DON GONYEA, HOST:
In the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday, NPR has been exploring the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and assessing whether they have been met in practice. The series is called America in Pursuit.
JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: This idea was to think about how the Declaration of Independence shaped this country and to talk about ways that people pursue these ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
GONYEA: For NPR’s Joseph Shapiro, that meant revisiting a largely forgotten disability rights protest at an ordinary intersection in downtown Denver. Working with Colorado Public Radio’s Stephanie Wolf, he traced how a protest nearly 50 years ago helped change disability rights across the country.
STEPHANIE WOLF, BYLINE: I’ve had this dream of, like, you know, more people should know about the history of disability rights that came out of Colorado.
GONYEA: That’s Stephanie Wolf talking about the project. Teaming up, the two of them heard from people who lived through that protest in Denver, like Dawn Russell (ph), heard here talking about wheelchair lifts on buses.
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DAWN RUSSELL: You never get on it without thinking about them. So when you think about the 19, it’s every time that lift goes down.
WOLF: The 19 – she’s talking about a group of disabled people called the Gang of 19 and their little-remembered act of civil disobedience at this bus stop almost 50 years ago. It was a protest that led to this wheelchair lift on this bus.
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GANG OF 19: We want to ride. We want to ride.
GONYEA: That protest on July 5, 1978, led to the city installing lifts on more than 200 buses. Joe explained the draw of this story for him about this pivotal moment in the disability rights movement.
SHAPIRO: It’s not a movement like the women’s movement, the Black Civil Rights Movement, the gay rights movement, that has lots of well-known protests. But I knew about this protest in 1978 in Denver – gave me a chance to go back and tell this sort of forgotten story and to go back to a place where it happened.
GONYEA: In this week’s Reporter’s Notebook, Shapiro and Wolf tell us how they revisited the story of the Gang of 19. I started by asking Wolf how she first got involved in the project.
WOLF: My memory is that I got a call from Joe last fall, I think it was. And I remember seeing a D.C. number and letting it go to voicemail ’cause I was like, who’s calling me from D.C.? And then I listened to the voicemail, and it said something like, hi, this is Joe Shapiro from NPR, give me a call. And I had already been doing some reporting on disability rights, and so I think maybe my name had come up, Joe, while you were actually looking into doing this story from some of the people you were talking to for it.
SHAPIRO: That’s right. Your name came up very quickly. And people told me about Stephanie Wolf at Colorado Public Radio, who was very interested in the subject and was interviewing people and already looking at the history of the Gang of 19. So I think you were the – one of the first calls I made.
GONYEA: Stephanie, the thing I’m intrigued by – a nondescript intersection in downtown Denver, near the capital. When you stand there today, how do you make what happened there so many years ago come to life?
WOLF: This is an area where people do tend to gather in protest, but there are – it does seem just like an average street corner where you wouldn’t think something so important happened there. But even just walking to get to that intersection and you walk up a curb cut, which is the slopes that you see now in so many sidewalks, like – these disability rights activists had a role in getting those installed in Denver as well so that you can get from one street block to another.
So it’s these little small moments that, once you know the story, just from crossing over really busy Broadway, the fact that there is no curb that somebody would have to step up onto – that’s, like, the work of the Gang of 19, as well as when you see those lifts come down. So once you know the story, you just kind of understand that these little tiny things are so monumental actually.
SHAPIRO: And, like, can I add that…
GONYEA: Yeah, go ahead.
SHAPIRO: We like to tell stories. We like to study history. But we forget these places where the history happened. I live in Washington, D.C. Every street has its ties to history, but things that are forgotten.
GONYEA: There’s a moment in the story where I just kind of go, wait, what? Did he just say that? Police wanted to arrest these protesters, but they did not know how to arrest someone in a wheelchair. So they arrested the people who were with them instead, who were not in wheelchairs. Talk about that moment ’cause that detail really struck me.
SHAPIRO: Right. So the Gang of 19 are young people. They’ve just come out of a nursing home where they’ve been pretty powerless. They moved into their own apartments, and they realize they can’t get around the city of Denver because buses don’t have wheelchair lifts. So that’s why they block the buses for a little over a day, July 5 and 6, 1978, because they want wheelchair lifts on buses so that they can have access to transit.
So they block the buses. The police come. The police want them to stop, and they won’t. They – in fact, they pull out their sleeping bags and they lay down in front of the buses and stay there overnight. The police want to arrest them, but the police – a couple things. They don’t like the visuals – right? – of arresting 19 people in wheelchairs. But then they realize they can’t do it. The buses aren’t – don’t have wheelchair lifts, nor do police vans, nor does the jail, nor does the courthouse. So there’s no way they can practically arrest all of these people. So the lawyer, John Holland – who we have in this story, who is wonderful – goes to court to demand the right to be arrested. He said, how can we have a civil rights movement if we can’t even be arrested? He said, it’s an odd right, the right to be arrested, but it is a right.
WOLF: Yeah. They win.
SHAPIRO: And then they win.
WOLF: I mean, now I’ve talked to ADAPT members. They have – many of them have these long rap sheets. I mean, one that I spoke with, she’s been arrested over 90 times. It’s almost this, like, badge of honor.
GONYEA: When this story aired, was there any surprising response from listeners?
WOLF: Yeah, I actually heard from an old friend that I hadn’t really kept in touch with in the last several years. She heard the story on the radio. Her son has a disability and needs a wheelchair lift to get on and off the bus. She had never heard of the Gang of 19, and so she reached out to me after she heard the story and sent this, like, really sweet message. She was just so happy to learn of the activism that likely led to her son’s ability to ride the bus in New York.
GONYEA: What comes next with this particular story? Is there a next phase, a next step?
SHAPIRO: Yes. Right now, a lot of the gains that came out of that protest in 1978 for the disability community – a lot of those gains are at risk. That is the ability to live independently in your own home. President Trump’s tax and spending bill that passed a year ago – it has deep cuts in Medicaid. Those are – that’s the health program that these people with significant disabilities – that they depend upon. To be able to live in the community, they need that healthcare. They need the personal attendance service that only Medicaid will pay for, that you can’t get with insurance through your employer. That’s at risk in many places, including Denver, including Colorado right now.
WOLF: But one thing that kind of stays in my mind after doing a bunch of these interviews is somebody said to me, like, we didn’t really want to be spending 2026, 2025, like, fighting to affirm already established rights. They were hoping to be able to push for stronger protections, new protections, and get past this point of, like, going from, quote, “survival” to thriving in their communities.
GONYEA: Stephanie Wolf of Colorado Public Radio, Joe Shapiro of NPR, thank you both for sharing this history with us.
SHAPIRO: My pleasure, Don.
WOLF: Yeah. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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