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NPR Sponsor Announcer
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Rand Abdelfatah
this is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Rand Abdelfatah. Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago.
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Narrator/Reporter
We're gonna do things, demonstrate and carry picket signs.
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Gang of 19 Member
We stood up.
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Dawn Russell
You're taught what a good country America is and all that crap as the
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Narrator/Reporter
greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
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Rand Abdelfatah
Today, civil disobedience, starting with those peaceful Boycotts in the 1700s escalating into the overthrow of the British tyranny. It's been a catalyst for change ever since. Being able to question, to stand up to the powers that be is one of the most American ideals, henry David Thoreau famously wrote in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience.
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Wade Blank
Must the citizen ever, for a moment or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?
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Rand Abdelfatah
At the time, Thoreau was railing against poll taxes, slavery and the Mexican American War. The big message underneath it all was that Americans have a moral duty to question the government and to fight injustice.
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Gang of 19 Member
I say break the law.
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Wade Blank
Let your life be a counter friction
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Carvana/Audible/Wise Sponsor Announcer
to stop the machine.
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Rand Abdelfatah
On this episode, we're going to shine a spotlight on work from our colleagues in the NPR newsroom, who bring us stories of resistance from Denver, Colorado, to Montgomery, Alabama, and from a 1966 primetime TV show that's coming up after a quick break.
- [02:13]
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Carvana/Audible/Wise Sponsor Announcer
Carvana makes car buying easy, 100% online prices down to the penny, delivered to your door. Why make car buying hard when it could be easy? Visit Carvana.com today. Terms may apply. This message comes from audible Manifestos are a call to action, an artful scream. They capture people's anger and try to do something with it. Dan Tabursky's Manifesto is a podcast that attempts to take the manifesto back from mass shooters and nihilists and return it to its rightful place with regular folks with just the right amount of crazy. Listen to Dan Tabursky's manifesto wherever you get your podcasts or binge the entire series right now on only with audible. This message comes from wise the smart way to manage your money around the world. With Wise, you can send, spend and receive Money in over 40 currencies at the mid market rate. Learn more at wise.com Ts and Cs
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Rand Abdelfatah
apply I recently learned this surprising fact about one of the Founding Fathers. To write his signature on the Declaration of Independence, Stephen Hopkins used his left hand to steady his right. Historians say the delegate from Rhode island had a disability, what we now call cerebral palsy or maybe Parkinson's. And as he signed the document, he noted, my hand trembles, but my heart does not. It wasn't until the 20th century that people with disabilities began demanding their rights to the Declaration's promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. NPR correspondent Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolf of Colorado Public Radio tell the forgotten story of one group of Americans with disabilities that helped launch a movement.
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Narrator/Reporter
It's one of the busiest intersections in downtown Denver, where Broadway crosses wide Colfax Avenue, where the Colorado State Capitol, with its gleaming gold dome towers against the dull winter sky. Cars rush by and buses. This is a hub for city buses. The bus driver spots Dawn Russell in her wheelchair and lowers the automatic wheelchair lift.
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Wade Blank
I know it's for you.
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Dawn Russell
I would have been alright. Every time that lift goes down, what does that feel like?
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John Holland
Russell is a disability rights activist. She wants us to see how easy it is for her to ride a city bus now.
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Dawn Russell
You never get on it, not once without thinking about them. So when you think about the 19, it's every time that lift goes down, the 19.
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John Holland
She's talking about a group of disabled people called the Gang of 19 and their little remembered act of civil disobedience. At this bus stop almost 50 years ago, it was a protest that led to this wheelchair lift on this bus.
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Wade Blank
We want to ride. We want to ride.
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Narrator/Reporter
In 1978, on the day after the Fourth of July, a group of mostly young people who use wheelchairs surrounded and blocked two city buses. The standoff lasted through the night and into the next day. That Gang of 19 was demanding that Denver's transit agency put wheelchair lifts on buses. They wanted the ability to get onto a bus and ride too.
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Wade Blank
We wanna ride.
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Narrator/Reporter
Disability wasn't understood as a civil rights issue back then. So on that hot July day in 1978. Those disabled people blocking the buses were doing something disabled people were not expected
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John Holland
to do, especially for this group, because just a few years earlier, as young adults, teens, and even preteens, almost all of them were living in a nursing home.
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John Holland (Lawyer)
No activities, nothing to do. Warehoused physical injuries, bed sores, a lot of bedsores.
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John Holland
Denver attorney John Holland.
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John Holland (Lawyer)
It was a cesspool. I mean, they had cockroaches and cereals. Debbie Tracy. I had a photograph of her with flies in her face. She couldn't move her arms right, just covered in flies.
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John Holland
Holland sued that nursing home with the help of a man named Wade Blank. Blank worked at the nursing home on the wing with the young residents. He was horrified by conditions there and started a group that moved those young people into their own homes and apartments.
