Over 1,500 demonstrators rallied outside Boston City Hall on July 23 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). A coalition of Massachusetts disability rights organizations and labor unions, including Boston Center for Independent Living, Dignity Alliance Massachusetts and Service Employees International Union 1199, along with dozens of others sponsored the commemoration.

Decades of protests, sit-ins and shutdowns by disabled activists and their allies forced Congress to pass the ADA in 1990. “That was won through struggle with our class enemy,” said Brian Shea, a longtime Workers World Party activist, recalling the actions he and other militant disability justice activists participated in. Efforts by WWP nationally, Shea noted, pushed the Amalgamated Transit Union representing bus giant Greyhound drivers to back the ADA. 

The struggle for disability liberation is ongoing — as the Trump administration’s murderous budget demonstrates, escalating decades of bipartisan neoliberal austerity. Shea explained:  “The ruling class sees any concessions it makes as temporary. They will try to claw it back. This is basically a class struggle. And the mass movement made the difference.”

The Boston July 23 action comes after the Trump administration announced trillion dollar cutbacks to Medicaid, threatening to reverse the gains for disability justice enshrined by the ADA. Trump’s austerity program disproportionately targets elders and disabled people, millions of whom rely on the community care programs that federal Medicaid cutbacks are pressuring state governments to abandon. 

In Massachusetts alone, hundreds of thousands of residents risk losing health insurance and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — cuts that above all affect undocumented immigrants, low-income families and people with disabilities. As Shea described, the rally owed its large turnout to widespread anger over Trump’s austerity and fascist crackdown.  He said, “people are angry.They’re looking to fight back.”

To open the rally, organizers led the crowd in chants of “ADA is here to stay! We will never go away!” Stressing the threat to Medicaid benefits, Reggie Clark, an activist and survivor of the notoriously abusive Fernald School, declared: “This is your right. Stand tall, and don’t let no one get in your way!” From City Hall, demonstrators marched to The Embrace sculpture on Boston Common where additional speeches took place. 

‘You have the power! You are the heroes!’

Disability justice activist Keith Jones emphasized the need for intensified struggle to secure and extend the concessions won by the disabled community: “Right now, we are facing pressure to conform to a system that our humanity is not seen worthy of. We are facing a system that’s looking at our humanity as if they are doing us a favor. What you need to understand about this time is that it is the opportunity to show what it is we mean by pressure. … You have all of the power. … You are the heroes for this moment.”

As Shea described, the U.S. is using its ableist austerity regime to fund the ongoing genocide and mass disabling in Gaza, where the Israel Occupation Forces continue to bomb, massacre and starve hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Gaza has the highest rate of child amputees in the world, with nearly 20,000 children having lost limbs. Hundreds of thousands of others continue to suffer physical and psychic trauma that words cannot adequately describe. 

Shea explained: “This is a transfer of funds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and for genocide.  Every dollar that comes out of the social supports, every dollar that comes from austerity cutbacks, goes to ICE. Every dollar goes to this settler state of Israel. From the U.S. settler state to the Israeli settler state. Basically, they’re desperate. The U.S is an empire in decline and decay. They’re actually very brazen about what they’re doing.

He continued: “Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the choice was socialism or barbarism. In Cuba, people were talking about socialism or death. The ruling class doesn’t want to bother with any level of encryption anymore. There’s no salvaging this system.” 

Solidarity with Palestine

As Shea noted, disability justice groups such as Sins Invalid continue to make explicit these connections — and the need for shared internationalist struggle against genocidal ableism and imperialism.  Read Sins Invalid’s statement on Palestine at sinsinvalid.org.

After the rally, WW activists displayed a Palestinian flag in a show of solidarity between disability justice, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. As Shea described, because capitalism exploits, devalues and dehumanizes peoples worldwide through fabricated rankings of race, gender and ability, these groups oppressed by these hierarchies have a common enemy. 

“We don’t have a choice but to get rid of a system that supports a class that owns the wealth we produce, while our class that produces all of the wealth owns none of it,” Shea said. “This is where it goes. It resulted in death and genocide in Palestine, and they’re bringing it home.”