I'm Not Tired: A "No Kings" mixtape

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on March 28, 2026)

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us

— from Henry V, by William Shakespeare

Five to one, baby, one in five:

OK-it wasn’t exactly the St. Crispin’s Day speech, but close enough.

On his MSNOW show this morning, Ali Velshi highlighted a fascinating bit of civil rights history, recounted in this PBS article:

Imagine climbing up 83 steps. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a big deal—but that’s likely because you’d be walking. What would you do, though, if you couldn’t?

That was the premise behind the Capitol Crawl, a now-iconic protest to demand the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA was a landmark civil rights bill aimed at providing basic amenities and protections to some 40 million mentally and physically disabled citizens. Today we take many of the ADA’s changes to society—curb cuts in sidewalks and closed captioning on entertainment, to name just two examples—for granted. But the act’s passage, in 1990, was anything but guaranteed.

By spring of that year, the ADA had been trapped in legislative limbo for months. Despite the strong support of then-President George H.W. Bush, the act was languishing in Congress, caught in the deliberations of House subcommittees. Many U.S. Representatives balked at the expense and complication posed by the ADA’s requirements.

Enter ADAPT—American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit—a grassroots disability rights organization that had been staging protests across the country even before its official founding in 1983. On March 12, 1990, ADAPT led a procession of more than 500 marchers, including other disability activists and lobbyists, from the White House to the west side of the U.S. Capitol. There, in the kind of guerrilla civic action for which the organization had become known, scores of marchers dropped to the ground and began the long journey up the hard marble stairs leading to the “People’s House.” They climbed backwards or on their hands and knees, step-by-painstaking-step. “As I’m seeing the people around me,” recalled Anita Cameron, one of the ADAPT activists who made her way up that day, “I’m like, ‘whoa, we are doing it. We are really doing it. We’re, like, crawling into history.’”

Rolled up in their pockets, protestors carried copies of the Declaration of Independence. Once they finally summitted the stairs, ADAPT reps delivered those scrolls to members of Congress as a reminder of the ADA’s importance. And while media coverage of the event wasn’t extensive, but the publicity that was garnered by the Crawl was impactful. “The pictures were striking,” said The New York Times several days later, “just as they were intended to be: Children paralyzed from the waist down crawling up the steps of the Capitol.” Six months later, following the bill’s now-remarkably swift passage through the House, President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA into law.

“We did it to show that we disabled people, as second class citizens, needed change. And the vehicle for how it was going to change was the ADA,” Cameron told American Experience, reflecting on the Capitol Crawl’s significance. “But I think a lot of people forget that the ADA was the floor. It was not the ceiling. So it was the beginning of rights for us, but it was not the end.”

One of the youngest participants in the Capitol Crawl was 8 year-old Jennifer Keelan:

(engage shame mode) For the life of me, I don’t remember hearing about this action at the time; Velshi’s retrospective today was my first awareness (and let me tell you-it certainly turned on the waterworks). How could I have missed it? It really bothered me; I turned it over in my mind. It wasn’t like I wasn’t aware of world events (I was working in radio…I announced news stories gathered off the AP wire as part of my weekday morning show, for god’s sake).

I contemplated further. In 1990, I was 34. Over the previous 2 years, I had shed 75 pounds, and had walked, jogged, biked and cross-country skied myself into the best physical shape of my adult life. So I wasn’t thinking twice about everyday physical activities like walking up and down stairs, stepping on or off curbs, or simply walking, for that matter. Consequently, like most able-bodied people, I didn’t stop and think about what it was like to be one of those folks who find such everyday physical activities a genuine challenge (if not insurmountable).

But nowadays, as I am “one of those folks” (stairs and curbs are a challenge, and I can’t walk far without some kind of assistive device)…I “get” it. Hence the waterworks when Ali Velshi ran the clip of Jennifer Keelan reaching that top step; I instantly grokked that it was thanks to the courage of activists like that little girl and her cohorts that I have the dedicated access to parking, transit and buildings that I take for granted as a (now) disabled person (pushing 70).

I also connected the dots between 88 year-old Jane Fonda and 8 year-old Jennifer Keelan:

They aren’t/weren’t too tired to keep pushing for change.

It’s in that spirit that I tip my hat to everyone hitting the streets today to exercise their First Amendment rights and (peacefully) push for change, and humbly offer this mixtape to perk them up should they feel…tired.

Bruce Springsteen – “Streets of Minneapolis”