town. I said, "Dad, we've been by there, that's an old school. Like Oklahoma State, they've got old buildings, they've got steps on all their buildings, they're trying to emulate an Ivy league school with all the steps in the Ivy and all of that. It's not gonna work." And he said, "Well, Tom, down at the office, graduated from there, and he knows the dean and he'll call the dean of students up there, and maybe we can just talk to him. Wouldn't that be okay?" And I said, "Okay, fine. I mean, whatever, it's not a big deal to me." And so we drove the next afternoon to the university. I got out of the van in my wheelchair and we couldn't get up the curb, couldn't get out of the parking lot. There was no way to get out of the parking lot onto the sidewalk, much less to the dean's office, which was up a floor.

 

10:57 LF: And the dean came out there on the parking lot, introduced himself. And he brought another dean, this was the dean of students, he brought the dean of education, Dean Fernow and Dean Harry Stephens. And the two of them said to me, "We've looked at your resume, you'd be a great student, you're the kind of student we're trying to recruit here and we'd love for you to be here." And I said, "Well, I don't really imagine myself in an environment where every place you turn, every place I'm supposed to be, there are steps." And he said, Dean Stephens said, "Well," he said, "the students here are good students. They'll be glad to carry you up the steps." And I said, "Well, I appreciate that. But to have students doing that every class I go to, all day and all week and all semester, to me, it just wouldn't feel right. I, frankly, would be afraid of my own safety after a while, and the safety of those students who were lifting me, it's a long flight of steps. And to do that over and over again, just doesn't make me feel like a good thing to do."

 

12:21 LF: And the other dean said, "Look across the U there. Clear on the other side, you see that construction?" And I said, "Yes," 'cause there was some building going on there. He said, "That's the first building we've built in 15 years on the campus and that building is gonna have a level entrance and it's gonna have an elevator on it. Would you consider going to school? Because we have that building? And I said, "Well, that's great. What will you teach there?" And the other dean said, "Oh, that'll be Biology." And I kinda chuckled and said, "Well, that won't be me 'cause I'm not interested in biology and I doubt that I would be a very good student." And the first dean said, "But wait, we're not married to that. Take the catalog, figure out what courses you want to take, call us and they will be in that building."

 

13:30 LF: And to me, that was like an awakening, that was like a miracle. They used to say the evangelist, Oral Roberts had miracles, but I never saw one at Oral Roberts. And this one across town at the University of Tulsa, they made the miracle. And that lesson has stayed with me all my life. I've used that as an example before and quite frankly, that was an example that we used in the ADA, the battle for the ADA. I used that example more than once in senators and house members office when they ask about, "What does this idea of reasonable accommodation mean?" And in the 1970s, I think about 1974 when they were working on the regulations to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, that included Title IV and Title V. The first ADA, really. They invited me to Washington, the Labor Department had a committee that they appointed to give recommendations into the regulations. And we were sitting around the table and somebody said, "What do we call this when we're finding a substitute that's reasonable?" And I said, at the time, "Well, here's what happened to me at the University of Tulsa and I would consider that to be a reasonable accommodation".

 

14:57 LF: And that phrase kinda caught on obviously and was incorporated into the ADA section, if you will, of the Rehabilitation Act, the first non-discrimination of protecting people with disabilities. So the experience that I had in Tulsa, after my neck was broken, probably framed the rest of my career and that experience was enough to motivate me to study, at the time, the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, to work on the regulations, to help found the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities. Judy Human, whom we've interviewed, Ed Roberts, whom I've had the ever little pleasure of meeting. [15:55] ____, whose passed for many years, a woman named Diane Latin, a man who recently passed, Elmer Bartels. A group of us got together with Fred Fay in Boston, Massachusetts and agreed to form an organization called the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities. That was about 1974 and we kept that organization together pretty well. Frank Bowe, we hired a deaf man who had graduated from New York University as our executive director and Frank was a great leader until his unfortunate passing seven years ago. So that's a long answer to your question.

