From the wheelchair using Black Panther to the ‘cripple suffragette’ – 10 heroes of the disabled rights movement

over 1 year in The guardian

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 childMartin 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. Continue reading...

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