I’m not tired: A “No Kings” mixtape

Crispin’s Day speech, but close enough. On his MSNOW show this morning, Ali Velshi highlighted a fascinating bit of civil rights history, recounted in this PBS article: Imagine climbing up 83 steps. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a big deal—but that’s likely because you’d be walking. What would you do, though, if you couldn’t? That was the premise behind the Capitol Crawl, a now-iconic protest to demand the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA was a landmark civil rights bill aimed at providing basic amenities and protections to some 40 million mentally and physically disabled citizens. Today we take many of the ADA’s changes to society—curb cuts in sidewalks and closed captioning on entertainment, to name just two examples—for granted. But the act’s passage, in 1990, was anything but guaranteed. By spring of that year, the ADA had been trapped in legislative limbo for months. Despite the strong support of then-President George H.W. Bush, the act was languishing in Congress, caught in the deliberations of House subcommittees. Many U.S. Representatives balked at the expense and complication posed by the ADA’s requirements. Enter ADAPT—American Disabled