Judith Heumann
American disability rights activist (1947-2023) · United States · On the map · Activists · Died at 75
She contracted polio at 18 months, spent her childhood fighting a school system that wouldn't let her inside, and turned that refusal into a five-decade campaign that rewrote American civil rights law to include millions the statutes had ignored.
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About this person
Judith Ellen Heumann was born December 18, 1947, and polio arrived before she turned two. Brooklyn schools denied her entry - wheelchair, fire hazard, they said - so her mother taught her at home until fourth grade. She became the first wheelchair user to teach in New York City public schools, but only after suing for the license they'd refused her. In the 1970s she co-founded Disabled in Action and led the Section 504 sit-in, a 25-day federal building occupation that forced the government to enforce its own anti-discrimination rule. Later she carried that framework into the World Bank and the State Department, embedding disability rights into international development policy and stretching the independent living movement across borders. She died March 4, 2023, called the Mother of the Disability Rights Movement by then, the title earned in rooms where the law was still being written.
