Stacey Park Milbern, who died two years in the past on her thirty third birthday, is remembered as a dynamic chief with a knack for organizing folks. Over her life, this pioneer within the incapacity justice motion additionally advocated for truthful therapy of individuals of colour, those that are transgender and gender-nonconforming, and folks with out housing.
As a part of its Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration, Google is honoring the Korean American activist with a Doodle on Thursday — Milbern’s thirty fifth birthday and the second anniversary of her demise. Thursday can be Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which promotes digital accessibility and inclusion for folks with all disabilities.
Milbern was born in 1987 with congenital muscular dystrophy at a US Army hospital in Seoul to a white father and Korean mom. Growing up, she embraced and celebrated components of her identification that stood out in an evangelical Christian household in North Carolina, particularly her sexuality.
She penned poetry and wrote about incapacity points on a private weblog during which she described herself as “simply your on a regular basis queer disabled corean woman residing within the south.” She may stroll as a younger woman however finally started utilizing a wheelchair, which led to her elevated incapacity consciousness and activism.
Milbern started serving on incapacity rights commissions whereas in her teenagers and was instrumental in serving to cross a North Carolina regulation in 2007 requiring that incapacity historical past curriculum be taught in colleges. She criticized Jerry Lewis’ annual muscular dystrophy telethon as categorizing “disabled folks as nothing greater than the objects of pity.”
At 24, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, a area central to the incapacity rights motion. She continued to be lively within the motion, with a particular deal with securing well being look after folks with disabilities. In 2017, she protested proposed cuts to Medicaid, the federally funded program that offered in-home attendants and allowed her to stay on her personal.
When Pacific Gas & Electric shut down energy to hundreds of houses in response to the 2019 California wildfires, Milbern helped launch a grassroots marketing campaign to supply essential assist to folks with disabilities affected by the blackouts reminiscent of sharing crowdsourced survival data and making connections to rides and housing. In early 2020, because the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic ramped up, she was figuring out of her Oakland dwelling with the Disability Justice Culture Club, a corporation she helped create, to distribute home made disease-prevention kits to the homeless.
While engaged on the kits, Milbern realized that surgical procedure to take away her fast-growing kidney most cancers had been postponed resulting from shelter-in-place orders. She died three months later, on her thirty third birthday, on account of surgical issues.
