That’s what Kay Gainer told me shortly after I stepped off the bus at
the Apex Museum, where Andrew Young would donate his papers to the Civil Rights
archive later in the day. She and four friends had been waiting in the warm
sun by the tour's Digital Front Porch for the bus to arrive, eager to tell
their stories.
Gainer and three of the five are African American. All are disabled. And
though they happen to be in wheelchairs and motorized scooters, each and
every one is committed to marching and participating in acts of civil disobedience
to bring attention to the injustices rained upon the disabled.
Margo Waters is relatively new to the movement. She was diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis 10 years ago. Cheri Johnson has had severe osteoarthritis
most of her adult life. She’s one of the lucky ones with a job. Eighty-five
percent of disabled citizens are unemployed, she said. Kate Gainer was born
with cerebral palsy. Samuel Mitchell, a one-time civil rights field coordinator
and a minister, was diagnosed with diabetes before he suffered a stroke several
years ago. Bernard Baker has been in a wheelchair his entire life.
Gainer has been a trailblazer in the fight for disabled rights since she
became the first African American in Atlanta to attend special education
classes in 1953. “My parents taught me I was worthy, that I was just
as good as anyone else and that I could do anything I wanted to.” She
met Julian Bond as a child and went to the same high school as Martin Luther
King, Jr. She has been involved in national efforts through ADAPT and other
organizations to have the Americans With Disabilities Act signed into law
and in local efforts to have wheelchair lifts installed in all Atlanta buses. “It
is ironic that all our people got on the bus in 1964 when the Civil Rights
Act was passed,” she said. “I couldn’t get on the bus until
1990.”
They all spoke of the hell of institutionalization. Mitchell talked about
his personal experience that landed him in a nursing home 200 miles from
home after suffering his stroke and the tangle of bureaucracy he had to deal
with just to get an aspirin for a headache. Baker swore that as long as he
could blink his eyes, he wasn’t going into a nursing home. “I’m
going to fight until the day I die.”
Their crusade led several of them to participate in actions that shut down
traffic in Seattle during the National Governors' Conference. This summer,
Gainer led the Long Road Home march to pressure the Department of Human Services
in Georgia to divert some funding of nursing homes to community-based services
so that individuals can have the option to live independently in the real
world rather than be shunted into an institution, where they are out of sight
and out of mind. “There is a difference between choosing and not having
a choice,” Gainer pointed out. “A nursing home is a place of
no return. Once you go in, you will never come out.”
The message resonated with me, as it should with anyone with an older loved
one in their family. “It’s about time the so-called normal world
begins to realize this is just a phase of life,” Mitchell explained.
“All of us will be age-disabled if we live long enough,” Waters
said. “Some of us just got an earlier start.”
