This story is based on interview excerpts of an upcoming episode of WXXI’s new Move to Include podcast on disability self-advocacy. The series launched on Jan. 12. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Anita Cameron sits in her living room with a large photo album on her lap. A cat hops up on the couch next to her pink wheelchair and perches in front of a window.
As Cameron, 60, flips through the album, she brings the page closer than an inch from her eye to see the images better.
“A couple of these pictures ... wound up in a textbook, a sociology textbook,” said Cameron, a disability rights activist.
Many of the photographs are from around the early 1990s when she and members of ADAPT, American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, committed acts of civil disobedience to gain rights for people with disabilities.
These images spark vivid memories, and they tell a story that Cameron said has been erased from the conversation about the history of the disability rights movement: Black people also built this.
Through an ongoing and upcoming storytelling project ‘We Were There Too: Blacks in the Disability Movement,’ Cameron aims to tell the stories of Black disabled activists and their contributions to shaping a movement that led to laws and policies that affect lives today, like the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
One of the most famous examples is the Capitol Crawl of 1990 in D.C. when a group of activists ditched their wheelchairs and mobility devices and climbed the steps of the U.S. Capitol to demand the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
These photos show many other direct actions around that time, that are not as widely known, that ADAPT organized in cities around the country.
In two photos, a young Cameron, about 26 years old, kneels on a police car as an officer speaks to her with his hands outstretched.
“I was the one who led the chants, could chant for hours," she said. "I was the one who made up the songs and whatnot. I was the one who kept people pumped up.
“And the joke used to be, if you don't want to be arrested, do not be anywhere near Anita Cameron.”
As she turns the pages of the photo album, one face shows up again and again. A woman Cameron knew well, and whose story is the first in the series.
“There's Latonya again, right here,” she said. “That was in Chicago.”
Cameron said she and the late disability rights activist Latonya Reeves met during a protest organized by ADAPT, possibly in Atlanta in 1990.
The protest could have been calling for the Attendant Services Act, or calling for accessible transportation, or a number of issues related to disability inclusion that the organization was working to address.
“She was in Memphis,” Cameron said. “And she was the one who was going to be involuntarily placed in a nursing home.”
It was around that time that Cameron said Reeves, who had cerebral palsy, was essentially evacuated from Tennessee to Colorado with the help of disability activists. Cameron was one of them.
“I didn't like ... what they called it, but basically they called it the ‘Disability Underground Railroad,’ because we were getting people from other states to Denver,” Cameron said. “At that time, the most accessible city in the country, home of ADAPT.”
Most of the people who sought help relocating to Denver to avoid being placed in a nursing home or institution elsewhere at that time were Black, she said.
“We had a nursing home transition program," she said. "It wasn't even called that at first, but we were doing that before there was a name for it. And so when LaTonya got here, that was what she started doing."
“Latonya was Miss Wheelchair Colorado,” she added, “and used her platform to talk about independent living and the civil right of people with disabilities to live in the community.”
Reeves’ experience later led to a Congressional bill, the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act of 2021, that would codify the right to live independently for people who need long-term services and supports. The bill stalled in committee.
The bill would prohibit goverment entities and insurance providers from denying community-based services for people with disabilitiesto live independently. And it would also require community-based services to be offered to people with disabilities before institutionalization is pursued.
The legislation also would require that institutionalized individuals be notified regularly of community-based alternatives.
Thirteen months after the bill was introduced, Reeves died.
"Here, this woman had an entire piece of legislation named for her, and no one knows who she was,” Cameron said.
