Dick Thornburgh: Three Mile Island and the Americans with Disabilities Act
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Richard Thornburgh was born and raised in Rosslyn Farms, right here in western Pennsylvania. He went on to serve as the forty-first Governor of Pennsylvania from nineteen seventy-nine to nineteen eighty-seven, then as United States Attorney General from nineteen eighty-eight to nineteen ninety-one. His first week as governor brought one of the worst nuclear accidents in American history: the Three Mile Island reactor failure in March of nineteen seventy-nine.
Thornburgh managed the public response and evacuation decisions under enormous pressure. As Attorney General, his most lasting achievement came in nineteen ninety, when he led the effort that produced the Americans with Disabilities Act, landmark civil rights legislation protecting more than fifty million Americans. He died in two thousand twenty.
From a Pittsburgh suburb to the defining disability-rights law of the twentieth century.
