From the wheelchair-using Black Panther to the ‘cripple suffragette’ – 10 heroes of the disabled rights movement.
Brad Lomax in the US, Rosa May Billinghurst in the UK, Javed Abid in India … these are the men and women I wish I had known about as a disabled child.
Martin Luther King, Emmeline Pankhurst, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks. As a kid, I knew these names. I was taught about the brave things these people had done and the change they had created. They were people to look up to.
Somewhere along the way, I became aware that none of these people were disabled. Despite all the opportunities I was afforded by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), passed in 1995 when I was a few months old, I lived with the misguided idea that disabled people had never fought for our civil rights. I had no idea that I was only in the classrooms where I learned the names of King and Pankhurst because of people whose names were never mentioned.
Click Here to read this great article in The Guardian by Lucy Webster, political journalist, writer and disability advocate.