Disability Activist Judith Heumann Dies at 75: NPR
Last edited Sun Mar 5, 2023, 01:28 PM - Edit history (2)
Activist Judy Heumann led a reimagining of what it means to be disabled, NPR, March 4, 2023.
Judy Heumann was the first person I called when, in 1987, I reported my first story on disability rights. Judy, who contracted polio when she was 18 months old, gave me the quote that perfectly summed up that little-known civil rights movement.
"Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives — job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example," she said. "It is not a tragedy to me that I'm living in a wheelchair." That idea seemed so unexpected and strange that my editors at a newsmagazine decided not to publish my story.
It was still a radical claim that disabled people didn't see themselves, or their conditions, as something to be pitied. Or that they insisted what most held them back wasn't their health condition but society's exclusion — maybe attitudes that they were less capable to do a job, go to college or find romance; or a physical barrier, like a sidewalk without a curb cut.
That reimagining of what it means to be disabled did gain traction over the years — the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act just three years later in 1990 was a milestone — thanks to leaders like Heumann, who died suddenly on Saturday at age 75 at a hospital in Washington, D.C. She'd been hospitalized the previous weekend with breathing problems...https://www.npr.org/2023/03/04/1161169017/disability-activist-judy-heumann-dead-75
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- Also: 8 celebrities who had polio & described their experiences, from paralysis to having their belongings burned. FDR, Joni Mitchell, Alan Alda, Neil Young, Mia Farrow, Francis Ford Coppola, Donald Sutherland, Frida Kahlo, https://www.insider.com/celebrities-who-have-had-polio-2022-8
- List of Polio Survivors, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polio_survivors
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