Capitol Crawl Quotes

At the “Capitol Crawl,” people using wheelchairs, leg braces, and canes made their way to the hundred steps in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Then they began to climb those stairs, leaving behind whatever gear couldn’t come with them, using their arms or whatever body parts they had available for mobility. Children as young as ten participated in what became a very public, strategic spectacle. That protest is considered by historians to have been the tipping point; the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, guaranteeing curb cut changes at every city sidewalk corner and ramped entrances at all newly constructed buildings, among other new provisions.

IT WOULD BE ANOTHER MONTH BEFORE I NOTICED it, though. It wasn’t Betsy, exactly. It was the whole town. But it affected Betsy and my relationship. People in DC, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, were harder to get to know. I first noticed it when I made a joke and the group I was talking to looked at each other to see if it was okay to laugh. One of them kind of chuckled and changed the subject as though to help me save face, even though I didn’t want to save face, or need to, for that matter. The whole thing reminded me of having grown up in a legalistic religious environment. It was more than just jokes. It was as though people only wanted to eat at restaurants that had been approved of, listen to music other people thought was popular, or understandably, express a political opinion that appealed to a broad demographic. And there was almost no self-expression. There was no art in the subways, no poetry sprawled on buses, no local art more risky than paintings of flowers. And everybody’s wardrobe seemed to have been stolen from the Reagan White House. I’d done a little work in DC a few years before, so I had a friend in town. Over lunch I asked why people in DC were timid to express themselves. My friend had worked in the White House and answered my question by tilting his head toward the window. I turned and saw the Capitol dome towering high across the lawn. “Think about it, Don,” he said. “Every day fifty thousand people climb out of these buildings and crawl into your neighborhood. And every one of them works for somebody who is never allowed to express themselves. This is a town in which you get ahead by staying on script. You become whoever it is people want you to be or you’re out of a job.” Suddenly DC made sense.

I realized that I get to report in the halls of Capitol Hill because of the work of disabled activists who literally crawled up the steps of that very building to help pass the ADA. When people see me as an inspiration because I ‘overcame’ my disability to graduate college and hold a job, I want to respond that the only things I overcame were the specific obstacles in front of me. I am a return on others’ investment in policy. In the same way, every autistic person who language is in classes or winds up in a group home or institution is not a reflection of poor upbringing but rather a failure in policy.” ~ Eric Garcia We’re Not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation

March 1990 to galvanize legislators into action, among them a group of disabled people who left behind their mobility aids and hauled themselves up the steps of the U.S. Capitol building to prove a point about the barriers they faced every day. Known as the “Capitol Crawl,” it was one of the most iconic moments in the disability rights movement.