Disability rights activists are too often erased from history. I'm on a mission to change that

I’ve had some pretty amazing opportunities in my working life over the last few years, but the most incredible and life-changing one was sharing a stage with disability rights legend Barbara Lisicki.

Barbara’s work has changed countless lives, and yet most people don’t even know who she is. Barbara Lisicki is one of the founders of the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN), which fought in the 1980s and 1990s for accessible transport, other disability rights, and respect for disabled people as members of our society.

DAN were the ones chaining themselves to buses, picketing charity telethons and shouting the now iconic slogan ‘Piss on pity’ at the likes of Chris Tarrant. This became the battle cry against media portrayals of disabled people, demanding equality instead of condescension. The work of Barbara and her peers led to the creation of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995.

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While I was onstage with Barbara at the National Education Union’s disabled members’ annual conference in 2023, I realised two things. The first was just how important disability journalism was to disabled people. While so many of the questions from the audience were directed at Barbara, her incredible work and her views on the situation for disabled people in the UK today, a good chunk were aimed at me and the awful state of media ableism.

The second realisation didn’t make me feel anywhere near as helpful to the community. A teacher in the audience spoke about the importance of teaching their students about recent disability history and how difficult it was. Suddenly, this really resonated with me.

Despite being a prominent disability rights journalist, whose job it was to fight for change for disabled people by exposing the injustices we face, I felt ashamed at the lack of knowledge I had about those from past generations who had fought for the rights I now have. I knew so little about our history, and about those still fighting to maintain and improve our rights and freedom. It was there and then that I vowed to change this.

Though many argue it wasn’t enough, and was full of loopholes that left it easy to discriminate against disabled people, the Disability Discrimination Act was a landmark law. It enshrined for the first time the right of British disabled people to live free from discrimination – 20 years after women had won the same protections in the Sex Discrimination Act, and 30 years after the Race Relations Act had outlawed racial discrimination. I was six when it came into effect in 1995, but I don’t remember once hearing about it growing up.

It was only after I interviewed the writer and presenter Cerrie Burnell about her documentary Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, which hit our screens as late as 2021, that I fully grasped how little I knew about the treatment of the UK’s disabled people right up until the late 20th century. Or how the social values and assumptions behind that treatment are connected to the struggles our community still faces today.

To give just one example: of course I knew that disabled people had been shut up in asylums a very long time ago. But it was a lot to take in when watching Cerrie’s documentary that this still happened routinely far into the 1900s – and that thanks to neurodivergent kids being misdiagnosed or inappropriately farmed out to the wrong services, it essentially still happens now.

At first I blamed myself for this lack of knowledge. The imposter syndrome kicked in and I thought I must not have researched or studied hard enough to be able to do my job. Could I be the wrong person to report on disabled people? But then I thought about the way disability had always been portrayed to me as a child and young adult.

I grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, when you would regularly see non-disabled parents crying on TV about the fate of their disabled kids. My 20s were spent in the dark times of the 2010s, when ‘documentaries’ like Benefits Street and endless tabloid news stories painted anyone who claimed unemployment disability benefits as a scrounger or defrauding the system. On top of the damage done by media representations of present-day disability, I realised I’d grown up in a society where the disabled past wasn’t represented at all.

Despite being interested in history for as long as I can remember, I can’t recall ever learning anything about the disabled people who were an integral part of Britain’s story and an integral part of the history of civil rights in the UK – not just disability rights. British school children learn more about the civil rights movement across the ocean in the US than they do about disabled people’s fight for civil rights in their own country. This shows just how much the history of disability rights has been erased.

And when the history of British activism does get taught, disabled campaigners are almost always missing from the story. When I was nine, I was obsessed with everything about the suffragette movement and, of course, the Pankhursts, but I was never taught anything about Rosa May Billinghurst. Known as the ‘Cripple Suffragette’, Billinghurst used to hide rocks in the blankets on her wheelchair to throw at police and would use crutches on either side of her chair to propel herself towards police trying to block the protesters. How had I never heard of such a badass?

The erasure of both disabled people and their champions throughout history has been so pervasive that entire generations of young people have no idea who came before them, or that the rights disabled people have today weren’t generously ‘bestowed’ on us by non-disabled society or the British state – we claimed the rights that were ours, and we fought for them, tooth and nail.

The fact that people, disabled and non-disabled, don’t know about this is unacceptable, especially now, when our rights are more at risk than ever.

That’s why it’s important for us to harness the unfinished history of the disability rights movement and use this knowledge to help us move forward. We will not allow our rights to regress when they’re so paltry to start with.

Rachel Charlton-Dailey is a journalist and disability rights campaigner. Her new book, Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism, is out now. Charlton-Dailey will also be appearing at many events over the next few months, find your nearest event here.

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