PROTESTERS (chanting): A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

POLICE OFFICER (over speaker): I order you to please dismiss!

PROTESTERS: A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

NARRATOR: On March 13, 1990, disability activists from across the country occupied the rotunda of the Capitol to demand the passage of the A.D.A., the Americans with Disabilities Act.

PROTESTERS (chanting): A.D.A.

now!

A.D.A.

now!

NARRATOR: One in four Americans was living with a disability.

Pent-up anger over discrimination, segregation, and isolation had led to this moment.

LAWRENCE CARTER-LONG: Did they get to have a career?

Did they get to have a spouse?

All of these questions, which we had for nearly a century shoved away, they weren't going to accept second-class status any longer.

PROTESTER: Up with access!

STEPHANIE THOMAS: We will ride!

We will ride!

We're going to be part of this country.

We're going to be part of the community, just like anybody else.

CYNDI JONES: Who'd ever thought that people with disabilities would actually be arrested for demonstrating?

♪ ♪ Aw, poor little cripples, right?

That coming of the movement said, "We're not going to hide in the shadows.

We're coming out."

Access is a civil right!

PROTESTERS: Access is a civil right!

NARRATOR: For the protesters, access and opportunity should be a birthright.

But opponents of the A.D.A.

lambasted it as unrealistic.

STEVE BARTLETT: This was a civil rights bill that required massive amounts of changes that somebody had to pay for.

NARRATOR: If passed, the Americans with Disabilities Act would be one of the most consequential civil rights bills in the nation's history.

ANITA CAMERON: Civil rights aren't given.

You have to fight to get them, and then you have to fight to keep them.

♪ ♪ TELETHON HOST: We are live.

We are coming to you from the resort and convention center of the world, Las Vegas, Nevada.

This is the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon.

(audience cheers and applauds) (music playing) (applause continues) (drumroll playing) (band playing) NARRATOR: At its height, the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, hosted by beloved comedian Jerry Lewis... (band playing) ...was watched by nearly half of the country.

(band playing) (group singing) Broadcast over 21 nonstop hours, it raised hundreds of millions of dollars towards finding a cure for muscular dystrophy.

Here's $100,000 for good luck.

(audience cheers and applauds) NARRATOR: But not everyone welcomed the telethons.

JONES: My husband and I both had polio.

We would hide-- I mean, we didn't want to go anywhere on Labor Day weekend, because everyone assumes that you had muscular dystrophy.

Everyone assumes that you're part of the telethon.

It was terrible.

We need lots of money, lots of love.

Every penny you send in adds up to dollars.

HOST: As a matter of fact, if you want to give $100 or more... MARY LOU BRESLIN: The telethon was really detested as a tool of using pity as a way to collect money.

"If you give us money, we're going to cure this poor, helpless kid of whatever their disability is."

(audience cheers and applauds) NARRATOR: In 1981, after more than two decades of huge TV ratings, a disabled lawyer named Evan Kemp published an editorial that stunned readers.

With its emphasis on poster children, he wrote, telethons equate disability "with total hopelessness."

JONES: When I was five-and-a-half, I was chosen to be a poster child for March of Dimes.

I was chosen because I was blonde, blue-eyed, and braced.

♪ ♪ I was, like, queen for a day.

I was in the parade and on the float.

I was in first grade, and March of Dimes had used my photo for a flyer to promote polio vaccines.

My teacher says, "Oh, we have a flyer with Cynthia's photo on it."

So she passes it back.

And I wondered, what photo did they use?

Was it the party photo?

Was it this photo?

That photo?

And I got the flyer on my desk, I thought, "Oh, my gosh."

They used a photo of two kids running through a field.

And it said, "This," and me in my party dress, and it said, "Not this."

I was shocked.

I, even now when I speak it, I am horrified.

I wanted to crawl under my desk.

So in an instant, I realized nobody wanted to be like me.

(bell ringing slowly) MAN: What's the matter?

WOMAN: That eye.

Staring at me.

MAN: Somebody's in there!

WOMAN: It's an animal!

♪ ♪ (all gasp and yelp) NARRATOR: The blockbuster 1939 movie "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" underscored the impossibility of blending into an able-bodied world.

(crowd shouting) JONES: When we see "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," what you see is someone who wants to participate, but is pushed out, and he hides in the shadows.

If you have a disability, is that what you're supposed to do?

You're supposed to hide in the shadows?

NARRATOR: Negative attitudes toward the disabled were formally sanctioned more than 100 years prior, with the eugenics movement, an ideology that viewed disability through the distorted science of Social Darwinism.

Over half the states in the country had laws allowing compulsory sterilization.

Alongside the rise of eugenics, cities across the United States began to pass what became known as the ugly laws.

CARTER-LONG: In San Francisco, the law said if you were diseased, mutilated, that you shouldn't be on public display.

It was "out of sight, out of mind" as public policy.

NARRATOR: Doctors often advised families that the best place for the disabled child was in an institution, even encouraging them to never mention the child again.

♪ ♪ At dinnertime on February 2, 1972, millions of Americans watched in horror as TV reporter Geraldo Rivera exposed the conditions at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island.

Willowbrook was the largest institution in the country for children with developmental disabilities.

RIVERA: We toured building number six.

They were making a pitiful sound, the kind of mournful wail that it's impossible for me to forget.

♪ ♪ ARLENE MAYERSON: Disabled people being treated...

I don't think it would be allowed in a zoo for the animals now.

♪ ♪ It was a shock to the nation.

(people talking in background) NARRATOR: The Willowbrook exposé ignited a national movement that would lift disability out of the shadows.

♪ ♪ In California, a group of disabled college students began to envision a new way forward.

With a $250 donation from the local Rotary Club, they formed C.I.L., the Center for Independent Living, in Berkeley.

WOMAN: This is about your membership.

Yeah?

Are you gonna be able to... CARTER-LONG: If you needed government assistance, there were people that could help you navigate that byzantine system.

C.I.L.

Employee: We find attendants for disabled people in our target area.

We have counseling, transportation service... CARTER-LONG: If your wheelchair was broken, there were people who could teach you how to fix it.

So for the first time in many people's lives, they were given the opportunity to dream, where someone would ask, "What do you want to do with your life?"