Lex Frieden

Frieden was refused admission to a university in 1967 on the grounds that a wheelchair user would be a burden, and later made the ADA's paper trail. As executive director of the National Council on Disability, a then-obscure federal advisory body, he oversaw its 1986 report Toward Independence, which recommended a comprehensive civil rights law for disabled people and produced the first draft of what became the ADA. He shows how a report written inside government can set an agenda for an outside movement.