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Narrator/Reporter
Blank, who died in 1993, wasn't disabled. He was a Presbyterian minister. He'd marched with Martin Luther King at Selma. He understood that riding a bus was a symbol of American civil rights. He told the gang of 19 to show up on that busy street corner and directed one of them, George Roberts in his wheelchair, to get in line for the bus.
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Gang of 19 Member
So on July 5, George Roberts sat patiently at the bus stop, waiting for the next bus to come. When the doors opened, he said, can I get on?
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Narrator/Reporter
Here's Blank years later, recalling how that confused the bus driver.
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Gang of 19 Member
When the bus driver closed the door, saying no to George, we gave a hand signal, and all the other 18 moved into the streets and block that bus. And as that, I mean, it was incredibly easy as long as you had the will to do it.
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John Holland
Brian McLeod.
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Gang of 19 Member
Once the bus is stopped, you have somebody immediately go to the door of the bus.
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John Holland
He's one of the last living members of the gang of 19.
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Gang of 19 Member
And then have a third person go to the side of the bus where the driver can pull out. So he's. He's basically trapped. He can't move anywhere.
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Wade Blank
When the police came, after the buses were occupied, the police came and they shouted and they got in people's face, and no one budged.
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John Holland
Barry Rosenberg worked with Wade Blank and helped at the protest.
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Wade Blank
No one spoke. No one talked back. They just sat and were quiet.
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Narrator/Reporter
The gang of 19 had been taught how to do civil disobedience by Wade Blank. That created a problem for the police.
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Wade Blank
Well, they weren't going to arrest anybody in a wheelchair. That was pretty obvious.
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Narrator/Reporter
Bill Rome was an attendant there to feed and empty the catheters of the people in wheelchairs.
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Wade Blank
Not only would the optics look bad, but the actual process of trying to get them off the street.
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Narrator/Reporter
The police couldn't figure out how to arrest people in wheelchairs. Buses weren't accessible, nor police vans, the jail or the courthouse.
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John Holland
Another attendant, Lisa Wheeler, saw the officer's uncertainty and challenged them.
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Margaret Weitekamp
Why aren't you arresting him? Are you afraid of him? You don't want to touch him? You know, stuff like that? I guess so.
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John Holland
The police arrested Lisa Wheeler and Bill Rome, the two attendants who weren't disabled.
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John Holland (Lawyer)
Instead, I moved to dismiss the charges on the grounds of equal protection violation.
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Narrator/Reporter
John Holland, the lawyer, went to court to get the charges against the attendants dismissed. He argued that the disabled members of the gang of 19 had been denied their civil right to be arrested.
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John Holland (Lawyer)
And I'll never forget saying to the judge, how are we going to have a civil rights movement if we can't even be arrested? So maybe a little more eloquently like
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Narrator/Reporter
that, the judge agreed. The Gang of 19 won the right to be arrested and treated like any other protest group.
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John Holland
And they won a lot more. The transit agency agreed to pay for wheelchair lifts on over 200 new buses. The gang of 19 became the core of a disability civil rights group called adapt. Its members used civil disobedience and got arrested across the country to fight for accessible transit, a right that was then written into the Americans with disabilities act in 1990.
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Narrator/Reporter
We're back at the corner of Colfax and Broadway with Dawn Russell, who showed us how she gets on a bus with a wheelchair lift. She joined Adapt in 1996. She's been arrested dozens of times. She's lost count.
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Dawn Russell
And we are the misfits of the misfits. And look at where we are now. Are you kidding me?
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Narrator/Reporter
After buses ADAPT members began protesting all over the US for laws to help disabled people live outside of nursing homes and institutions, to live in their own homes, and to pursue the promise of the Declaration of Independence to enjoy the same choices and chances given to all Americans.
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Rand Abdelfatah
Now to Montgomery, Alabama, a city where in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. A decade later, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Marched for voting rights. And this year, it's where pianist and scholar Lara Downs traveled to meet with human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who founded the Legacy sites. It was a trip inspired by an African American spiritual that Downs recorded years ago. The song Deep river, she says, embodies the resistance, freedom, and hope for generations of black Americans.
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Lara Downs
I was thinking about all the rivers and this place that you've built on this river and all the stories that this river carries.
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Wade Blank
Deep river captures a lot of the complexity, the changing currents, the power and the beauty of rivers in this country. So we've created Freedom Monument Sculpture park here in Montgomery, Alabama, on the banks of the Alabama river, which, during the 19th century, trafficked thousands of enslaved black people. And that pain and that suffering is a part of the American story. My abode is over Jordan. But the other part of the American story was how millions of enslaved people found a way to love in the midst of agony, to support one another and to find a way to survive and then to build and then to create. And Langston Hughes writes the poem, the Negro Speaks River. And we have that powerful poem at our site on the banks of that river. And I do think there's something powerful about water as a medium for storytelling. And that's what Deep River, I think, captures so powerfully, so beautifully. I think that's what you captured in your recording of it,
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Lara Downs
The river in black history. The metaphors run so deep. You know, the. The river as a gathering place, as a place of baptism, and as a route of escape.
