On October 9th, Rochester ADAPT hopped on a bus and headed to Atlanta, Georgia, home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Georgia is also known as the Olmstead state because it was there that Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, the original plaintiffs in the Olmstead vs. L.C. and E.W case launched their fight to leave a psychiatric hospital and move into the community. Their case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that “unnecessary institutionalization is discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act”. An outcome of the ruling is that each state must devise an Olmstead plan to transition people with disabilities living in institutions into their communities.
Ten years later, Georgia still has no Olmstead plan, and more and more Georgians with disabilities are being institutionalized. From 2002 to 2007, the percent of nursing facility residents under age 65 grew from 11.6% (7,211 people) to 14.2% (9,273 people). Of the approximately 230,000 non-institutionalized Georgians with disabilities age 5+ who require daily assistance, only about 17% of them get any assistance through the state’s Home and Community-Based Services system. And recently, the state’s Division of Aging has announced that due to budget cuts it is discontinuing its participation in the federal Money Follows the Person (MFP) program, a program created in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that allows people to move from more expensive institutional settings back into more cost effective community settings.
Disability activists in Georgia said “enough” and asked ADAPT to help them get their Governor and Georgia state agencies to listen to them and get to work to free our people, and of course ADAPT said “yes”, so Rochester ADAPT joined 500 other ADAPT member in Atlanta.
As we were preparing to leave, YNN News came and took pictures and interviewed one of the folks going. We then took off into the rainy night, and arrived the following evening.
Sunday, October 11th dawned beautiful and sunny, and after a wonderful picnic of delicious Southern treats provided by local activists, we marched onward to a rally on hallowed ground –the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, which houses a museum, the burial site for Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, as well as the home where Dr. King was born.
Mark Johnson, a local Atlanta ADAPT member started things off with a moment of silence for all of our sisters and brother who have died in institutions, and for those still trapped inside. Ironically, right next door to this symbol of freedom is a nursing home!
Other speakers included Sue Jameson, the attorney for Lois and Elaine, Delores Bates, who finally got out of a nursing home after being in for 43 years (it was her birthday, so ADAPT sang “Happy Birthday to You”. It was the first birthday celebration she’d had in over 40 years.), Bodie Watkins, who has been trapped in a nursing home for 52 years, Andrew Jones, who was the first person in Georgia to transition back into the community under MFP, and Lois Curtis, the surviving Olmstead plaintiff, who led us in a “Free Our People” chant. After the rally, ADAPT slowly marched past the nursing home next door, while “We Shall Overcome” was sang. It is here that I will confess that it was I who sang “We Shall Overcome”. ADAPT members felt that it was powerful and moving, and many were brought to tears. I was honored to have been asked to do the singing. It was powerful and emotional for me. Click here to see the video of Sunday’s rally.
Monday, the 12th was a day of epic rain, but that didn’t stop ADAPT! We headed to the Capitol to get Governor Sonny Perdue to keep the promises he made to Georgians with disabilities during his first term. Dashing through the rain, we stormed the Capitol, taking over the first and second floors. The building was alive and pulsing with our chants of “free our people”, and “people are dying, shame on you”! Our demands were:
1. Meet with ADAPT;
2. Appoint an Olmstead “Czar” to divert from nursing homes people who wish to remain in the community, and transition others already in nursing facilities back into the community;
3. Adequately fund community-based services so Georgia complies with Olmstead and the ADA;
4. Freeze institutional funding at current levels and work with advocates to rebalance long-term services and supports funding so the majority is spent on home and community services;
5. Modernize Georgia’s Nurse Practice Act to allow trained attendants to perform health maintenance tasks;
6. Fund community organizations to identify & assist people in institutions to return to community;
7. Issue an Executive Order requiring the Division of Aging to keep implementing MFP, and remove the “cost share” from Community Care Services Program services; and
8. Demonstrate leadership by publicly urging other southern state governors to develop and implement Olmstead plans and policies in accordance with the ADA and the Olmstead decision
After much negotiations, ADAPT was able to get a meeting with the Governor’s Chief of Staff, and other high-level administrators.
Tuesday, the 13th, ADAPT headed over to the Office of Civil Rights to find out why they aren’t enforcing the Olmstead decision, and to push them to do so. The cops were clearly unhappy with our presence as wave after wave of ADAPTers entered the building, and they got ROUGH! We kept our cool, as we are a steadfastly nonviolent group, and concentrated on why we were there. A few of our folks were arrested, and several were definitely man-and woman-handled and injured. After negotiations, those folks were released, and later, Roosevelt Freeman, the Regional Director of the Office of Civil Rights, came out with some of his staff and announced that they would be meeting with ADAPT the next day.
