Throughline - How wheelchairs, a river, and a spaceship challenged the status quo

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Stories of resistance from three places: Denver, Colorado where the Gang of 19 put their bodies on the line for the right to use public transportation. Montgomery, Alabama, where a song quietly galvanized generations. And finally, on broadcast TV, where a 1966 prime-time show inspired Americans to dream bigger.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa de Feth-Barre. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. We're going to keep things to demonstrate. We're picking up. We stood up. You're taught what a good country, America, is, and all that crap.

As the greatest demonstration. demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Today, civil disobedience. Starting with those peaceful boycotts in the 1700s, escalating into the overthrow of the British tyranny. It's been a catalyst for change ever since. Being able to question to stand up to the powers that be is one of the most American ideals.

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in his 1849 essay, civil disobedience. Must the citizen ever for a moment or in the least degree resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? At the time, Thoreau was railing against poll taxes, slavery, and the Mexican-American war. The big message underneath it all was that Americans have a moral duty to question the government and to fight injustice. I say break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.

On this episode, we're going to shine a spotlight on work from our colleagues in the NPR newsroom who bring us stories of resistance from Denver, Colorado to Montgomery, Alabama, and from a 1966 primetime TV show. That's coming up after a quick break. I recently learned this surprising fact about one of the founding fathers. To write his signature on the Declaration of Independence, Stephen Hopkins used his left hand to steady his right. Historians say the delegate from Rhode Island had a disability, what we now call cerebral palsy, or maybe Parkinson's. And as he signed the document, he noted, my hand trembles, but my heart does not. It wasn't until the 20th century that people with disabilities began demanding their rights to the declaration's promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. NPR correspondent Joseph Shapiro and Stephanie Wolfe of Colorado Public Radio,

Tell the forgotten story of one group of Americans with disabilities that help launch a movement. It's one of the busiest intersections in downtown Denver, where Broadway crosses wide Colfax Avenue, where the Colorado State Capitol, with its gleaming gold dome, towers against the dull winter sky. Cars rush by and buses. This is a hub for city buses. The bus driver spots Dawn Russell in her wheelchair, and lowers the automatic wheelchair lift. I know it's for you. Every time that lift goes down, what does that feel like?

Russell is a disability rights activist. She wants us to see how easy it is for her to ride a city bus now. You never get on it not once without thinking about them. So when you think about the 19, it's every time that lift goes down. The 19. She's talking about a group of disabled people called the Gang of 19, and their little-remembered act of civil disobedience at this bus stop almost 50 years ago. It was a protest that led to this wheelchair lift on this bus.

In 1978, on the day after the 4th of July, a group of mostly young people who used wheelchairs surrounded and blocked two city buses. We want to ride. The standoff lasted through the night and into the night. the next day. That gang of 19 was demanding that Denver's transit agency put wheelchair lifts on buses. They wanted the ability to get onto a bus and ride too. Disability wasn't understood as a civil rights issue back then, so on that hot July day in 1978, those disabled people blocking the buses were doing something disabled people were not expected to do.

Especially for this group, because just a few years earlier, as young adults, teens, and even pre-teens, almost all of them were living in a nursing home. No activities, nothing to do, warehouse, physical injuries, bed sores, a lot of bed sores. Denver attorney John Holland. It was a cesspool. I mean, they had cockroaches and cereals. Debbie Tracy, I had a photograph of her with flies in her face. She couldn't move her arms, right? Just covered in flies.

all ensued that nursing home with the help of a man named Wade Blank. Blank worked at the nursing home on the wing with the young residents. He was horrified by conditions there and started a group that moved those young people into their own homes and apartments. Blank, who died in 1993, wasn't disabled. He was a Presbyterian minister. He'd marched with Martin Luther King at Selma. He understood that riding a bus was a symbol of American civil rights. He told the gang of 19 to show. show up on that busy street corner and directed one of them George Roberts in his wheelchair to get in line for the bus. So on July 5th, George Roberts sat patiently at the bus stop waiting for the next bus to come.

