Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Foreword, July 26, 1997

Future historians will come to view the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 as one of the most formative pieces of American social policy legislation in the 20th century. Its enactment codified into law important principles that would henceforth govern the relationship between society and its citizens with disabilities. The ADA is universal. It champions human rights themes by declaring that people with disabilities are an integral part of society and, as such, should not be segregated, isolated, or subjected to the effects of discrimination. The ADA is also distinctively American. It embraces several archetypal American themes such as self-determination, self-reliance, and individual achievement. The ADA is about enabling people with disabilities to take charge of their lives and join the American mainstream. It seeks to do so by fostering employment opportunities, facilitating access to public transportation and public accommodations, and ensuring the use of our nation’s communication systems.

The ADA is much more. The ADA’s founding principles, explicit and implicit, also serve as a framework in which other public policies can be tested, challenged, and, if necessary, amended. It has altered our public discourse about disability and about the role of people with disabilities in American society. Future generations will look back on the passage of the ADA as a watershed public policy.

As Major R. Owens (D-NY) wrote regarding the ADA’s final passage, the ADA “articulates forcefully and eloquently the purposes which must be embodied in our public policies and in our commitments as individuals and as a nation in order for America to thrive. . . . It embodies a philosophy and constitutes a declaration in support of human possibility and capability.” As Owens noted, ours is a nation of interdependence: we do and must rely on one another for success. Because the ADA seeks to build a society “which encourages and supports the efforts of each individual to live a productive life,” it promotes the success of our entire nation.¹ The ADA is important for what it says about our national commitments to each citizen. In a long tradition of promoting civil rights, the ADA upholds the principle that each individual has the potential, and deserves the right to participate in, and contribute to, society.

1. Congressman Major Owens, statement, Cong. Rec., v. 136 (July 12, 1990), p. H4622. Views from Congress and the Bush Administration

Focus and Sponsorship

Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act tells a story of how the ADA came about. Other works have explored in great detail what individual provisions of the ADA mean, how they apply to individuals and businesses, and what one must do to be in compliance. This account examines process rather than content. Its defining focus is the transition from a fragmented national disability policy, which often worked to the detriment of people with disabilities, to an affirmation of the basic civil rights of persons with disabilities, as symbolized in the ADA’s passage. To help readers familiarize themselves with the content of the ADA, appendices include descriptions of key concepts in the ADA, a reprint of the text of the ADA, and information necessary for obtaining technical assistance.

Equality of Opportunity is the first detailed history of the ADA. It was written for a broad audience, including the disability community, policy makers, academicians, and general readers. Rather than seek to be the final word on the ADA’s history, Equality of Opportunity hopes to succeed by leading others to explore the rich history of the ADA and the disability rights movement and offer additional information and interpretations. This work can thus serve as an important source document for future researchers.

Writing the history of the ADA is not an easy task. There is not a single or even a handful of founding fathers and mothers around whom a narrative can be organized. Nor is there one straight line from first thoughts about implementing a national, comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities to the ADA’s enactment on July 26, 1990. Rather, thousands of people from all over the nation played roles crucial to the ADA’s success, and multiple thematic threads characterize the ADA’s development. Unfortunately, each contribution cannot be fully recognized in the limited space of this work. And maintaining narrative cohesion precludes full coverage of simultaneous activities taking place in Washington and throughout the country. Nonetheless, the spirit of community and cooperation among a large and diverse group of advocates and the complexity and intensity of the ADA’s passage are evident in the narration.

Research and writing for this project was conducted under contract with the National Council on Disability at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) Research Center, a division of the Medlantic Research Institute, in Washington, D.C. Research was based on a lengthy series of personal and correspondence interviews with key participants in the ADA’s passage, in addition to traditional documentary sources.

Building on Foundations

The heart of this story begins in 1986, when the National Council on the Handicapped (renamed the National Council on Disability in 1988) presented a breakthrough report titled Toward Independence, which included a proposal for a comprehensive, equal opportunity law for people with disabilities—the embryo of the ADA. Equality of Opportunity traces the development of the ADA from this report (first as a draft bill, and then as a formal item of Congress in 1988), through the Senate and House of Representatives, and to the desk of President George Bush in 1990.