 

16:51 S1: This year, we're gonna be celebrating the 29th anniversary of the ADA. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about the years that led up to its passage. You were originally appointed the Executive Director on the, what we now know as the National Council on Disability, by President Reagan in the early '80s. What was your experience working inside the Reagan Administration?

 

17:13 LF: You have to back that up a little bit because I had been in Texas and working nationally with the ACCD. And I had met a man named Justin Dart and sort of educated him on the disability movement, the Independent Living Movement, and he became an advocacy leader, as you know. And Justin's father had been one of the primary funders of the Reagan campaign. They lived near one another in California. And Justin benefited from that relationship to his father, who by the way had disowned him some years before. But Reagan didn't know that. And so President Reagan, when he was brought a list of people to be on this presidentially appointed counsel as members, selected Justin Dart to be the vice-chair person. And the council needed to hire an executive director. They needed an executive director was included in the law. It was newly formed. Before the '83 amendments to the Rehabilitation Act, the council had been just an advisory body in the department of HEW.

 

18:32 LF: But as a result of a number of dynamics, the council was made an independent federal agency. And so they had the opportunity to hire fresh staff, starting with an executive director and Justin recommended me. And the other council members agreed to interview me. So I flew to Washington, did an interview. The council members who were on the committee were pleased with me. Thought it would be great to have somebody from outside the proverbial beltway to come in and lead this new council. Well, they recommended me to the president and everybody thought it was a done deal, I was gonna move to Washington, be the executive director. But a few minutes before all the papers were to be signed in The White House, the Director of Presidential Personnel got a message that Lex Frieden was not a Republican. He was a Democrat. In fact, he was a delegate to the competition, Mondale. I was working as a Mondale delegate. Had been to Democratic Conventions before that and nobody had asked me. When they interviewed me, they never asked me, "Were you a Republican or a Democrat?" It didn't make any difference. I was a leader. I was a professional. Why would that have made a difference? They didn't think so. They didn't ask me. And I didn't feel compelled to volunteer and who cared?

 

20:07 LF: So the presidential personnel guy gets this message and he's a little shocked and he calls the chairman of the panel, Mrs. Parrino says, "You're sending a recommendation over here to the president to work for him and the guy worked for the competition, what are you doing?" And she said, "Well, I don't know anything about that. You need to deal with him." So the guy calls me and he says, "Mr. Frieden," he said, "We're not gonna be able to carry through this appointment unless," he said, "you have somebody call who can vouch for you and they need to call right away, probably within the next 30 minutes." And I'm thinking, "I don't understand, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. Here they've given me 30 minutes to get a recommendation and yet, they've already interviewed me and been through this vetting process."

 

21:10 LF: And I thought for a minute. I was sitting in my office and I thought about who I might know that could recommend me and tell the President that I was safe? And I remembered a woman who had made my bed and the beds of some of my colleagues when we lived in a kind of communal living situation a few years before, people with paraplegia, quadriplegia living together, sharing an apartment setting. And this woman had been, I remembered, the wife of the owner of one of the television stations in Houston, Channel 13, his name was Willard Walbridge. And he was kind of a famous guy, and I knew Mrs. Walbridge, and I thought about calling her. But then I thought, "Well, I don't have time to talk to her and explain it. I'll just call Mr. Walbridge. I'd never met him, never talked to him, I'm just gonna call him and tell him the deal."

 

22:10 LF: And so I called there and I spoke to his secretary, kind lady who said, "Well, I'm sorry Mr. Frieden, I'm sure Mr. Walbridge would like to hear your story." I told her why I was calling, and she said, "But he's busy right now. I'll get him to call you when he's finished with his meeting. It should be in the next five or 10 minutes, and I'll tell him what the call is about." And I said, "Well, do you think he... " I was just kind of curious at that point. I said to the secretory, I'd said, "Well, do you think maybe he knows the President?" And she said, "Well, judging by his mail, yes, he does." [chuckle] And I'm thinking, "Well, boy, oh boy. What... This is the best cold call a salesman ever made." [chuckle] So I never heard back from Walbridge and I didn't know what to think about that, and haven't thought about anybody else. And I remembered from Tulsa, from going to church there and being in the community, there was an oil man named Robert Parker who was very politically active. And as I recalled, he was a Republican and I had met him at the church. He was a family friend of ours.

