In the News

Photos show bumps on road to ADA

Written on 05 July 2015.

Kristi L. Nelson, Knoxville News Sentinel

The pictures alone are powerful: black-and-white images blown up to poster size, showing people with disabilities chained to the wheels of Greyhound buses, crawling up the Capitol stairs, snaking in long, long lines down city streets with signs on their wheelchairs, their walkers, their backs.

But they’re only one part of a package designed to remind people that equal rights for people with disabilities didn’t come easy — and the work isn’t done.

The Road to Freedom bus, driven across America by veteran photographer Tom Olin, who documented the movement for equal rights for people with disabilities, will be parked in Market Square in downtown Knoxville 11 a.m.-7 p.m. today. It’s part of a citywide commemoration acknowledging the upcoming 25th anniversary, in July, of the signing of the American Disabilities Act into law.

On Wednesday, the photos lined the lobby of the Regal Cinemas Pinnacle 18 in Turkey Creek, where they drew attention from a few curious moviegoers.

In one, a police officer cuts a chain connecting a man in a wheelchair to a bus hubcap. In another, people in wheelchairs gather at a corner, shouting and holding signs advocating curb cuts in sidewalks. A gray-haired woman in a silky blouse has a sign attached to the back of her wheelchair; it reads, “Asking did not work.”

Today, the photographs will be on easels under a 30-foot tent near the Market Square stage where at 11 a.m. the disAbility Resource Center will present its annual Spirit of the ADA Awards.

“We don’t want people to walk around it; we want them to go through it,” said Katherine Moore, service coordinator for the disAbility Resource Center.

Mayor Madeline Rogero will speak at noon, with state Sen. Becky Duncan Massey immediately following. All around, service providers and local businesses will have booths with information and giveaways.

Moore said staffers from disAbility Resource Center saw the display at a conference in New Mexico last summer and immediately made arrangements to bring it here.

Moore said many people without disabilities are unaware of the struggle it took to get the ADA passed in 1990 — and she said many “myths and stereotypes” are associated with the law, which isn’t “affirmative action” but was designed to level the playing field.

A four-banner display outlines the history of self-advocacy among people with disabilities, back to the beginning of the last century. Locally, the advisory Mayor’s Council on Disability Issues will celebrate its 30th anniversary this week.

“The ADA was modeled after the 1969 bill” that resulted from the movement guaranteeing equal rights to minorities in America, Moore said. “It is a civil-rights bill for over 56 million people in the United States alone.”