Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day 1990, President George H.W. Bush signs the American with Disabilities Act, the ADA.

At the signing, Bush said that the act, quote, promises to open up all aspects of American life to individuals with disabilities,

employment opportunities, government services, public accommodations, transportation,

and telecommunications.

And it really was that sweeping touching all aspects of our life it's a little

hard to imagine life before the ADA and I guess that's where we will start this episode looking

at life before the ADA why it took Bush to finally

get this legislation done and how things have changed and the legacy of that act.

Here to do that as always are Nikolheimer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. We were just remarking before we started

taping about how 1990 seemed sort of late for this to happen and part of the story here is that this

took decades and decades of activism and legislative battles to get into place

but if we did pick 1990 as our sort of point here where things started to change to what I said in the

intro let's paint a little picture of life before the ADA but maybe we take for granted

some of the things that it has it has changed.

Before the ADA, people didn't necessarily see a design as the problem.

They thought that a disability was a problem and that if people had difficulty getting around it was because of their

disability not because of the design of a sidewalk or the design of a parking lot or the design

of stairs and so you could imagine for somebody who was say in a wheelchair unable to walk on their own

that they would constantly be confronted with buildings that had stairs and no ramps that they would, if they could go to a hotel and get a room, they wouldn't necessarily

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