Date:    Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:51:33 -0500
From:    Howard Gorrell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: ADA Message from Paul K. Longmore

Thought you might be interested to read the below: (from a friend)

Howard L. Gorrell
[log in to unmask]

==============================================

PAUL KENNETH LONGMORE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear All,

Thanks for your attention to the following urgent and important request
from
Paul Longmore:

  ---------------------------

Dear Colleagues:

The U.S. Supreme Court has just taken up a challenge to the
constitutionality of ADA Title II, the part of the law that places
requirements on state and local governments and their branches.  The
U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has already declared both the
ADA
Title II and its forerunner, Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act,
unconstitutional within its jurisdiction.

The argument partly claims that Congress exceeded its authority in
imposing
the ADA on the states without having evidence to show that the state and
local governments had engaged in a historical pattern of discrimination
against persons with disabilities.

I am part of a team that will submit an amicus brief to the Supreme
Court. I
am writing to a long list of professional historians, scholars in other
disciplines, and lay writers who have done research in Disability
History.
We need your help.

We need to lay out historical evidence of de facto and/or de jure
discrimination against people with disabilities by state and local
governments -- not the federal government -- in the U.S. Let me suggest
some
of the areas in which such evidence would prove useful:

--- state and local education policies and practices that deliberately
or
effectively excluded children with various disabilities from public
schools
or discriminated against them in schooling;

--- state and local policies and practices that deliberately or
effectively
excluded adults with disabilities from employment in government jobs or
discriminated against them in such jobs;

--- laws, policies, and proposals that promoted or compelled the
institutionalization of people with certain types of disabilities and/or
inhibited or prevented their residence in local communities;

--- eugenic laws, policies, and proposals that sought or caused the
sterilization of individuals with certain types of disabilities (in this
regard, proposals to sterilize blind people or deaf people that never
became
law are as important as proposals to sterilize developmentally disabled
people that were enacted and enforced);

--- laws and proposals that denied drivers licenses to Deaf people,
people
with epilepsy, or others;

--- local ordinances that barred people with visible disabilities from
public places, such as "unsightly beggar" ordinances, whether such
statutes
were enforced or not;

--- laws that prevented persons with various types of conditions from
making
contracts regarding property or marriage;

--- policies and practices that deliberately or effectively excluded
persons
with various disabilities from sitting on juries or from voting in
elections;

--- cases of individuals or entities that discriminated against people
with
disabilities but were not prosecuted or were acquitted;

--- state and lower court rulings that upheld any of these laws;

--- state and lower court rulings that upheld other segregative
practices,
such as allowing public transportation systems to turn away passengers
with
disabilities.

In each area, we need:

specific examples, such as particular statutes or rulings, including
pertinent or revealing facts and quotes;

historical generalizations, such as: These examples of state
sterilization
statutes illustrate the pattern of lawmaking in the 32 states that
passed
such laws;

citations to the sources of the evidence (we cannot use merely anecdotal
material; we must have documentation to both primary and secondary
sources).

It would also help greatly if you could refer to and identify scholarly
literature that recounts this history.  We need to show the Court, not
only
that there is evidence of a history of discrimination, but that scholars
have examined it closely and interpreted it by carefully following the
highest standards of research.  We do not want the opposing side to
claim
that our brief is based on unfounded polemics.

Please circulate this message to other scholars who may have knowledge
of
this history.

Please email me any evidence, information, references, or citations you
think we could use.  We are using email because time is of the essence.

Please send your material by February 10th at the latest.

It is no exaggeration to say that the civil rights of millions of
Americans
are at stake.  The scholarly work to which we have all commited
ourselves
has never been more necessary or vital than it is at this crossroads.
We
need your help.

Paul K. Longmore
Professor of History
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94132
Phone: 415-338-6498
Fax: 415-338-7539