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The Power of One Person

Mary Johnson

Mary Johnson was co-founder
and, for 14 years, editor of The Disability Rag.
She is now editor of Ragged Edge.

ABRIDGED FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw

The Americans with Disabilities Act may be ushering in a new era of access. But for well over a year already a man in Rhode Island and a woman in Maryland have each single-handedly gotten scores of agencies and programs to provide access.

How? They are forcing them to start obeying laws that have been on the books for nearly two decades. They are using Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and their states’ human rights laws. And neither has yet lost a battle for access.

In Rhode Island, Gregory Solas, a former ironworker, has in the last two years filed complaints with the Rhode Island Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office on 30 of the 37 public school districts in the state. He’s taken complaints out on private and parochial schools as well; he just won a complaint against Salve Regina University. In his hometown of Warwick, RI, he used the 1984 Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act to force access to his formerly inaccessible polling site.

Solas has used the Fair Housing Amendments Act to win a battle against realtors who were steering him away from houses he wanted to rent, and now, with the encouragement of the Rhode Island Governor’s Commission on the Handicapped, he’s pushing to ensure that the state’s open meetings law, which gives disabled people access to public meetings, is enforced.

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