Items21The creator’s order
  1. 1Ed Roberts (activist)Ed Roberts (activist)Roberts, who used a ventilator after polio, had to fight the University of California, Berkeley, to be admitted in 1962 and lived in the campus hospital wing. With other disabled students, the "Rolling Quads", he organised for kerb cuts and attendant support, and in 1972 they founded the Berkeley…0i
  2. 2Alf MorrisAlf MorrisBorn 23 Mar 1928Morris, a Labour MP from Manchester, used a private member's bill to pass the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, the first law anywhere to require councils to identify disabled residents and provide services, and public buildings to consider access. In 1974 he became the world's first…0i
  3. 3Paul Hunt (activist)Paul Hunt (activist)Born 9 Mar 1937Living in a Cheshire Home, Hunt organised fellow residents to demand a say over how the institution was run, and in 1972 wrote a letter to The Guardian inviting disabled people to form a group run entirely by themselves. That became the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, whose…0i
  4. 4Vic FinkelsteinVic FinkelsteinBorn 25 Jan 1938Finkelstein, a South African jailed and exiled for anti-apartheid activism, co-founded the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation with Paul Hunt and argued that disability was a form of social oppression comparable to racism. His best-known parable imagines a village built by and for…0
  5. 5Judith HeumannJudith HeumannBorn 18 Dec 1947Heumann sued New York's education board in 1970 when it refused her a teaching licence because she used a wheelchair, and won. She founded Disabled in Action, then helped lead the 1977 occupation of the federal building in San Francisco, which lasted nearly four weeks, to force the government to…0i
  6. 6Kitty ConeKitty ConeBorn 7 Apr 1944Cone was the strategist of the 1977 Section 504 sit-in. She helped build the coalition that kept more than a hundred disabled protesters inside the federal building for nearly four weeks, lining up unions, churches, civil rights groups and sign-language interpreters so the occupation could not be…0
  7. 7Brad LomaxBrad LomaxBorn 13 Sept 1950Lomax, a Black Panther Party member with multiple sclerosis, is the link that made the 504 sit-in hold. Through him the Panthers brought hot meals to the occupiers every day, and he and his attendant travelled with the protesters' delegation to Washington to press the case in person. Lomax had…0
  8. 8Wade BlankWade BlankBlank, a nursing home worker, helped young disabled residents move out into their own flats in Denver, and in 1978 joined the "Gang of 19" who surrounded city buses in their wheelchairs to demand lifts. In 1983 they founded ADAPT, which for years blockaded transit and Greyhound offices nationwide…0i
  9. 9Mike Oliver (disability advocate)Mike Oliver (disability advocate)Oliver gave the social model its name in 1983 and spent his career, at Kent and then Greenwich, turning it into an argument policymakers could not ignore: if disability is created by inaccessible buildings, transport and attitudes, the remedy is to change them, not to "fix" people. His book The…0
  10. 10Lex FriedenLex FriedenBorn 5 Mar 1949Frieden was refused admission to a university in 1967 on the grounds that a wheelchair user would be a burden, and later made the ADA's paper trail. As executive director of the National Council on Disability, a then-obscure federal advisory body, he oversaw its 1986 report Toward Independence,…0i