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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 Center for Independent Living, run by disabled people for disabled people. The model spread to hundreds of centres, and Roberts went on to run California's vocational rehabilitation department.
More about Ed Roberts (activist)2
Alf Morris
Born
Morris, 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 minister for disabled people. Later campaigners criticised the welfare framing of his era, which treated disabled people as recipients of care, but the 1970 Act was the foundation they built on.
More about Alf Morris3
Paul Hunt (activist)
Born
Living 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 1976 statement drew the distinction between impairment and disability, the social restrictions imposed on people with impairments. It is where the British social model of disability starts.
More about Paul Hunt (activist)4
Vic Finkelstein
Born
Finkelstein, 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 wheelchair users, where the able-bodied keep banging their heads on low doorways and become the "disabled" ones. At the Open University he helped create one of the first courses taught from that perspective, and he pushed for organisations of disabled people rather than charities.
More about Vic Finkelstein5
Judith Heumann
Born
Heumann 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 sign regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the first civil rights protection for disabled Americans. She later served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and at the World Bank.
More about Judith Heumann6
Kitty Cone
Born
Cone 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 starved or ignored out of existence. Her planning, rather than one charismatic leader, is why the 504 protest has become a case study in how a small, determined coalition wins a policy fight.
More about Kitty Cone7
Brad Lomax
Born
Lomax, 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 already pushed the Panthers to back independent living and helped set up an Oakland branch of the Center for Independent Living, a reminder that disability rights and Black liberation were connected movements.
More about Brad Lomax8
Wade Blank
Blank, 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 and won accessible public transport, then turned to campaigning for funding to follow people out of nursing homes. ADAPT's leadership was overwhelmingly disabled people; Blank is the organiser who stayed alongside them.
More about Wade Blank9
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 Politics of Disablement (1990) is the readable statement. Critics, including disabled scholars such as Tom Shakespeare, argue it underplays pain and impairment; Oliver defended it as a political tool, not a full theory.
More about Mike Oliver (disability advocate)10
Lex Frieden
Born
Frieden 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, which recommended a comprehensive civil rights law for disabled people and produced the first draft of what became the ADA. He shows how a report written inside government can set an agenda for an outside movement.
More about Lex Frieden11
Justin Dart Jr.
Born
Dart, a wealthy Republican businessman who used a wheelchair after polio, spent his own money touring every US state in the 1980s with his wife Yoshiko, holding public forums that collected thousands of testimonies of discrimination. That evidence fed the case for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and as a known conservative he helped persuade the Bush administration and Republican senators to back it. George H. W. Bush gave him one of the pens at the 1990 signing.
More about Justin Dart Jr.12
Tony Coelho
Born
Coelho had been barred from becoming a Jesuit priest because of his epilepsy, and as a California congressman he introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1988 as its lead House sponsor. The Act banned discrimination in employment, public services and public accommodations and required reasonable adjustments. Coelho resigned from Congress in 1989 over a financial controversy before it passed, but the coalition he helped assemble carried it through in 1990.
More about Tony Coelho13
Marca Bristo
Bristo founded Access Living in Chicago in 1980, run and staffed largely by disabled people, and made it one of the most politically active independent living centres in the country, campaigning for accessible buses and against institutional care, and lobbying hard for the ADA. As chair of the National Council on Disability under Clinton she pushed for enforcement of the Act rather than celebration of it, and she later helped found the US International Council on Disabilities to support the UN convention.
More about Marca Bristo14
Jane Campbell, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton
Born
Campbell co-founded the National Centre for Independent Living and was a leader of the British Council of Disabled People in the campaign that won two laws in quick succession: the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which activists criticised as weak, and the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996, which let disabled people receive cash to employ their own personal assistants instead of accepting council-arranged care. She later chaired the Social Care Institute for Excellence and, from the House of Lords, has been a prominent opponent of legalising assisted dying.
More about Jane Campbell, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton15
Bert Massie
A Liverpudlian who had polio as a baby, Massie worked inside the system to give the 1995 Act teeth. As director of the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation he lobbied for an enforcement body, and as first chair of the Disability Rights Commission from 2000 to 2007 he oversaw test cases, a formal inquiry into health inequalities for people with learning disabilities and mental health conditions, and the 2005 Act that extended duties to public bodies. More radical activists saw RADAR as too close to government; his record shows what insider pressure could achieve.
More about Bert Massie16
Kalle Könkkölä
Könkkölä founded Kynnys, the Threshold Association, in 1973 as a Finnish organisation of disabled people rather than for them, and in 1983 became the first wheelchair user elected to Finland's parliament, for the new Green League; the chamber had to be adapted for him. His campaigning helped win Finland's personal assistance entitlement, and he later chaired Disabled Peoples' International and built partnerships with disabled people's organisations in Africa and Asia.
More about Kalle Könkkölä17
Lois Curtis
Born
Curtis, a woman with intellectual disabilities and mental illness, had spent years in Georgia's psychiatric hospitals although her own doctors agreed she could live in the community. With Elaine Wilson and lawyers from Atlanta Legal Aid she sued, and in Olmstead v. L.C. (1999) the Supreme Court ruled that unjustified institutionalisation is discrimination under the ADA. The decision underpins thousands of moves from institutions into homes; Curtis herself became an artist and spoke about the case at the White House.
More about Lois Curtis18
Stella Young
Born
Young, an Australian comedian and journalist, coined the term "inspiration porn" for images of disabled people used to make non-disabled audiences feel good, and her 2014 TED talk "I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much" made the social model argument to millions in twelve minutes. As editor of the ABC's disability website Ramp Up she gave disabled writers a platform on politics rather than personal triumph. She died in 2014, aged 32.
More about Stella Young19
Yetnebersh Nigussie
Born
Nigussie, blind since childhood, trained as a lawyer and co-founded the Ethiopian Centre for Disability and Development, which works on inclusive schooling and employment and pressed Ethiopia to ratify and apply the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She won the Right Livelihood Award in 2017 for that work and now campaigns internationally for disability-inclusive development, a reminder that most disabled people live in the Global South, where the movement looks very different.
More about Yetnebersh Nigussie20
Alice Wong (activist)
Born
Wong built political organising for people who could not easily get to a protest. Her Disability Visibility Project, started in 2014, collected oral histories with StoryCorps and grew into a hub for disabled writers, and in 2016 she co-founded #CripTheVote with Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan, using online forums to question candidates on Medicaid, benefits and access. She attended a White House event by telepresence robot in 2015. Wong died in November 2025.
More about Alice Wong (activist)21
Haben Girma
Born
Girma, the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, took accessibility online. As a lawyer at Disability Rights Advocates she worked on National Federation of the Blind v. Scribd, in which a federal court ruled in 2015 that the ADA can apply to a business that exists only on the internet, a key step in the long and still unsettled fight over whether websites and apps must be accessible. She now campaigns and consults on accessible digital design.
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