 

23:26 LF: And so I called Mr. Parker and spoke to him, and Mr. Parker said, "Yes," he said, "I know the President." He said, "I'll put in a call for you." And I said, "Well, here's the number of the personnel director who called me." He said, "Okay. Well, I'll do that." So I waited a few minutes, and the 30-minute hour came across and the phone rang, and I didn't know who it was, and it was the director of Presidential Personnel. And he said, "Well," he said, "start packing." And I said, "Excuse me?" He said, "Well, I guess you're coming to Washington." And I said, "What happened?" [chuckle] And he said, "Well, a guy named Parker called me, that was fine," he said, "but your buddy Walbridge talked to the President." And I said, "Excuse me? I gave him your number." He said, "Well, he apparently didn't have time for underlings. He called the President." And I said, "Well, what did he say to the President?" He said, "It was a short conversation." He said, "He told the President there wasn't a good Republican in Texas who hadn't first been a Democrat."

 

[laughter]

 

24:44 LF: And so that's the way I got to Washington. The President was moved by Mr. Walbridge who probably made a lot of donations to his campaign as well, and I was glad to have the opportunity to work with Sandra Parrino and Justin Dart and Joe Dusenbury and the whole array of 15 members of the council. And they, from the very beginning, wanted to do something to change the lives of people with disabilities. I was apprehensive at first. Anybody in the disability community would have been... Republicans didn't have a good record on disability. Reagan had never really talked about disability himself. Nobody knew what his attitudes were, but he did appoint 15 people, and among them, people with disabilities and parents of kids with disabilities. And those parents were, they were among the best advocates I've ever met in my life. There was a deaf actress who was on the panel, and there was a woman who owned a bank in California, and she was on the panel and she had two children with disabilities, and it just went on and on. These people knew what they were talking about and they wanted to do something radical and we proposed the ADA.

 

26:03 LF: Now, a lot of the disability community was not in sync with us on that. They, in the first place, didn't trust the Reagan Administration. They didn't trust the Republicans, in general. They wanted to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That was not our approach. We had a different approach. We wanted a free-standing bill for people with disabilities. In fact, I had done some research and discovered that on several times, several occasions in the past, amendments to the Civil Rights Bill that included people with disabilities had been made and they were fought by the civil rights community. The civil rights community didn't wanna include disability in their law. And so it was our conclusion that, fine, we'll just make the Civil Rights law protecting people with disabilities, which is what we wound up proposing. And we had a deadline to report to the President on our findings, was to be a report making recommendations for laws, and our deadline was February 1986.

 

27:21 LF: So throughout 1984 and 1985, we developed our report. We wrote the 13-page draft of the ADA. We put that in a report called Toward Independence. We got input from many, many groups. We had hearings all over the country. Justin Dart drove his pickup around every state at least twice, having little dinner meetings with people and consulting with them. We did a lot of things to gain input over those two years and we had the report together. That was another story, by the way. We almost didn't get the report done on time because we didn't realize that the federal printing office is the only place you can get a federal report printed. You can't take it to Kinkos. [chuckle] You have to take it to the GPO, the General Printing Office, Government Publishing Office. We took it over there a month before it was supposed to be published and they told us their schedule didn't allow for us to get it published on time. It would be six months. And we said, "Oh, that's wrong. We have to get our report done on time." They laughed and said, "No federal report is ever done on time, so don't worry about it."

