Updated April 3, 2026 at 4:28 PM CDT
On the day after the Fourth of July in 1978, a group of young disabled people blocked two city buses at one of the busiest intersections in downtown Denver – to declare their right to live independently.
The Gang of 19, as they'd be called, demanded that the city install wheelchair lifts on more than 200 newly-ordered buses, so they could ride public transit. The protest lasted some 24 hours. At night, some of the protesters got out of their wheelchairs and slept on the hard asphalt.
It was an act of civil disobedience that got little attention at the time and has now been largely forgotten. But those people with disabilities secured wheelchair access on Denver buses and eventually helped spur a nationwide movement.
Today, few people who pass through the intersection of Broadway and Colfax Avenue — steps from the gold dome of the Colorado State Capitol — know the history.
Few pay attention to a plaque, mounted in concrete along the sidewalk, with black and gold lettering that says the bus stop is dedicated, by the regional transit agency, "to the memory of Reverend Wade Blank."
Blank, who died in 1993, was the Presbyterian minister who came up with the idea for the demonstration and taught the disabled protesters civil disobedience.
Now the city of Denver is about to celebrate — and bring new attention — to the consequential protest of the Gang of 19.
From a nursing home to their own homes
Before becoming the Gang of 19, most of the activists lived in nursing homes or state-run institutions, many in a suburban Denver facility called Heritage House. That's where they met Blank, who worked on the youth wing and was horrified by the conditions he saw there.
With the help of a Denver attorney named John Holland, Blank sued Heritage House for abuse and neglect.
"It was a cesspool. I mean, they had cockroaches in the cereals," Holland recalls of the conditions that left the young residents of the nursing home powerless and often in danger of long-term health problems. "No activities. Nothing to do. Warehoused. Physical injuries. Bed sores. Lots of bed sores."
Blank, who was not disabled, had a vision that these young disabled people — in their teens and early 20s — could live in their own homes. In 1975, he co-founded Atlantis Community, to provide services, including attendant care, so disabled people could leave institutions. Co-founder Barry Rosenberg said the name Atlantis came from the idea of a lost civilization.
"Wade felt that these were people who were lost and were brilliant people, who lived and were undiscovered," said Rosenberg, who met Blank at Heritage House.
Blank convinced the city to lease public housing units to the people leaving the nursing home and he got state money to make the apartments wheelchair accessible. Later, Blank took the money he won from the lawsuit against Heritage House to help many of the residents buy their own homes and apartments.
But the members of Atlantis quickly found their new independence was limited.
They couldn't take buses that didn't have wheelchair lifts. Even getting to a bus was difficult because sidewalks were inaccessible without curb cuts, the ramps at the end of a sidewalk that were uncommon then.
"Put yourself in [their] position in the 1970s, if you were lucky enough to live in a space that did not have steps, you could go as far as your block because there were no curb cuts," Brian Grewe, the current executive director of Atlantis Community. "There weren't accessible vehicles. We didn't have buses with lifts. ... And so you were picked up, you were carried, or you were left in these types of locations."
When Holland, the attorney, learned that Denver metro's Regional Transportation District, RTD, needed to purchase hundreds of new buses and that officials did not plan to equip them with wheelchair lifts, he asked Blank to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit against RTD.
They lost in court. Blank quickly decided to take the fight to the streets.
'We will ride'
Disability wasn't understood as a civil rights issue then, but Blank, who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, saw it differently. And he understood that the right to ride a bus was a symbol of American civil rights.
"You can measure how a society views an oppressed group by how they treat them in public accommodations," he told a local news outlet.
Only a small number of Denver city buses had lifts on them. Years later, Blank, speaking at an event to commemorate the Gang of 19, explained how the protest unfolded.
"So on July 5th [1978], George Roberts sat patiently at the bus stop waiting for the next bus to come. When the doors opened, he said, 'Can I get on?'"
Roberts was an Atlantis resident, described by others as kind and strong — the kind of activist who took sledgehammers to sidewalks protesting the lack of curb cuts. And on that hot July day, Blank directed Roberts to try to get on the bus in his wheelchair, confusing the driver.
"The bus driver looked at him like he was this side of berserk and 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."
A second bus attempted to go around, but the demonstrators encircled and entrapped that one too.
Brian Macleod, one of the Gang of 19, said it proved to be fairly easy to block a bus once it's stopped, "as long as you had the will to do it."
Once they surrounded the bus, Macleod told NPR, "the driver can't pull out and go on his way … He knows he's screwed. He can't move anywhere."
Macleod, then known as Bob Conrad, and his wife, Hava Macleod, formerly Renate Rabe-Conrad, are two of the three surviving members of the Gang of 19.
The group chanted, "We want to ride," and stuck a sign behind the buses' windshield wipers that read "Taxation Without Transportation!"
Local police showed up to disperse them.
"No one budged," said Rosenberg, who was helping support the protest. "No one talked back. They just sat and were quiet. And then you saw more police coming in waves and you could tell their importance by the gold in their hats."
