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James J. Weisman: Disability Rights HeroBy Kathi Wolfe
James J. Weisman, senior vice president and general counsel of the United Spinal Association, doesn’t have a disability. Growing up in Queens and Long Island, N.Y., Weisman had no family members with disabilities. “I had no disabled friends until I was 16,” he said recently in a telephone interview. Today, Weisman is a renowned, ground-breaking figure of the disability rights movement whose legal strategizing was critical to the creation of the transportation section of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Yet, he may never have gotten involved with disability advocacy if, as a teenager, he hadn’t developed a crush on a girl who worked at a summer program for children with disabilities. Because of his interest in the girl at the Henry Viscardi School in Albertson, N.Y., he became a volunteer with the program. There, Weisman met the late Paul Hearne, another counselor. (Hearne, who died in 1998, had osteogenesis. He was a co-founder of the American Association of People with Disabilities). “(Hearne) was....maybe a year older than (I was), and he had a driver’s license,” Weisman said. “We became very friendly.” Soon, Weisman became friends with other people with disabilities. “I had no legal or political thoughts about people with disabilities,” he said. “I just had friends with disabilities.” Weisman soon noticed that people with disabilities were treated differently from non-disabled people. “We would go into restaurants....and people would say to me, ‘Don’t put him there,’” he said. “I would respond, ‘Talk to him.’” But in 1967 (his first summer with the Viscardi program), Weisman didn’t think of it as a civil rights issue, “I just thought of it as rudeness. “It became obvious to me...that people with disabilities were the same as everybody else,” Weisman said. “They liked to laugh. They’d get insulted. They had desires. There was no difference.” Weisman continued to work in the Viscardi program during the summers while attending the University of Toledo in Ohio. After graduating in 1973, Weisman taught English for three months to high school students. “I didn’t like it,” he said, “I wasn’t a very good teacher.” Weisman decided to study law because, “I didn’t want to work,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.” He eventually enrolled in law school at Seton Hall University in Newark, N.J., and soon realized he’d found his calling. “I knew I liked it,” he said. After graduating from law school in 1977, Weisman assumed that he’d spend the rest of his life working for the district attorney’s office in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he had interned while at Seton Hall. But after New York City went bankrupt and froze hiring, he needed an alternate plan. Unsure of his future, Weisman talked with Hearne one night. At the time, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., then secretary of the former U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, had just signed the first set of “504” regulations, prompted by demonstrations of people with disabilities. (The “504” regulations of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibit any program that receives federal funding from discriminating against people with disabilities.) “I made a remark to Paul....like, ‘You got the regs signed! That’s great!’” Weisman said. Hearne put a damper on Weisman’s euphoria, however, when he replied, “It’s just a piece of paper.” That night, the two talked about something Weisman had never discussed before: the politics surrounding being disabled. For the first time, Weisman said, he realized that “every institution of society (housing, employment, transportation, education, etc.) institutionalized discrimination against people with disabilities.” Hearne soon invited Weisman to work with him in New York at “legal services, which is like legal aid,” Weisman said. He accepted Hearne’s offer, and the pair wrote a grant proposing that they do disability-related law. After they received funding, their project became the first in the nation to serve people with disabilities, who were typically poor. But their “offices were all inaccessible,” Weisman said. They created an accessible office, Weisman said, “to provide what we thought would be traditional legal services: welfare, landlord-tenant, domestic relations, etc.” But to their surprise, though people with disabilities did seek out those services, they also complained of discrimination in “employment, housing, education, transportation, places of public accommodations — all those places,” he said. One day, Weisman told Hearne, “You do employment; I’ll do transportation.” In September 1977, when he attended a public hearing held by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Weisman became enraged by what he thought was the MTA’s cavalier attitude toward people with disabilities. (The MTA is required to hold public hearings when it applies for federal funds, Weisman said.) “When people with disabilities....said they (the MTA) should put lifts on buses, they (MTA officials) talked to each other, got coffee, went to the bathroom,” Weisman said. “They were incredibly rude to them.” The disability community’s complaints about the inaccessibility of public transportation “captured my imagination,” he added. In 1979, Weisman left his legal service position because of the “inaccessibility problem” and then worked for former N.Y. Governor Hugh L. Carey, whose administration was launching the N.Y. state Office of Advocate for the Disabled. Weisman stayed at that job only for a few weeks because, he said, the office “wasn’t aggressive enough (in its advocacy).” At a meeting in front of members of the disability community, “my boss told