 

28:40 LF: And I said, "You know, I'm from Texas and things get done on time when somebody asks us to do 'em and we're gonna get it done on time." They said, "There's no way you can do that, with one exception." And they told us what the exception was and that was to have a... [chuckle] The work done by a federal penitentiary. That's the only exception in the law. And as far as we knew, nobody had ever used that exception. But I went to the federal penitentiary in New York, spoke to the warden, spoke... And get this: There was a prisoners' union. So I spoke to the prisoners' union president. And at this point, in order to get it printed, they would have had to work through the holidays at the end of the year. And so the prison... [chuckle] The prisoners had to vote whether they would take this contract to print this report. The prisoners' union president read to the prisoners some of the report. And they understood what it was about, the rights of people with disabilities, and they agreed unanimously to work weekends, holidays, overnight, whatever needed to be done to get this report printed and to us in time to deliver it.

 

30:06 LF: So we had, at the same time... This is December. We're making an appointment with the President to meet early February 'cause we intended to have our report done and take it to the President. The law said that it will be presented to the President. We were too naïve to understand that that meant put it in the mail with the address of the President on it, and the President never sees the report, you see? It all gets read by all the staff and all that thing. We thought it meant, take it to the President. So we made an appointment and darned if we didn't get one. You see, we were ready with our press release. We even hired... We used private funds that had been donated by some of the council members to hire a PR firm to organize this big blast we were gonna have after the President endorsed the ADA. And well, we were ready to go. We were all dressed and we had our press people waiting in a hotel across town. There were to be, I think, four of us representing the council, who would take the report to the President. And we were dressed and ready to go when the spaceship's Challenger unfortunate explosion on the launch pad and the... At that point, that was just a few hours before we were to meet the President.

 

31:37 LF: And this whole thing was scripted, the President was gonna say how glad he was to receive this report, to endorse it in a few words and it would have been beautiful. Ronald Reagan on the steps of The White House endorsing the ADA, and it didn't happen. The President's schedule was cancelled. We couldn't get another appointment. He was gonna be in mourning, no appointments or anything for the next few days. After that, the calendar was already packed, scheduled ahead. The only thing the appointment secretary could say was, "Have you tried the Vice President?" Which didn't give us much good feeling at that point. I mean, we were saddened because we lost those astronauts and we were... I can say doubly saddened because we thought for a moment that we had lost the opportunity to start a fire that would lead to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but it didn't happen. And then we thought about meeting with the Vice President, and the Vice President was George Bush and nobody had ever heard of him. I mean, at that point in time, it was like who knows who the Vice President is today? You only hear about the President, right? Who is the Vice President anyway? Half the people can't tell you.

 

33:01 LF: And that's the way it was then. But what else were we gonna do? So we said, "Let's, okay, meet with the Vice President." And I think it was the following week we went to the West Wing, to the Vice President's office there. And it was almost prophetic 'cause I don't know if you know who James Brady was, but James Brady was the press secretary to the President. And early in his tenure, there was an assassination attempt on the President at the Washington Hilton. And James Brady, the press secretary, got between the shooter and the President and took a bullet. And the bullet went in his head and he had a severe head injury and had difficulty... As I recall, he couldn't speak. He was famous for giving a thumbs-up to everybody he met, had a loving family and he... The President was so fond of him and respectful that he kept an office for him in the West Wing. And so Mr. Brady would come to work there and sit during the day and greet people and so on and so forth, and it was almost prophetic. When we went in that morning to see the Vice President, James Brady gave us a wave and a thumbs-up, and I thought, "You know, that's pretty cool."

 

34:31 LF: So we got to the office, outside the Vice President's office, and Boyden Gray, big, tall, drink of water from North Carolina. The President's lawyer, Boyden Gray met us and gave us a little briefing and said, "The President has read your report. We gave him a copy and briefed him yesterday." And he looked at me and he said, "You're from Texas, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes, sir." And he said, "Well, be sure to tell the President, the Vice President, you're from Texas, because he likes Texans." And I thought, "Well, that's kind of cool." We were also told by an assistant there that this was just a so-called photo op, that we would have 10 minutes with the Vice President. He would take the report, the photographer would snap pictures of us handing it to him. We'd do it in a certain part of the room in front of the fireplace, and then we'd be out of there. And we thought, "Okay, well this is fine. We'll have our pictures and we'll go and do what we have to do. At least we can say we delivered the report as we were supposed to do."

