The landmark civil rights law prohibited discrimination in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and telecommunications for people with disabilities. Signed before a crowd of thousands including disability rights advocates, it required businesses and governments to provide reasonable accommodations, reshaping American architecture, workplaces, and public life over subsequent decades.
Bush signed the bill flanked by disability rights activists on the White House lawn, declaring "let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down," an echo deliberately chosen to evoke the fall of the Berlin Wall less than a year earlier.
The law's passage followed years of grassroots organizing, including the famous 1990 "Capitol Crawl," when dozens of activists abandoned their wheelchairs and mobility devices to crawl up the Capitol's front steps, dramatizing the physical barriers disabled Americans faced daily.
The ADA's requirements—curb cuts, accessible bathrooms, closed captioning, wheelchair ramps—transformed the built environment so thoroughly and quickly that within a decade many Americans had stopped noticing features that were, for millions of people, the difference between participation and exclusion.
Key people: George H.W. Bush