Elated, we had lunch, then, took a quick walk over to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). No sooner than we filled the first floor lobby, the Regional Director of HUD came down, welcomed us, and asked to meet with six of us. An hour later, she and her staff told ADAPT that they would restart monthly meetings with ADAPT, have the national office work with local housing authorities to support vouchers for folks wanting to transition from nursing homes back into the community, and have the regional office provide training on fair housing compliance. What a day!
Wednesday, the 14th, we tackled the issue of the media not seeing the issue of living at home rather than an institution as a civil rights issue. The media either won’t cover most disability issues, or gets it totally wrong. Case in Point: CNN’s medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, did a report back in August where he referred to the Community Choice Act (CCA) as legislation that would improve access to hospitals. WRONG! CCA is about giving people with disabilities and seniors living in institutions the choice to live in the community! ADAPT contacted Dr. Gupta and asked him to correct his story, but he never responded. Well, guess whose world headquarters were right next door to our hotel? Why CNN, of course, and ADAPT took full advantage of that fact! We sauntered over to the CNN entrance, then, executed a lightening fast takeover of the entrance and lobby, and our chanting could be heard throughout the CNN complex. The cops, as usual were pretty rough, but negotiations quickly began taking place. A cameraman came down and began filming, and a staff person came over to see what we wanted. She quickly took our demands upstairs.
Our demands were:
That Dr. Sanjay Gupta and his colleagues at CNN meet with ADAPT to learn about the institutional bias, the Community Choice Act (S683/HR1670), and consumer-directed/community-based alternatives to institutionalization;
That Dr. Gupta correct his inaccurate report about the Community Choice Act;
That Dr. Gupta and his colleagues at CNN acknowledge in their reporting that there are disability rights and civil rights issues embedded within healthcare issues;
That Dr. Gupta and his colleagues at CNN report about the efforts of the disability community to eliminate the institutional bias and give people a REAL CHOICE in how and where they receive long term services and supports; and
That Dr. Gupta and his colleagues at CNN report about community-based and consumer-directed models of assistance that are more cost-effective and give seniors and people with disabilities real control over their lives.
Almost immediately, David Vigilante, CNN’s VP for Legal Services came down, and a team of ADAPT folks (I was one of the group) went upstairs with him to discuss our demands. It was clear that he “got it” about community choice being a civil rights issue. Vigilante told our group that they agreed to explore how they could do a story about our demands. He was given a list of ADAPT folks to contact, and CNN has actually began calling and connecting with ADAPTers.
The day wasn’t done though. We went back to the Office of Civil Rights offices with the 10 ADAPTers who were to meet with the Regional Director and his staff. Though it was drizzling, our spirits certainly were not dampened and we chanted and sang as we waited for news of the outcome of the meeting.
The news was great! OCR was very open to systemic improvements in reporting and investigating Olmstead compliance in the eight states that make up the Southeast region. They were also interested in investigating systemic complaints because it would benefit more people, as opposed to individual complaints. Finally, they said that they would share the work that they were doing with other OCR offices for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) around the country so that Olmstead compliance would happen everywhere.
What a week! We hit four targets in 3 days, and helped our sisters and brothers in Georgia make headway that they could not make in years. ADAPT ended the week with our traditional party, but for the Rochester crew, it wasn’t over yet. We stayed on in Atlanta for two “play days”.
Thursday, the 15th, some of our folks went to the Aquarium, while others rested, or tried to recover their strength. I will say here that I stayed in bed the whole day, as I was suffering, and I do mean suffering from the ADAPT Crud. Lisa went with some of our crew to the Underground Mall, where she bought me a beautiful shirt from an Afrocentric store.
Friday, the 16th, some of our crew went to the Coca-Cola Factory, but many of us (including me; I wouldn’t have missed this opportunity for the world, ADAPT Crud be damned!) returned to the Martin Luther King Center. We walked about the museum, where there were entire rooms devoted to the life of Dr. King, Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, and Mahatma Gandhi. The rooms held pictures, period clothing, a giant timeline, Dr., and Mrs. King’s medals that they had received (including Dr. King’s Nobel Peace Prize), and the books and papers that Dr. King had written. In another building, we watched a movie about the civil rights movement, posed on a giant recreation of a march, listened to some of Dr. King’s speeches, and saw a huge clear glass structure that was covered with every Jim Crow law from every state in the South. Our emotions were mixed – amazed, sad, angry, relieved that these laws are no more.
Later that evening, our hardy Rochester folks boarded the bus for the long ride home, invigorated by this action and ready to work to FREE OUR PEOPLE!
