Maybe the most merciful thing would be to put him out of his misery. Years later, this initial reaction still haunts me. I want viewers to experience the discomfort that I felt, to process and examine it, and come out on the other side of that discomfort with a greater sense of acceptance and tolerance and awareness of the barriers that affect people and prevent them from participating in the life that most of us able-bodied Americans take for granted. Determined to leave home one way or another, he went on a hunger strike to push his parents into placing him in an institution, the only choice he thought existed. Campbell s parents panicked and brought him to a hospital where he was placed in the psychiatric ward, evaluated and found to be perfectly capable of independent living.
T DO IT and the two became good friends in the process.
It takes someone to make a stand, someone to say, I ve had enough. In our case, we can t even get on the bus, let alone ride in the back. Crashing their wheelchairs through police lines and manacling themselves to buses in acts of civil disobedience, Campbell and his fellow activists helped dramatize the need for access for people with disabilities. In one of the film s most stirring sequences, Campbell participates in a Washington, D.C. protest rally in which 70 disabled activists laboriously drag themselves up the steps of our nation s Capitol. Their efforts helped spur the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.