When the door is opened, he said, can I get on? Here's blank, years later, recalling how that confused the bus driver. When the bus driver closed the door saying no to George, we gave a hand signal and all the other 18, moved into the streets and blocked that bus and as that. I mean, it was incredibly easy as long as you had the will to do it. Brian McLeod. Once the bus was stopped, you have somebody immediately go to the door of the bus. He's one of the last living members of the gang of 19.

And then have a third person go to the side of the bus where the driver can't pull out. So he's basically trapped. He can't move anywhere. When the police came after the buses were occupied, the police came and they shouted and they got in people's face and no one budged. Barry Rosenberg worked with Wade Blank and helped at the protest. No one spoke. No one talked back.

They just sat and were quiet. The gang of 19 had been taught how to do civil disobedience by Wade Blank. That created a problem for the police. Well, they weren't going to arrest anybody in a wheelchair. That was pretty obvious. Bill Rome was an attendant there to feed and empty the catheters of the people in wheelchairs. Not only would the optics look bad, but the actual process of trying to get them off the street. The police couldn't figure out how to arrest people in wheelchairs.

Buses weren't accessible, nor police fans, the jail, or the courthouse. Another attendant, Lisa Wheeler, saw the officer's uncertainty and challenged them. Why aren't you arresting him? Are you afraid of him? You don't want to touch him? You know, stuff like that, I guess. So the police arrested Lisa Wheeler and Bill Rome, the two attendants who weren't disabled instead. I moved to dismiss the charges on the grounds of equal protection violation. John Holland, the lawyer, went to court to get the charges against the attendants dismissed. He argued that the disabled members of the Gang of 19 had been denied their civil right to be arrested. And I'll never forget saying to the judge, how are we going to have a civil rights movement if we can't even be arrested?

So maybe a little more eloquently like that. The judge agreed. The gang of 19 won the right to be arrested and treated like any other protest group. And they won a lot more. The transit agency agreed to pay for wheelchair lifts on over 200 new buses. The gang of 19 became the core of a disability civil rights group called Adapt. Its members used civil disobedience and got arrested across the country to fight for accessible transit, a right that was then written into the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. We're back at the corner of Colfax and Broadway with Don Russell,

who showed us how she gets on a bus with a wheelchair lift. She joined ADAPT in 1996. She's been arrested dozens of times. She's lost count. And we are the misfits of the misfits. And look at where we are now. Are you kidding me? After buses, ADAP members began protesting all over the U.S.

for laws to help disabled people live outside of nursing homes and institutions, to live in their own homes and to pursue the promise of the decoration of independence to enjoy the same choices and chances given to all Americans. Now to Montgomery, Alabama, a city where in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, a decade later where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched for voting rights. And this year, it's where pianist and scholar Lara Downs traveled to meet with human rights lawyer Brian Stevenson, who founded the legacy sites.

It was a trip inspired by an African-American spiritual that Downs recorded years ago. The song Deep River, she says, embodies the resistance, freedom, and hope for generations of black Americans. I was thinking about all the rivers and this place that you've built on this river and all the stories that this river carries. Deep River captures a lot of the complexity, the changing currents, the power, and the beauty of rivers in this country. So we've created Freedom Monument Sculpture Park here in Montgomery, Alabama, on the banks of the Alabama River, which during the 19th century trafficked thousands of enslaved black people. And that pain and that suffering is a part of the American story. But the other part of the American story was how.

how millions of enslaved people found a way to love in the midst of agony, to support one another, and to find a way to survive, and then to build, and then to create. And Langston Hughes writes the poem, The Negro Speaks a River. And we have that powerful poem at our site on the banks of that river. And I do think there's something powerful about water as a medium for storytelling. And that's what Deep River, I think, captures so powerful. so beautifully, I think that's what you captured in your recording of it.