 

35:42 LF: So we were escorted into the Vice President's office and all showed where to stand for the photos, and we did that. That was me and Justin Dart and Mr. Milbank, Jeremiah Milbank, who had been the treasurer of the Republican Party and Mrs. Parrino from New York who was the chairperson. And the four of us went in and stood by the fireplace and the Vice President came over from behind his desk and he took the report. There's some pictures of that. And we were... You know, we nodded and shook hands. I didn't even have a chance to tell him I was from Texas. And we all started to leave and he said, "Well, wait, where are you going?" And I think Justin said, "Well, we don't wanna take too much of your time. We were told this was a photo op, but thank you very much." And the Vice President said, "No, no." He said, "Come over here to the desk and sit down." And I'm like, "Did anybody tell the secretary that? 'Cause she's probably got somebody waiting to come in here." But he came, took us over and showed us where to sit next to his desk and he went around behind it, and he said, "You know, Barbara and I read this report last night."

 

36:58 LF: And I'm thinking, "Are you kidding me? Mrs. Bush was up reading to you at night?" And he said, "Yeah, Barbara and I read the report." And he said, "This rings home to us." He said, "This report hits us at home because we have two children, one of them with a disability who died, Robin, and we miss her terribly." And he said, "And we have a son who has a learning disability, a reading disability. And we've been concerned about their schooling, how they might do in school and we've been concerned about what barriers they might face because of their disabilities." And he said, "What you've said in this report makes a lot of sense to us, and I wanna do everything I can do to support you on this." But he said... Now, this was kind of funny. He said, "You probably saw the article in The Washington Post this morning. The title of it is, 'Where is George?'" And that article, you can go back and read it, but it makes a big deal about Reagan is the President, Bush is just kind of a hanger-on over there. He does nothing. All he does is... When the President doesn't feel like traveling to a state funeral, he'll send George. And George goes around the world to these state funerals, representing the President and the United States and that's about all he does.

 

38:31 LF: So Vice President Bush said, "You know, as you read, I'm just the Vice President. So I'll give the report to the President. I'll tell him that we met and that I would recommend that, and I'm sure he'll be supportive of it." But he said, "If in the future I can do anything more to help you, I'm gonna be there for you." And you know, you talk about, thinking ahead a little bit, he became the President within two years. Two years later, he was the President of the United States. And the first speech he ever gave to a joint session of Congress, what did he say? "I wanna see in my term an Americans with Disabilities Act pass that will protect people with disabilities from discrimination." Now, he did not name the ADA, but he did say, "I wanna see a law that will protect people with disabilities from discrimination." That's very... I mean, you know, you think about politicians making promises and stuff. This guy said, [chuckle] in that meeting in February of 1986, "If in the future there's anything more that I can do to help you, I will." And darn sure did, he do it. And he stayed with it until he signed it. So not many people know that whole story and many of them listening to this might have tuned out already, but it's a good story.

 

40:00 S1: It is. So it's been almost 30 years. It'll be 29 this week since the ADA was passed. Where do you think we are in terms of your original expectations in 1986, coming out of that meeting versus right now?

 

40:23 LF: Well, some of our expectations have clearly been exceeded, but we weren't clear of when. We should have been, but we weren't. We did not anticipate the World Wide Web. We didn't anticipate... We thought email would get better. [chuckle] We thought speech-to-text would get better. We even thought Text-to-Speech would get better but we never did anticipate what's happened with the explosion of electronic technology and communications. And so we didn't expect that. And then the question is would we have done anything different had we known it would happen? And that makes me think how well we did with the ADA because we tried not to make a law that really named all the ways one might discriminate or all those who might be discriminated against. That is, right there, that defines the ADA better than anything else you can do. It is a law that addresses discrimination on any basis, any basis that's tied to differences that may relate to disability in any way or that may be cast upon a person that has no control over it. So many different groups, I think, have benefited from the ADA that we didn't necessarily think of in the beginning.

