It’s a romantic tale: a young communist struggling against an authoritarian regime is arrested on a treason charge. A dramatic trial follows, and he is consigned to a long sentence, separated from his wife and family. In prison, he rallies his comrades, organizing education sessions. It could be the story of Nelson Mandela, except that… Read More from Antonio Gramsci
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May Billinghurst
The Women’s Suffrage campaigner Rosa May Billinghurst was born into a middle class family in Lewisham in 1875. At five months old, she contracted an illness – almost certainly polio – which left her completely paralysed. Despite some recovery, she was left paraplegic, relying on calipers and crutches to walk, and usually resorting to a… Read More from May Billinghurst
Harriet McBryde Johnson
“I am in the first generation to survive to such decrepitude. Because antibiotics were available, we didn’t die from the childhood pneumonias that often come with weakened respiratory systems. I guess it is natural enough that most people don’t know what to make of us.” Born in Laurinburg, North Carolina on July 8, 1957, Harriet… Read More from Harriet McBryde Johnson
Ed Roberts
“If I’m going to be a vegetable, I’m going to be an artichoke, prickly on the outside, with a big heart in the middle” Before Ed Roberts contracted polio at the age of 14, he had wanted to be a marine, dragging his mother Zona to visit gun shops. After he recovered from the disease,… Read More from Ed Roberts
Mabel Cooper
For some time, I have been seeking out a person with intellectual disability to include in this website. Despite books such as Downs: a history, and other historical research about intellectual disability, very few named individuals with intellectual disability have left a record. In the late twentieth century, with the growth of deinstitutionalization and consensus… Read More from Mabel Cooper
Rosa Luxemburg
When I was a politics student, it was the democratic socialists, not the authoritarians like Lenin who appealed to me, and in particular Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci: both committed to freedom; both great writers; and both disabled people who paid a heavy price for their courageous work in pursuit of a socialist utopia. Rozalia… Read More from Rosa Luxemburg
Jean-Paul Marat
Maverick scientist, jobbing medic, sometime political philosopher, eloquent journalist, impassioned political activist – Marat was multifariously gifted but brutally extreme. He was born in Neuchatel, son of a Sardinian religious refugee, but left for the bright lights of Paris, where he studied medicine. He moved to London in 1765, where he began to write philosophical… Read More from Jean-Paul Marat
Harriet Tubman
Never having received appropriate recognition in life, after death, Harriet Tubman became an African American icon and a hero to later generations of Civil Rights activists. Her concrete achievements in war and peace, and her struggles on behalf of African Americans and women in particular, surely make her someone that disabled people can also call a… Read More from Harriet Tubman
Helen Keller
“The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the… Read More from Helen Keller
Ernesto “Che” Guevara
“The true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary who does not have this quality.” Ernesto “Che” Guevara Lynch was born in Misiones, a remote jungle backwater in Argentina to aristocratic but radical parents: his father said “in my son’s veins flowed the blood of… Read More from Ernesto “Che” Guevara