Subject
title
Proclamation Declaring July 26, 2025, as the 35th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
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Department
City Clerk/Director of Council Operations Office
Recommendation
Staff recommends that the Mayor and Council Read and approve the proclamation.
Discussion
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in several areas, including employment, transportation, public accommodations, communications and access to state and local government programs and services.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law at the White House by President George H.W. Bush, on July 26, 1990.
The history of the American with Disabilities Act did not start there. It was a long time in the making.
There is an excellent article regarding the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act on the
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund website entitled “The History of the Americans with Disabilities Act - A Movement Perspective, written by Arlene Mayerson in 1992. Here are some excerpts from this article.
“The history of the ADA did not begin on July 26, 1990 at the signing ceremony at the White House. It did not begin in 1988 when the first ADA was introduced in Congress. The ADA story began a long time ago in cities and towns throughout the United States when people with disabilities began to challenge societal barriers that excluded them from their communities, and when parents of children with disabilities began to fight against the exclusion and segregation of their children. It began with the establishment of local groups to advocate for the rights of people with disabilities. It began with the establishment of the independent living movement which challenged the notion that people with disabilities needed to be institutionalized, and which fought for and provided services for people with disabilities to live in the community.
The ADA owes its birthright not to any one person, or any few, but to the many thousands of people who make up the disability rights movement - people who have worked for years organizing and attending protests, licking envelopes, sending out alerts, drafting legislation, speaking, testifying, negotiating, lobbying, filing lawsuits, being arrested - doing whatever they could for a cause they believed in. There are far too many people whose commitment and hard work contributed to the passage of this historic piece of disability civil rights legislation to be able to give appropriate credit by name. Without the work of so many - without the disability rights movement - there would be no ADA.
The disability rights movement, over the last couple of decades, has made the injustices faced by people with disabilities visible to the American public and to politicians. This required reversing the centuries long history of “out of sight, out of mind” that the segregation of disabled people served to promote. The disability rights movement adopted many of the strategies of the civil rights movements before it.
Like the African-Americans who sat in at segregated lunch counters and refused to move to the back of the bus, people with disabilities sat in federal buildings, obstructed the movement of inaccessible buses, and marched through the streets to protest injustice. And like the civil rights movements before it, the disability rights movement sought justice in the courts and in the halls of Congress.
For the first time, the exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities was viewed as discrimination
The ADA, as we know it today, went through numerous drafts, revisions, negotiations, and amendments since the first version was introduced in 1988. Spurred by a draft bill prepared by the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency whose members were appointed by President Reagan, Senator Weicker and Representative Coelho introduced the first version of the ADA in April 1988 in the 100th Congress.
The disability community began to educate people with disabilities about the ADA and to gather evidence to support the need for broad anti-discrimination protections. A national campaign was initiated to write “discrimination diaries.” People with disabilities were asked to document daily instances of inaccessibility and discrimination. The diaries served not only as testimonials of discrimination, but also to raise consciousness about the barriers to daily living which were simply tolerated as a part of life. Justin Dart, Chair of the Congressional Task Force on the Rights and Empowerment of People with Disabilities, traversed the country holding public hearings which were attended by thousands of people with disabilities, friends, and families documenting the injustice of discrimination in the lives of people with disabilities.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited employment discrimination by the private sector against women and racial and ethnic minorities and banned discrimination against minorities in public accommodations. Before the ADA, no federal law prohibited private sector discrimination against people with disabilities, absent a federal grant or contract.
The job of the disability rights movement during the ADA legislative process was to demonstrate to Congress and the American people the need for comprehensive civil rights protections to eradicate fundamental injustice -to demonstrate not only how this injustice harms the individual subjected to it, but also how it harms our society.
A woman testified that when she lost her breast to cancer, she also lost her job and could not find another one as a person with a history of cancer. Parents whose small child had died of AIDS testified about how they couldn’t find any undertaker that would bury their child.
At this Senate hearing and in all the many hearings in the House, members of Congress heard from witnesses who told their stories of discrimination. With each story, the level of consciousness was raised and the level of tolerance to this kind of injustice was lowered. The stories did not end in the hearing room. People with disabilities came from around the country to talk to members of Congress, to advocate for the Bill, to explain why each provision was necessary, to address a very real barrier or form of discrimination. Individuals came in at their own expense, slept on floors by night and visited Congressional offices by day. People who couldn’t come to Washington told their stories in letters, attended town meetings and made endless phone calls.
While some in the media portray this new era as falling from the sky unannounced, the thousands of men and women in the disability rights movement know that these rights were hard fought for and are long overdue. The ADA is radical only in comparison to a shameful history of outright exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities. From a civil rights perspective the Americans with Disabilities Act is a codification of simple justice.”
Much more information regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act can be found on these websites:
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/disability/ada#:~:text=The%20Americans%20with%20Disabilities%20Act,local%20government'%20programs%20and%20services <https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/disability/ada>.
<https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/ada/>Mayor and Council History
Mayor and Council present this proclamation annually.