disabled people have the solutions
Stacey Park Milbern and disability justice
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We wouldn’t know the word “disability justice” without the work of Stacey Park Milburn.
In 1987, Stacey was born with congenital muscular dystrophy, often abbreviated as CMD. She was born in Korea but grew up in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where her father, a U.S. Army officer, was stationed.
Stacey realized early on just how little awareness her peers had about the “totally different reality” disabled people inhabit. As a teenager, she fought to change that, joining multiple state commissions to promote disability rights. Her work added disability history to her high school curriculum and created new programs and forums for young people with disabilities. She wrote a personal blog chronicling her life with CMD and her hopes for the disability rights movement.
In 2005, when she was just 18 years old, Stacey worked with other activists to coin the term “disability justice,” revolutionizing a movement “dedicated to ensuring the perspectives of traditionally marginalized groups within the disabled community weren’t left out of the fight for disability rights.”
In 2011, Stacey moved to the Bay Area to join the community’s decades-long history of disability advocacy work. She founded the Disability Justice Culture Club and held club gatherings in her home.
There honestly isn’t space in this newsletter to list all of Stacey’s honors and accomplishments. As she said in a 2017 interview with the Disability Visibility Project:
I would want people with disabilities 20 years from now to not think that they’re broken. You know, not think that there is anything spiritually or physically or emotionally wrong with them. And not just people with disabilities, but queer people, gender nonconforming folks and people of color. And all of the people I think that society really pushes down and out.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Stacey worked with the club to distribute masks, hand sanitizer and other necessities to the unhoused in the Bay Area. “Oftentimes, disabled people have the solutions that society needs,” she said. “We call it crip — or crippled — wisdom.”
Just a few months later, she passed away from surgery complications. She died on May 19, 2020 — her 33rd birthday.
More on 🌺:
Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong
Stacey Milbern, a Warrior for Disability Justice, Dies at 33, The New York Times
In Her Own Words: Remembering and Honoring Stacey Park Milbern, Google Arts & Culture
Loving Stacey Park Milbern: A Remembrance, Disability Visibility Project
What Disability Justice Activist Stacey Park Milbern Taught Us, KQED
Stacey Park Milbern, The National Women’s History Museum
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