Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, Donald Galloway: living the intersection
Three civil rights leaders who lived the intersection of race, disability, class, and gender — and one quote I have carried my whole life without knowing whose it was.
Brad Lomax experienced the intersectionalities of being Black and disabled in Oakland, California. Much of his work was in making transportation accessible and equitable for anyone who was disabled. He advocated for systems we now take for granted when we see them — which is exactly how successful infrastructure disappears.
Fannie Lou Hamer lived at the intersection of being a Black woman with multiple disabilities. She was born a sharecropper and experienced medical violence as an adult at the hands of doctors who performed a hysterectomy on her without her consent during a separate surgery for a uterine tumor. She focused on voting rights and disability rights.
Two weeks before I was born, Fannie Lou Hamer gave a speech in Washington, DC at the National Women's Political Caucus and said, "Nobody is free until everybody's free." I have heard that my whole life and I did not know she had said it. To know the life she lived at the intersection of her experience makes knowing that so much more powerful.
Donald Galloway advocated for the rights of disabled individuals to live independently and to be hired for employment that would otherwise be closed to them.
Putting these three on the timeline is not decoration. It is the point: disability justice and civil rights were never separate movements, and the people who lived both are the ones who made that visible.