To understand the ADA one must first understand the decades that preceded it. Equality of Opportunity therefore pays considerable attention to the tradition of civil rights established in the 1960s and developments within the disability community during the 1970s and 1980s. Especially important for the ADA’s success was the emergence of a disability rights movement molded in the image of the movements that preceded it—the civil rights, women’s, self-help, and the deinstitutionalization and normalization movements. The disability rights movement deserves its own book; the following pages seek only to relate its relevance to the ADA’s development.

The extraordinary efforts of people with disabilities throughout the nation helped build a grass roots movement that resulted in legislative and judicial successes and the development of crucial coalitions and networks within the civil rights community, Congress, and the White House. The ADA could not have succeeded without this foundation. Equally important was the ADA’s legislative foundation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and regulatory foundation resulting from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. By building on tested legal principles, the ADA was able to avert much of the debate that would have accompanied an act developed de novo. This is not to say there was no conflict over the ADA. On the contrary, the ADA went through comprehensive review by various interested parties and underwent painstaking revisions. The original draft, for example, was transformed to enlist broad, bipartisan support. But the Civil Rights Act and the Rehabilitation Act enabled the ADA to withstand Congressional scrutiny.

Some Lessons

The passage of the ADA was a consciousness-changing experience for the 101st Congress and must remain an important analytic point of departure for the development of disability policy both now and in the future. This account therefore has as much to say about our public policy future as it does about our past.

Students of public policy and the American legislative process would do well to examine how the ADA came about. In our age of cynicism about the American political system, where partisan clashes have led to government shut-downs and rampant accusations, the ADA offers a refreshing example of how the legislative process can work when it works well. Passage of the ADA is a story of political leaders on both sides of the aisle who put aside personal and partisan differences to do what they thought was the right thing to do. The ADA was certainly not without its detractors, and debate was at times prolonged and intense. Moreover, near unanimous support in the final voting masks deep divisions that characterized the deliberative process. But members of Congress and the Bush administration demonstrated a remarkable cooperative spirit that resulted in a solid, durable act that has been able to withstand subsequent scrutiny. Furthermore, they maintained a high level of public debate that kept the ADA from falling victim to a venomous public debate controlled by spin doctors and political pundits as witnessed, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. In short, the passage of the ADA provides important lessons about restoring dignity to public debate about the leading issues of our time.

Also important for the enactment of the ADA was the ability of the ADA coalition to close ranks. Historically, the disability community has been divided internally, in part because of conflicts over limited public funding. With the ADA, however, scores of organizations representing thousands of people with different disabilities joined forces to work for a common cause. People with blindness fought the battles of those who used wheelchairs; persons with epilepsy fought the battles of those with deafness. The disability community’s abiding commitment to act as one unified voice helped keep the ADA a strong act and prevented the exclusion of specific subgroups of disabilities.

In Closing

Now is the time to preserve a record about the creation and passage of this historic, landmark legislation. We view the present and look to the future based on our cumulative experiences. As we look toward the continued development of disability policy, we must have a firm grasp on how we have reached this point. This is especially important for those who were not direct participants in the ADA’s passage and for the next generation that is growing up in an America transformed by the ADA. Because disability is usually not passed on from generation to generation, there is not a natural cultural transference about disability. NCD recognizes the crucial role of the past and the need to build our own history as we march into the future. Therefore, we made a commitment to providing a thorough analysis of the ADA’s history. Other histories will and must be written, but this one sets the stage.

The National Council on Disability and the National Rehabilitation Hospital Research Center are pleased to make Equality of Opportunity, by Jonathan M. Young, available to the public. We believe it is a work in which the disability community and the public policy-making community can take great pride.

Marca Bristo
Chairperson,
National Council on Disability

Gerben DeJong
Director,
NRH Research Center