 

42:00 LF: I will say this: We did have a lot of support from the gay and lesbian community when we passed the ADA and they were certainly aware of the implications of the ADA for people who were lesbian and gay. And I think that was important. We had the support of groups of veterans who had PTSD that hadn't really been defined as a disability at that point in time. We had the support of, at the time, finally when it passed, we had the support of the whole civil rights community. Maybe part of that was because we weren't messing with their law, but in fact, one of our recommendations in 1986 was that housing, laws that relate to housing be made to... Made clear that it should not... That it should include protection on the basis of disability. And as a result of that, the Civil Rights Act portion that deals with housing was amended in I think 1988. So the Fair Housing Act, which is a part of the Civil Rights Act, was amended and includes disability and that was a spin-off of our 1986 report. So we had an impact much greater than we thought on some areas. Among other areas, I must say I'm disappointed.

 

43:33 LF: The public accommodations, Title III aspects of the ADA have been fairly well-accommodated. What's frustrating to me is that people continue to build buildings without full access. They continued to violate the law when it comes to accessible parking spaces. I am frustrated by schools that don't provide adequate inclusive education in mainstream classrooms. I know that children with disabilities still are segregated. I know it's for so-called practical reasons. Some schools will defend that by saying they have specialists who are trained to treat and serve people with disabilities and therefore, they have them where they are best served. I don't think segregation is best served under any circumstances. And if I were the parent of one of those children, I would prefer that they were in a integrated classroom without a specialist if that was the option that I had. I would far prefer however, that the specialists were working in all the classrooms and I think they should be. I think all of those teachers should receive that training. So there are issues that still relate to segregation and full participation, but I'm disappointed it haven't been addressed in the area of housing.

 

45:01 LF: We don't... Despite the Fair Housing Amendments, there's not enough accessible housing and that many people are at nursing homes. Not because they can't take care of themselves outside the nursing home, but because they can't find a place to live where they can manage themselves. And that's ridiculous and we have to change that. That's the other thing that I think is important to say here. We are not now just 43 million people with disabilities, as we were in 1990. And now we're 53 million or 56 million or however many people there are with disabilities. Plus, 76 million baby boomers who will soon have disabilities. Plus, an array of other people who have been discriminated against on the basis of disability, even though they don't have disabilities. That being the excuse for the discrimination that occurs. So we're talking about a much larger segment of the community than we thought about when we were working on the ADA in 1989 and 1990. And I think all those people stand to benefit but they also have to be advocates.

 

46:16 LF: And that's the other thing I would say is that I'm disappointed that the aging community hasn't become more outspoken about the need for personal attendant services in the community, community-based services. They need to join the disability community and become more vocal about that. And if we join together, then we can affect the funding in Washington, we can affect the rules and regulations, we can be ensured that federally insured programs don't sponsor people in institutions or nursing homes. And nursing homes are institutions. So I don't care how you define it. The average length of... The average lifespan if you wind up in a nursing home is suddenly three and a half years. Okay? I mean it's a death sentence. Anyway, it's just wrong. And everyone will acknowledge, anyone that have any sense will acknowledge the community is a better option, but what are we doing to ensure that people have opportunities and accommodations in the community there? There we have gaps. And so we need to rally youth, the millennials are sympathetic but they haven't become activists yet. And we have a lot of challenges.

 

47:45 S1: Well, as a millennial, a lot of us are just now getting into positions in entry-level spots and in non-profits, like ABLE, where we can... We're starting to get our feet wet so we're out there, we're working, but we're... We've got, like you said, we've got a lot ahead of us and a lot to work towards and a lot working against us. But what in your opinion do you think will be the next big unifying fight that will bring people together for disability rights?

 

48:17 LF: Well, that's a really good question. It's hard for me say, because I'm biased a little bit by what I know. And what I know is that this aging and disability matter is a crisis of great proportions. And Bob Cosca, my friend and colleague for many, many years, Bob says, "When the old people start dying in the streets, the politicians are gonna start... Gonna come running and they're gonna wanna solve that problem." And next year is not only the 30th anniversary of the ADA, but maybe more importantly, to people with disabilities and advocates, it is a presidential election year. So I tend to focus my energy around, what are we doing to affect the election of a president who will be supportive of full participation, equal opportunity for people with disabilities, rather than celebrating 30 years of ADA? And in that regard, I do think that if the politicians figure out that if they can align all the disabled and aging people in America, they can get elected president. I'm certain of that.