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Rand Abdelfatah
Right.
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Lara Downs
And in Deep river, we talk about crossing over. And that metaphor, whether you're crossing over into another life or crossing over into freedom, exists so much in the reality of these old songs, these old spirituals.
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Wade Blank
I often argue that justice has to have a soundtrack. Freedom, liberation needs a soundtrack. During the civil rights era, people sang We Shall Overcome not just to make noise, but it steadied you. You needed a song in your heart, and you needed to give voice to it, because sometimes you were singing to other people, but you were also singing to yourself. And that's the power that music allows us to tap into. And that's what jazz and blues and the compositions of all of those amazing African American artists who were taking the classical trad and applying their own lived experience to that tradition.
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Lara Downs
You mentioned the legitimizing of those old songs. And, you know, I love to think about that time in the late 19th, early 20th century when composers like Burleigh came along and wanted to ensure that there was dignity for this music and that this music got introduced into the mainstream of American culture, not that it got left behind as a relic of slavery or something that we would be allowed to forget.
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Wade Blank
Yeah.
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Gang of 19 Member
Yeah.
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Wade Blank
Well, I think the burden we have inherited in America is this false narrative that was created to justify so many of the harms that took place as we were emerging. And we created a false narrative that black people aren't as good as white people, that black people are less capable, less human, less evolved. Less worthy. And the challenge to that narrative was the brilliance of these early African American composers who were creating these works of such beauty and complexity. And that's what music did. It challenged that narrative in a very powerful way.
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Lara Downs
You know, we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of this nation, and we're doing it during a very, very difficult time in this country. And I'm contemplating what comes next and how we can all play into it. And I don't know, how do you see it? How do you see that flow?
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Wade Blank
There are things that we can and should celebrate, and there are things that I think we can and should acknowledge. And marking an anniversary creates an opportunity to do both. When we began challenging segregation in the 1950s, we're in Montgomery, Alabama. Within a decade, this city changed the world. From 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, to 1965, a decade later, when Dr. King marched into Montgomery, followed by 25,000 people had marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And then a few months later, the Voting Rights act is passed. Within a decade, this country was changed radically. And so that's what encourages me. It's like that river, And you can't hold back a river when it starts to move in the direction that those who believe in good need it to move. And so I'm not discouraged about how much longer we're going to have to do this work. We're going to have to do it, but I think our day is coming.
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Gang of 19 Member
Sam.
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Rand Abdelfatah
A fun fact about our final story. Martin Luther King Jr. Was a huge fan of this NBC primetime show. It was the only show that he would let his kids stay up late to watch. The show pushed the boundaries of network tv. Every episode tackled a moral or ethical dilemma, all under the guise of space travel. In the future, NPR's Jennifer Letton tells us more
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Jennifer Letton
generations of Americans will recognize
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Narrator/Reporter
this space, the final frontier.
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Jennifer Letton
The opening to Star Trek. As the USS Enterprise glides through the universe today, you can see that Original Starship from 1966 in the lobby of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Light gray saucer with two engines, 11ft
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Margaret Weitekamp
long, mostly made of wood, actually painted,
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Jennifer Letton
but only decorated on the one side that ever faced the camera, says curator Margaret Weitekamp upstairs in her office. She explains that after the UFOs and pointy rockets that came before, this design was revolutionary.
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Margaret Weitekamp
Immediately you can see this is a populated ship for long term spaceflight with a very large crew.
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Jennifer Letton
Weitekamp says Star Trek evoked Americans sense of themselves as frontiersmen, and it spoke to the civil rights and women's movements roiling the country.
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Margaret Weitekamp
This was a show that imagined an integrated crew of men and women of different races and even a half alien going out and exploring the universe together.
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Jennifer Letton
This science fiction had real world influence. African American actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, had decided to leave the show for Broadway until a fan, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Told her his family loved watching Star Trek for its groundbreaking diversity.
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Margaret Weitekamp
And he said, who knows how long it'll be before that door opens again if you allow it to close.
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Jennifer Letton
The first African American woman to go into space, Mae Jemison, said the show inspired her. Star Trek's utopian vision of humanity spawned a franchise that has lived long and prospered, and global fandom for this piece of the American imagination.
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Rand Abdelfatah
That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. And join us next week for as we tackle that American behemoth Walmart, it
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Margaret Weitekamp
just really piqued my curiosity. Like, how did this happen? What's the story behind Walmart in China?
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Rand Abdelfatah
That's next week. This episode was produced and edited by Julia Redpath and Kiana Moghadam with Nick M. Nevis and support from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Adaplowi and his band Drop Electricity. Special thanks to Liana Simstrom, Irene Noguchi, Yolanda Sangweni and Lindsay McKenna.
- [21:45]
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- [22:16]
Up First Host
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