The Underground Railroad

The Memphis to Denver Underground Railroad highlights the need for the Disability Integration Act

LaTonya Reeves moved to Denver Colorado in the early 1990s, but she didn’t arrive from Memphis Tennessee as a typical transplant from the volunteer state. She was a pioneer, a traveler on the modern underground railroad from a state that had forced her into an expensive facility because of her disability.

LaTonya was a refugee, fleeing Tennessee for the opportunity for services in her own home. She met Wade Blank, the founder of ADAPT, at the Denver airport and began a life working to change the institutional bias in Medicaid.

"I had an accident and they made me wash my face in feces and urine," LaTonya Reeves said about a nursing home in Memphis. "The nurse put me in the tub and threw ice-cold water on my face. She told me if I didn't stop screaming she would drown me."

Deborah Cunningham helped LaTonya and others to leave expensive nursing facilities in Tennessee to live in their own homes in Colorado. As the Executive Director of The Memphis Center for Independent Living Deborah literally put people on an airplane out of town, to move to a new state where home and community based options made it possible for them to live in their own apartment.

Deborah created an “Underground Railroad,” for about ten years that gave people an option to live in their own home when the state of Tennessee did not. Medicaid is a federal program that is shared with the states and Colorado state policy allowed for more cost-effective home and community based services, while Tennessee limited options to expensive facilities.

Daryl Williams made the trip on the “disability underground railroad” in 2003 and he returned to speak at the Memphis Center for Independent Living before Deborah Cunningham died in 2015. He left a Memphis nursing home with nothing and came back to train Care Managers on nursing home transitions.

Daryl Williams did not have to say much, the fact that he had a job in Colorado and was a taxpayer says a lot about the difference in how the states supported their citizens. But Daryl did have a lot to say. He drove back to Memphis in his own van that he controls partly with a joystick. He also was able to announce that he had just closed on a home and was giving more back from additional work he was doing.

The legacy of the underground railroad out of Tennessee should be a major reason Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander and the HELP Committee schedules hearings on the Disability Integration Act.

The Disability Integration Act (DIA) is non-partisan civil rights legislation, introduced by Senator Schumer in the Senate (S. 910) and Representative Sensenbrenner in the House (H.R.2472), to address the fundamental issue that people who need Long Term Services and Supports are forced into expensive institutions and losing their basic civil rights.

Tennessee more than most states needs the Disability Integration Act. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nursing homes nationally cost approximately $6,500 per month for an individual. Although the volunteer state has made progress providing home and community based services, the state still spends the lion share of Medicaid on institutional care.

“It’s ridiculous that Senator Alexander hasn’t stepped up for Disabled Tennesseans,” said Michael Heinrich an ADAPT activist and constituent of Alexander’s from Memphis. “If he doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of history, he should cosponsor DIA.”

The Underground Railroad gave Tennesseans a chance at life. They had to leave behind their homes and families for a taste of freedom. Now Tennessee must look at the DIA to give people that same opportunity.

“I would be dead if I would have stayed in Tennessee,” said LaTonya Reeves. 

LaTonya now lives and works in Denver Colorado.