She couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak and had Down syndrome. She spent years in an institution, until her twin sister rescued her. Yet today, her textile pieces are held in museums throughout the world and sell for tens of thousands of dollars. This profoundly disabled person was at the same time a great artist, whose work… Read More from Judith Scott
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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
Flannery O’Connor
“The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Flannery O’Connor, who wrote some of the finest stories in the English language as well as two powerful novels, came from… Read More from Flannery O’Connor
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Who was the greatest ever American president? A good case could be made for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is undoubtedly one of the top three people to have held that office. In his first administration from 1933, he helped drag USA out of the Great Depression. He went on to became the only US president… Read More from Franklin D. Roosevelt
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
Emily Dickinson
Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea, Past the houses – past the headlands – Into deep Eternity. Bred as we, among the mountains, Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land? Born to a typical New England bourgeois family, Emily was a sickly teenager, but… Read More from Emily Dickinson