ADAPT
ADAPT is a self-described "national grass-roots community that organizes disability rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom."[1]
History
In 1978, Wade Blank founded American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT).
Accessible Public Transit
On July 5-6, 1978, Wade and nineteen disabled activists held a public transit bus "hostage" on the corner of Broadway and Colfax in Denver, Colorado. ADAPT eventually mushroomed into the nation's first grassroots, disability rights, activist organization.
In the spring of 1990, the Secretary of Transportation, Sam Skinner, finally issued regulations mandating lifts on buses. These regulations implemented a law passed in 1970-the Urban Mass Transit Act-which required lifts on new buses. The transit industry had successfully blocked implementation of this part of the law for twenty years, until ADAPT changed their minds and the minds of the nation. In 1990, after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), ADAPT shifted its vision toward a national system of community-based personal assistance services and the end of the apartheid-type system of segregating people with disabilities by imprisoning them in institutions against their will. The acronym ADAPT became "American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today." The fight for a national policy of attendant services and the end of institutionalization continues to this day.
Protesting Mitch McConnell
ADAPT members were carried out of Senator Mitch McConnell's office on June 22 2017 as they protested the Republican healthcare law.