05 Oct John Holland featured in Video Collection of Disability Civil Rights Advocates
The “It’s Our Story” program is a national initiative to make “disability history public and accessible.” This oral history project collects “over 1,000 video interviews from disability leaders across the country.” The recently released archival collection of interviews includes people who played significant roles in the establishment of important legal rights, culminating in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Mr. Holland is interviewed in about a dozen segments regarding “working at the forefront of disability civil rights law.”
The segments chronicle various aspects of John’s role in the origin of this movement including the struggle to establish accessible public transportation and the relationship between law, protest, and media in establishing disabled persons’ civil rights. These segments also cover his work to expand rights to home and community based services, to compel governments to arrest disabled protestors rather than their able bodied supporters (which was essential to establishing the credibility of the movement), and to reform the nursing home inspection system. More about this project can be learned at the It’s Our Story website, and the videos can be seen on youtube.com.
The video collections can be seen here:
For more information on the It’s Our Story project, visit their website: https://sites.google.com/a/pinedafoundation.org/ios/home