Bill Roem, who was a personal care attendant and had worked at Atlantis, brought his 16-year-old foster daughter, Cindy Dunn, who he met when she lived at Heritage House. Cindy, in her wheelchair, took a spot next to a bus and became a member of the Gang of 19.
Roem remembers the scene being "kind of chaotic."
"[The police] were yelling at everybody. They were yelling at Wade. They were yelling at the people in the wheelchairs. But we were there for a purpose," he said.
Gaining the 'right' to be arrested
Roem felt it was "pretty obvious" that officers weren't going to arrest anyone in a wheelchair.
"Not only would the optics look bad," says Roem, but the police had no "actual process of trying to get them off the street."
That's because the police cars, the jail and the courtroom weren't wheelchair accessible, Holland recalls.
Instead, police arrested Roem and another personal care attendant, Lisa Wheeler.
Neither were disabled. Nor were they protesting. As attendants, their role was to assist the people in wheelchairs – helping them eat, take medicines, emptying their catheters, and for those who couldn't move on their own, to reposition them in their wheelchairs to prevent discomfort and the potentially painful and even deadly skin breakdowns that can develop quickly from sitting too long in one position.
"What lesson were they teaching? The lesson was, you don't even deserve to have a civil rights movement," said Holland, who later filed to have Roem and Wheeler's charges dismissed.
In court, Holland brought witnesses, including an aide to the mayor, who said police and city officials agreed not to arrest the protesters in wheelchairs because of the lack of accessibility.
A judge agreed with Holland's argument that police had "selectively enforced" the law — a violation of the demonstrators' rights to equal treatment when they protested — and dismissed the charges against the attendants.
"The right to be arrested for protesting is an odd right. But it is a right," Holland said. "You have the right to be taken seriously."
Another surviving member of the Gang of 19, Bobby Simpson, told CPR News the idea of the protest "kind of scared me a little bit." But it was important to him at the time and he feels proud to have been one of the protesters.
"It changed lives," he says.
A 'lost' people finding their power
Blank and the Gang of 19 did win their fight against RTD.
The public transit agency eventually agreed to pay for wheelchair lifts on the more than 200 new buses. The demonstration also shifted how its participants saw themselves.
"The original 19, you have to understand, literally came out of those nursing homes and had no purpose, no validation, no nothing. And then from there, they began to see, okay, I have some value here," Macleod said in a 2020 podcast produced by History Colorado, the state historical society. "They began to understand they could change things and do something for themselves as well as other people."
Grewe said the Gang of 19 didn't necessarily set out to be activists on those two warm days in July 1978. They were people who just "wanted to live their lives."
A new civil rights movement
Soon they were helping disabled people across the country live their lives.
The Gang of 19 became the core of a disability civil rights group called ADAPT, known for a theatrical style of civil disobedience protests around the country. In March 1990, at the Capitol Crawl, disabled activists got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the U.S. Capitol steps to push Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.
When the ADA became law, in July of 1990, it included the right to ride public transit, mandating all new public buses have wheelchair lifts.
Next, ADAPT turned to advocating for laws and programs to help disabled people live outside of institutions and in their own homes. The group made national headlines in 2017 with a series of nationwide protests against cuts to Medicaid and GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, including a "die-in" outside then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office.
Dawn Russell, who joined ADAPT in 1996, has been arrested dozens of times — "I've lost count" — in Colorado and across the country. She travels frequently from Denver to Washington D.C. to lobby members of Congress to pass the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act, to formalize the right of disabled people at risk of living in an institution to get government assistance to live at home.
"We wouldn't have had access or even known to do that kind of work if they had not done this on July 5, 1978. We wouldn't even know to do that," she said of the Gang of 19. "So it means everything to us, the way we sit, the very work that they were doing then we are doing now."
Beyond disabled people like Russell in Denver, the importance of what happened at Colfax and Broadway is little known. But that's about to change.
For decades, there was little reminder of the history on that corner – just the historic marker that is easily missed. Now, nearly 50 years later, the city and county of Denver have decided that's no longer enough to commemorate the Gang of 19's actions.
Denver Parks and Recreation has begun a multimillion dollar renovation of Civic Center Park.
It's steps from Colfax and Broadway and surrounded by government buildings including City Hall and the Colorado State Capitol. Workers will soon install a memorial plaza that will include the names of each member of the Gang of 19 — etched into a large medallion in the ground, made of a material meant to resemble the asphalt the protesters slept on overnight to block the buses.
There's another recognition across the busy street.
Earlier this year, the metro area's transit agency, the same one the Gang of 19 protested in 1978, renamed the bus terminal at that same intersection for Wade Blank.
The renaming was not without controversy. After the RTD raised the base fare of a popular transit program for disabled riders on January 1, Russell, ADAPT and other disability advocates protested angrily — in echoes of the Gang of 19.
A public celebration was canceled. But just a few weeks ago, new signs went up over the bus terminal, the newly renamed Wade Blank Civic Center Station.
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