In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, which expanded funding for vocational rehabilitation services for disabled people. Section 504 of the law included an anti-discrimination clause which outlawed bias based on disability in a similar manner to bias based on race. But during the presidencies of Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Section 504 was never implemented, with the business lobby and others citing the supposedly prohibitive cost that providing special accommodations for disabled people would place on taxpayers and businesses. But the legal precedent set by Section 504 planted the seed for what became a twenty-year struggle on the part of disabled activists to codify their full and rightful place in society, culminating in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.
Thirty-five years after its passage, Jim LeBrecht’s new nonfiction film, Change, Not Charity: The Americans With Disabilities Act, documents how disabled people across the country drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and, tired of being ostracized, began organizing for legal recognition of their rights. LeBrecht, a filmmaker who uses a wheelchair and whose 2020 film Crip Camp received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, flips the script on ableist narratives in his depiction of the disability rights movement’s evolution. As one rousing movement slogan quoted by activist Stephanie Thomas in the film’s opening moments goes, “Access is a civil right!”
But, as Change, Not Charity shows, this was not always a widely accepted view: For ages, physically and mentally disabled people were stereotyped as “the least among us,” sidelined, and kept out of sight, out of mind. LeBrecht intercuts footage from the 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame—in which a heavily made-up Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo is presented as a “misshapen,” monstrous outcast cut off from everyday life and consigned to the shadows—to demonstrate how popular culture perpetuated this pervasive exclusionary mindset. Clips from the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon, an annual TV event beginning in 1966 that raised funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, show children with muscular dystrophy being portrayed as objects of pity, much like the March of Dimes campaign portrayed children with polio a generation earlier. The film also includes a clip of Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 exposé of Willowbrook State School, an infamous Staten Island institution where thousands of children with intellectual disabilities were warehoused and subjected to horrific conditions.
Tom Olin
ADAPT leader Stephanie Thomas in the center of a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. on March 13, 1990.
Alongside this archival footage, LeBrecht includes original interviews with disability rights advocates such as Mary Lou Breslin, who describes the indignity of needing to use the bathroom in high school at a time when stalls weren’t equipped for the functional needs of people in wheelchairs—a challenge that, along with other obstacles such as boarding and exiting public transport, can make daily life daunting for wheelchair users. Judy Heumann, a wheelchair user who became a leader in the disability rights movement after she sued the New York Board of Education for denying her a teaching license, is shown in footage summarizing the movement’s goal: “We demand entry into the mainstream of American life.”
After the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 provided hope of attaining this egalitarian goal, disabled activists and their allies launched a remarkable series of acts of civil disobedience and direct actions. Demonstrations took place at the Washington, D.C., headquarters and regional offices of what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW; now the Department of Health and Human Services). In April 1977, about 100 protesters marched to San Francisco’s Federal Building and occupied a floor for weeks. During what became the longest occupation of a federal building in U.S. history, the Black Panthers—who, like disability activists, were often represented in the media as violent—brought food, clothing, and medical supplies to the “multi-culti” occupiers in an act of solidarity.
Tom Olin
ADAPT activists smash sidewalk curbs to create curb cuts.
Back in D.C., when HEW Secretary Joe Califano declined to support the proper implementation of Section 504, protesters staged candlelight vigils at his home. Califano, enraged, finally signed the statute, only for the U.S. Supreme Court to weaken 504 in a series of rulings beginning in 1979. When the austerity-minded Reagan Administration came to power in 1981, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush insisted, “We’ve gone too far in the federal government in regulating things,” and Section 504 languished.
At this point, disability rights activists stepped up their game. In 1990, attorney Arlene Mayerson of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund conceived of what is described in Change, Not Charity as “an overarching piece of legislation” to enshrine the movement’s demands into legislation: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Throughout the Reagan Administration and into the George H.W. Bush Administration, disability activists engaged in both legislative advocacy and public protest. In Congress, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Ted Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, along with U.S. Representatives Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, and Steve Bartlett, Republican of Texas, sponsored the ADA.
The legislation was spurred on by letter writing campaigns to legislators and activists’ more daring public acts of defiance, such as a demonstration in which members of Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) chained their wheelchairs to buses and used the chairs to block traffic. One jaw-dropping scene shows more than 700 demonstrators marching on March 12, 1990 from the White House to the U.S. Capitol, where at the bottom of the steps, they descend from their wheelchairs to climb their way up the eighty-three steps on all fours. “We’re crawling into history,” participant Anita Cameron says in an interview for the film. The day after the “Capitol Crawl,” the Rotunda was occupied by the undaunted protesters, 104 of whom were arrested by Capitol police for insisting upon their dignity and full and equal rights as human beings.
Tom Olin
Disabled ADAPT activists drag themselves up the Capitol steps at the "Capitol Crawl" demonstration in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 1990.
Senator Harkin, who was interviewed for the film, advocated for the ADA in the first Senate floor speech ever made in American Sign Language; he dedicated the address to his deaf brother. When former President Bush (who had initially resisted fully implementing Section 504) finally signed the bill into law on July 26, 1990, at a ceremony on the White House lawn attended by 3,000 cheering people, he declared, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion come tumbling down.” In an interview for the documentary, Ralph Neas, a civil rights attorney and former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, calls the ADA “the most important civil rights bill since 1965.”
This is a moving documentary about being a “part of an organization moving mountains,” as Anita Cameron proudly tells the filmmakers. It demonstrates what Justin Dart, who contracted polio when he was eighteen and is regarded as the “father” of the ADA, asserts: “Nobody is going to give us rights. We’re going to take our rights.” The film derives much of its power and authenticity from the fact that it is not only helmed by a disabled director, but that its narrator is the four-time Emmy Award winner for Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage. The beautiful Change, Not Charity chronicles how activism empowered the so-called “least” to be first.
Change, Not Charity: The Americans With Disabilities Act premieres on March 25 on PBS/ AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, streaming for free simultaneously with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms. The film will be broadcast with open captions and audio description. Viewers who stream via PBS.org and on the PBS app will have access to versions with: closed captions, interpreted with American Sign Language and open captions; with extended audio description; and with Spanish language closed captions.