Midtown Sweep!
by Josie Byzek
On July 26, the 9th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, our disability rights group, Accessible Communities Today (ACT) unveiled our Midtown Sweep, a campaign to be allowed in the shops in the Midtown region of Harrisburg, PA.
At a press conference that quickly turned into an ADA rally, we released the names of the first three businesses we were suing for denying us access.
We'd been setting up our campaign for over six months. We wanted to draw attention to the ADA, and to our legal right to have access to businesses.
The first thing we did was pick a target: the entire Harrisburg Midtown neighborhood. With tons of cute shops, coffee houses and cool restaurants, it's up-and-coming -- a very cool place to live and hang out. It's also my neighborhood, and the neighborhood of many members of the local disability rights group.
The second thing we did was go through the neighborhood and write down the names of all the businesses that had no accessible entrance. My 8-year-old daughter helped with this part (she thinks she's Harriet the Spy).
The third thing we did was send a letter to the more than 20 inaccessible area businesses, telling them who we were, that we wanted to give them our business, that they were breaking the law, and that they had ten days to respond before we did further enforcement actions. We even sent them information on how to get tax breaks for becoming accessible.
Then we waited.
Only two businesses responded positively: the local Historic Resource Center and the Brick Oven restaurant (who was also getting heat from our statewide independent living council headquartered here in town and was now ready to cooperate).
On July 19, we issued our first press release to area media. The ADA was about to be 9 years old, it said, and businesses in our city, especially in the Midtown where so many of us live, were ignoring the law. We would unveil our plan for dealing with offenders at a press conference on July 26, we said.
On July 23 we issued an updated release: the Disability Law Project would represent us on whatever legal action we might choose to take, it said.
On the morning of July 26, we called media to remind them of the press conference. We did not unveil our plan -- that we were suing the offenders -- until the press conference itself.
There were 25 of us activists at the press conference. We waved colorful "Access is a Civil Right" and "Hey, Midtown, Let Us In" signs in the 95-degree heat.
Our lawyer came up to the podium and handed the papers for three lawsuits to our spokesperson Linda Riegel, who waved them dramatically for the cameras and announced that we'd just filed the suits that morning. We'd file three more per month, we said, until all the businesses in our "Midtown Sweep" were "cleaned up."
Every TV station in town covered our action. Coverage in the local paper was good, too. I was asked by the paper to do an opinion page article; that ran Aug. 8 -- and letters to the editor started appearing the following week.
The media has been calling it the "Midtown Sweep," too. TV reporters with cameras confronted two of the offending businesses, who then, on camera, told reporters that we'd "get our ramps" (One had the nerve to say that we shouldn't have gone to the extreme of filing a civil rights lawsuit -- that he'd have gotten around to it eventually, that he just hadn't had the time in the past nine years.) The third refused to be interviewed.
Businesses we haven't even targeted have called to tell us they now want to be accessible.
So far, our objectives are being met. Harrisburg heard, loud and clear, that access IS a civil right, and that we take our civil rights seriously. We hope to continue to plan out our media/advocacy campaigns this meticulously.
Each month we'll target three more businesses, until all the ones in our backyard stop discriminating against wheelchair users. And we're spreading the word to the other 29 disability rights groups in Pennsylvania to let them know how we did this - -- and offer support to others tired of the excuses shops come up with to deny us access to their public accommodations.
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