me off for being too strong an advocate for people with disabilities,” he said. In addition to being frustrated with his job, his wife was pregnant with the couple’s first child. But it was at that meeting, however, that Weisman met Terry Moakley of the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (now the United Spinal Association). Weisman talked with Moakley about his employment situation and the next day, he got a call from the EPVA executive director, the late Jim Peters, offering him a job. “I said, ‘I’ll take it!’” Weisman said. Though he’d received benefits working under Carey, Weisman wanted to work with Peters, even though that meant taking a pay cut. During their long conversation, Peters asked Weisman, “What would be the first thing you’d want to do?” Weisman told Peters that he wanted to sue the MTA “because nobody (with a disability) can get to work, and work is the difference.” Peters replied, “If you get that done, we can get people jobs.” Weisman said he remarked to Peters that people would have a reason to work because they could go places. Weisman, then only 28, got his wish. “I spent that summer (of 1979) writing the complaint to sue the transit authority,” he said. “In September, we sued them.” (publisher of Independence Today; Denise Figueroa, director of the Independent Living Center of the Hudson Valley; and Jim Peters were among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.) In 1974, New York state passed a law making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of disability. Weisman argued that a public company didn’t have to buy buses with lifts or renovate subway stations with elevators if it wasn’t going to buy buses or renovate stations anyway. But if it were to do so, it would have to buy buses that everyone — not just people who can walk – could use and renovate stations so that everyone could take advantage of the renovation, he told the MTA. If it didn’t do so, that would constitute discrimination, Weisman argued. In his argument, he also cited obscure legislation: the Public Buildings Law of New York. This law defined public buildings as those maintained with state or municipal funds and included a section stating that any renovations done to public buildings must include accessibility. No one, Weisman said, had ever sued under the latter provision. In addition, the law defined a public building “as including transportation stations and terminals, so we sued under that (definition).” The MTA argued that it didn’t discriminate on the basis of disability. It claimed, “We don’t post signs that say ‘no disabled allowed,’” Weisman said. “We don’t throw people off the buses and trains for being disabled.” If someone with a disability wanted, for example, to crawl in the subways, the MTA argued, it wouldn’t prohibit it. The MTA “said what I wanted was not ‘non-discrimination’ but ‘affirmative action — that I wanted them to act affirmatively to benefit people with disabilities,” Weisman said. He refuted that by telling the MTA, “If you’re not buying buses or renovating stations you have no obligation to people with disabilities under the non-discrimination law.” According to Weisman, the MTA also argued that the Public Buildings Law stipulated that it applies to buildings “typically used by ‘the handicapped.’” The MTA contended that subways aren’t typically used by “the handicapped” because they’re inaccessible, “so the law meant to exclude them.” The MTA lost the part of the case based on the Public Buildings Law, and EPVA lost the portion pertaining to New York’s non-discrimination law. But on appeal, “we got an injunction preventing subway renovation unless they (the MTA) obeyed the Public Buildings Law requiring them to be made accessible,” Weisman said. According to Weisman, the MTA then refused to renovate any stations and was lobbying heavily to get the Public Buildings Law changed so that it would not have to make them accessible. That same year, 1982, Mario M. Cuomo was running for governor of New York. “Cuomo wanted to distinguish himself from (Edward) Koch (his opponent in the gubernatorial primary),” Weisman said. “He took our (side). After he was elected, he was a man of his word.” When he became governor, Cuomo told the MTA that he would never sign an amendment to the Public Buildings Law, and that it should start renovating subway stations and making them accessible. “The MTA settled the case with us,” Weisman said. “In June 1984....a statute was passed taking the lawsuit settlement and making it the law of the state of New York.” Under the settlement, the MTA agreed to put lifts on buses, make key subway stations accessible and provide a paratransit program for people who can’t use accessible transportation, Weisman said. In 1986, EPVA sued the transit authority in Philadelphia, Weisman said. “We won in Philadelphia and got a similar result (to the settlement with the MTA in New York).” The settlements in New York and Philadelphia became the model for the transportation provisions of the ADA, Weisman said. The ADA signing ceremony was one of the most significant events of his life, Weisman said, comparing it to the birth of his children and his upcoming marriage to his second wife. “Feeling incredibly insignificant and tiny after I saw all these thousands of disabled people on the White House lawn — it humbled me,” he said. You’re privileged to be part of a good idea when it happens, Weisman said. “If you’re riding the crest of that wave, it means that generations of people have had that idea before you and haven’t gotten the opportunity you have.” *********** Kathi Wolfe, a Washington, D.C., Metro-area writer, was a 1998-99 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow. |
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It all started
because of a girl