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On May 12, 1999, some 4,000 people gathered in Upper Senate Park, near the U.S. Capitol, and then marched to the Supreme Court. Inside, the justices had a case in front of them — Olmstead v. L.C. and E.W. — that would decide whether a state could keep disabled people in institutions when they could live in the community. The marchers called it Judgment Day.
From institutions to the integration mandate
From the nineteenth century on, disabled Americans were increasingly housed in large institutions, at first separate ones for people with developmental and with psychiatric disabilities.
Agnews Insane Asylum in Santa Clara, California. National Register of Historic Places, 97000829
From the late 1950s, disabled people and their allies pushed back against the abuses they endured there — the deinstitutionalization movement. States argued that centralized care saved money; activists showed that community care usually cost less, and, more importantly, that most disabled people wanted to live outside an institution and had better lives when they did. Community services take many forms:
- personal care attendants, for daily tasks such as washing and eating;
- home nurses, for routine medical care;
- job coaches, to help someone learn and keep a job.
With them, a person can live alone, with family or friends, or in a group home with housemates and a caregiver. Courts began to listen — a class action against Pennsylvania's Pennhurst State School and Hospital, which closed in 1987, was an early landmark. The movement's biggest win was the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed by President George H. W. Bush on July 26, 1990. Its integration mandate is what Olmstead would test.
Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson
Lois Curtis (L.C.) and Elaine Wilson (E.W.), who had intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, were held for years at a state regional hospital in Georgia. They felt trapped and wanted to leave; their doctors agreed each could live in the community with support. With the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, they sued and won, and the lower courts upheld the ADA's integration mandate.
Georgia's Commissioner of Human Services, Thomas Olmstead, appealed. Georgia argued that keeping people in an institution until community services were available was not discrimination — it had simply not been funded for more. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in December 1998. It was the Court's first case on the integration mandate, and the question underneath it was plain: who decides where a disabled person lives — the state, or the person?
How activists organized
ADAPT — founded in Denver in 1983 as American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, known for lying down in streets to block buses without lifts, and renamed American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today after the ADA — went to work:
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Winter–spring 1999 | spread the word across its national network; wrote postcards, signed petitions, pressed governors and state attorneys general |
| January 15, 1999 | demonstrations at a dozen governors' offices |
| By late spring | of 26 states that had filed briefs supporting Georgia, 19 withdrew — a reversal ADAPT said had never been seen in a Supreme Court case |
| April 1999 | about 100 people held a candlelight vigil and press conference with Curtis and Wilson, slept on the sidewalk outside the Court, and were first in line for the oral arguments |
| Week of May 10 | so many came by train from New York that Amtrak removed seats for sixty wheelchair users; hundreds occupied the offices of the National Governors Association and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (85 arrested); the next day they surrounded HUD, whose deputy secretary agreed to enforce the department's own anti-discrimination rules better |
"Don't Tread on the ADA"
More than 100 organizations backed the May 12 rally, believed to be the largest disability rights rally to that date. People with physical, developmental and psychiatric disabilities stood together behind the signs and chants: My control, not state control. Integration, not segregation. Separate will never be equal.
The speakers included people who had made the ADA — activist Justin Dart, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who told the crowd that for many of them this was "a literal struggle for your lives," and that their fight to be heard in Washington "is working."
Then they marched. A mock funeral procession for freedom, with pallbearers and a casket, led the way to the Supreme Court Building (a National Historic Landmark since 1987). The marchers sang "We Shall Overcome" and ended with a moment of silence for everyone who had died in an institution.
The decision
On June 22, 1999, the Court ruled that unjustified institutionalization is discrimination. Activists called it a victory for personal choice and for desegregation, and it remains a cornerstone of disability rights.
Lois Curtis in her art studio, supporting the "I Am Olmstead" campaign. U.S. Department of Labor
It was not the end. Programs like Medicaid still tend to favour institutions over community services, which are often the first cut when budgets tighten, and the lobbying and direct action go on.
Sources
Written from "Don't Tread on the ADA: A Rally and March to the US Supreme Court in 1999," by Ellie Kaplan, National Park Service Park History Program (2024); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on ADAPT's records and releases, Jennifer Burnett in Mouth (1999), T. K. Small in Able (1999), Nadina LaSpina, Senator Harkin's speech in the Harkin Collection at Drake University, the New York Times (1999), the Associated Press, and Fleischer and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement.
Licença: CC0 1.0 (domínio público) · Adaptado de www.nps.gov
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