Who's
behind
Freedom
Clearinghouse?
Who's behind Freedom Clearinghouse?
Who took all the photos?
Some of the people and national groups who have given their blessings to the Clearinghouse:DIMENET provides the internet server to run the Freedom Clearinghouse website.
- Justin Dart, Jr.
- The National Council on Independent Living
- Support Coalition International
- SABE, Self Advocates Becoming Empowered
- ADAPT
- TASH
- MadNation
- Not Dead Yet
- The Arc of the United States
- Westchester Disabled On The Move
- ILC of Eastern Indiana
- Relatives & Allies of Psychiatric Survivors
To give your organization's blessing to the Freedom Clearinghouse effort, CHECK THAT BOX ON THE SIGNUP PAGE.
Justin Dart
In 1999, the Smithsonian Museum asked for and received Justin Dart, Jr.'s trademark cowboy hat and boots, his pen with which President George Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom with which he was honored in 1998. Born in 1930, Dart contracted polio at the age of 18. He founded two small businesses, one of which grew to 26,000 employees and sales representatives. He is married to Yoshiko Saji Dart. Read Justin Dart on heroism.
Lucy Gwin
At the age of 46, Gwin was struck by a drunk driver. She woke up three weeks later in a nursing home. After her escape, she founded Mouth magazine, "where I'm not allowed to tell a lie." Mouth is a non-profit kitchen-table operation.
Her founding partner in the Freedom Clearinghouse was Mary Johnson, editor of Ragged Edge, the original disability rights magazine. Johnson, not pictured here, set up and ran the Clearinghouse website from her own kitchen table in Louisville, Kentucky, until bowing out earlier this year.
About the photographerAlmost all the photos on this site were taken by Tom Olin, a photojournalist who's been recording the activism of the disability rights movement for over a decade.
Who are these people? What do they want?
Lying in the road, chained to a wheelchair, blocking traffic on the main drag in Baltimore, Maryland, what did this man hope to accomplish?
The man shown here is nursing home survivor, one of hundreds of members of ADAPT who, for two days in the autumn of 1991, blocked the doorways and driveways and underground parking garages of the ten-block-square national headquarters of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) in Baltimore, Maryland.
ADAPT is a national organization of disability rights activists, people with little or no money at all who practice civil disobedience to effect social change. (The name "ADAPT" stands for "American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today.") They don't seem to have a boss of any kind. And they don't have a national headquarters, but they do have people power. And they want to live in their own homes, not in nursing homes.
Freedom Clearinghouse is a project of
Free Hand Press, publisher of Mouth magazine
Website developed by Cliffwood Organic Works.
Website hosted by DIMENET.
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