The river in black history, the metaphors run so deep. You know, the river as a gathering place, as a place of baptism, and as a root of escape, right? And in deep river, we talk about crossing over, and that metaphor, whether you're crossing over into another life or crossing over into freedom exists so much in the reality of these old songs, these old spirituals. I often argue that justice has to have a soundtrack. Freedom, liberation needs a soundtrack during the Civil Rights era. People sang, we shall overcome, not just to make noise, but it steadied you.

You needed a song in your heart, and you needed to give voice to it because sometimes you were singing to other people, but you were also singing to yourself. And that's the power that music allows us to tap. into, and that's what jazz and blues and the compositions of all of those amazing African-American artists who were taking the classical tradition and applying their own lived experience to that tradition. You mentioned the legitimizing of those old songs, and, you know, I love to think about that time in the late 19th, early 20th century, when composers like Burleigh came along and wanted to

ensure that there was dignity for this music, and that this music got introduced into the mainstream of American culture, not that it got left behind as a relic of slavery or something that we would be allowed to forget. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the burden we have inherited in America is this false narrative that was created to justify so many of the harms that took place as we were emerging. And we created a false narrative that black people aren't as good as white people, that black people are less capable, less human, less evolved, less worthy.

And the challenge to that narrative was the brilliance of these early African-American composers who were creating these works of such beauty and complexity. And that's what music did. It challenged that narrative in a very powerful way. You know, we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of this nation, and we're doing it during a very, very difficult time in this country. And I'm contemplating what comes next and how we can all play in terms. it. And I don't know, how do you see it? How do you see that flow? There are things that we can

and should celebrate, and there are things that I think we can and should acknowledge. And marking an anniversary creates an opportunity to do both. When we began challenging segregation in the 1950s, we're in Montgomery, Alabama, within a decade, this city changed the world. From 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give a receipt, to 1965, a decade later, when Dr. King marched into Montgomery, followed by 25,000 people who marched across the Eminet's Bridge. And then a few months later, the Voting Rights Act has passed. Within a decade, this country was changed radically. And so that's what encourages me. It's like that river. And you can't hold back a river when it starts to move in the direction that those who believe in good needed to move.

And so I'm not discouraged about how much longer we're going to have to do this work. We're going to have to do it. But I think our day is coming. A fun fact about our final story, Martin Luther King Jr. was a huge fan of this NBC primetime show. It was the only show that he would let his kids stay up late to watch. The show pushed the boundaries of network TV. Every episode tackled a moral or ethical dilemma, all under the guise of space travel in the future. NPR's Jennifer Lennon tells us more. Generations of Americans will recognize this.

Space, the final frontier. The opening to Star Trek as the USS Enterprise glides through the universe. Today, you can see that original starship from 1966 in the lobby of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, light gray saucer with two engines, 11 feet long. Mostly made of wood, actually, painted. But only decorated on the one side that ever faced the camera,

says curator Margaret Whiteacamp. Upstairs in her office, she explains that after the UFO, and pointy rockets that came before, this design was revolutionary. Immediately you can see this is a populated ship for long-term space flight with a very large crew. Wida Camp says Star Trek evoked Americans' sense of themselves as frontiersmen, and it spoke to the civil rights and women's movements roiling the country. This was a show that imagined an integrated crew of men and women of different races and even a half-alien going out and exploring the universe together.

This science fiction had real-world influence. African-American actress Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, had decided to leave the show for Broadway, until a fan, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told her his family loved watching Star Trek for its groundbreaking diversity. And he said, who knows how long it'll be before that door opens again if you allow it to close. The first African-American woman to go into space, Mae Jemison, said the show inspired her.

Star Trek's utopian vision of humanity spawned a franchise that has lived long and prospered and global fandom for this piece of the American imagination. That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. And join us next week as we tackle that American behemoth, Walmart. It just really piqued my curiosity. Like, how did this happen? What's the story behind Walmart in China? That's next week.

This episode was produced and edited by Julia Redpath and Kianna Mogadam, with Nick M. Nevis and support from the throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Ada Blui and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Leanna Simstrom, Irene Noguchi, Yolanda Sangueni, and Lindsay McKenna.