 

49:47 LF: If you take all the old people and the kids that are trying to figure out how to care for their parents and love ones, and you take all the disabled people and the families who are concerned about them, and you work on a platform that would say, "We need community-based services that will enable people to work and be sure that their loved ones are cared for in the community and not cast away in a nursing home, that we can get help in the home, that we can get the community-based support services," that would be one platform that I guarantee you could win a presidential election. And I don't know if anybody has the wherewithal. When Bush, people don't know this... But the Bush campaign chairman was a young, he would, at that time, he would be equivalent to a millennial. He was from South Carolina, his name was Atwater, Lee Atwater, Lee Atwater. And Lee Atwater, young man, went to Bush and said, "I can get you elected President because I've done a lot of research on how the states vote, and what the issues that are gonna affect people's vote in the States are." And Atwater, according to some histories that I've read, was the first campaign manager of a presidential campaign who really used analytics to help the campaign figure out how to get the votes that were necessary to win the Electoral College. And that's where the Southern strategy began with Lee Atwater, in South Carolina and through the South-Eastern states.

 

51:29 LF: Atwater, at some point, figured out the disability message was a winning message. And that reinforced Bush's natural inclination to support disability. If the campaign chairman, had said, "Stay off that subject," it never would have been brought up. But Atwater said, "Anytime you get a chance to talk about disability, do it." And therefore, the night before the election, and you can go back and watch the tapes, like some of my students would do this. The night before the election, Bush paid for 30 minutes, the Campaign paid for 30 minutes on a national broadcast. And in those 30 minutes, Bush laid out what he would do if he were elected President. And he talked about this disability rights law. Atwater wrote that speech, and was responsible for that strategy. And I think if some strategists today, be that a candidate or a campaign chairman, or whomever, put together what we know now about the needs and soon to be greater needs of the community for services that we know best how to provide and what's needed, people with disabilities and disability advocates, that would be a winning strategy today.

 

52:56 LF: I'd love to see that happen. And if it doesn't happen, at some point, Bob Cosca's theory about people dying in the streets may be enough to rally the politicians, but that's almost too little, too late. Now I think we have the opportunity to make some significant changes in policy and direction and with leadership, we could really be a model for the rest of the world.

 

53:25 S1: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time and your insights, this has been absolutely fantastic. Is there anything you'd like to say in closing?

 

53:37 LF: Well, yeah. You've mentioned the millennials, I wanna give you one of the press secretary's thumbs-up, I really do, I love millennials, I love the Z generation as well. But I'm telling you that my students, most of whom are millennials, and my good friends, Maria Town just left Houston as the director of the Mayor's Office on Disability, and moved to Washington to be the Director of the American Association of People with Disabilities. Maria Town, Rebecca Cockley, you and others whom I know, you have to grab this opportunity and be leaders. And bring in with you the rest of the generation who is, I would say, probably this is the first, the millennials are the first generation that have the wherewithal, given all the technology, given all the knowledge, the good education, they've had and so on. And you have more abilities, more resources with which to change the future for Americans, people with disabilities, of mankind than anybody else has ever had. And frankly, some of you realize that, and you're not arrogant about it. Which I appreciate it.

 

55:08 LF: So it is a unique time in history for disability, with leaders like yourself and a unique time in mankind's history to change global warming, to change the way we accept one another as individuals and not according to some kind of tag somebody's put on them. This is the generation that can do that. So I'm... Put up a candidate for president, I'll vote for you.

 

55:43 S1: Well, I will get right on that.

 

55:45 LF: Alright. [chuckle]

 

55:47 S1: Once I'm 35, I will be on there.

 

55:49 LF: Alright, works for me.

 

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