Stacey Milbern, a warrior for disability justice, has died
A few years back, Stacey Park Milbern had a problem. She was trying to get someplace in her wheelchair, but there was a step four or five inches high. Hoping to improvise a ramp, she asked herself, “What do I have that fits that exact size?”
“I used my two tennis shoes to fill the gap,” she said, and she was able to conquer the step.
She told that story in a 2017 interview with the online community Disability Visibility Project to illustrate something she had learned about herself and others with disabilities: They are resourceful.
“The world literally isn’t made to house us, it feels like sometimes,” said Milbern, who had muscular dystrophy. “So we get to be really creative problem solvers and, I think, aren’t constrained to boxes.”
That creativity was on display in March, when she and a few friends who had formed a group called the Disability Justice Culture Club set about helping homeless people in the Bay Area who had no resources to protect themselves against the new Coronavirus.
Working out of Milbern’s home in East Oakland, they created homemade kits that included masks, vitamins, gloves and mix-ityourself hand sanitizer, and distributed them at homeless encampments.
“Oftentimes, disabled people have the solutions that society needs,” Milbern told the San Francisco public radio station KQED. “We call it crip — or crippled — wisdom.”
She was making those kits even as she was dealing with some significant health problems, she told KQED. Two months later there were complications during a surgery, and she died on May 19 at a hospital in Stanford, California, her friend Andraéa LaVant said. It was her 33rd birthday.
Through her organizing, writing and speaking, Milbern was a prominent and widely respected figure in what is known as the disability justice movement, in the Bay Area and beyond. Since her death, friends and admirers have posted tributes on social media under the hashtag #StaceyTaughtUs. Some posts mention a book she recommended, others the importance of self-worth or cooperation or thinking big.
That last quality was something experienced firsthand by Jim LeBrecht, who with Nicole Newnham directed the recent Netflix documentary “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution.” Milbern, along with LaVant, created a campaign to broaden the impact of the film.
“She focused our campaign toward those in the disabled community whose important contributions and teachings were often overlooked,” LeBrecht said by email, and developed workshops on self-care, sexuality, the history of disabled black activism and other topics.
“Here’s the point,” he said. “She would come up with ideas for our impact campaign that seemed outlandishly beyond imagination or possibility, and then pull it off in splendid fashion.”