Stacey Park Milbern
Who was Stacey Park Milbern?
How did Stacey Park Milbern change education in North Carolina?
What did Stacey Park Milbern do to promote disability justice in California?
How did Stacey Park Milbern help disabled people during emergencies?
Stacey Park Milbern was a Korean-American disability rights activist who helped add disability history education to the North Carolina school curriculum as a teen and went on to become a key figure in the disability justice movement.
Early years
- Born: May 19, 1987, Seoul, South Korea
- Died: May 19, 2020, Stanford, California, U.S. (age 33)
- Education: Methodist University, bachelor’s degree, 2009; Mills College at Northeastern University, M.B.A., 2015
- Best known for: Disability rights activism
- Quotation: From a 2020 KQED interview: “Often times, disabled people have the solutions that society needs.”
Milbern was born in South Korea to a white father, Joel Milbern, who was stationed there with the United States Army, and a Korean mother, Jean (Park) Milbern, who was self-employed. Stacey Park Milbern grew up in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She had congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD) but recalled not specifically knowing what the disease was. She recalled that she “walked until about middle school and then started using a manual chair and then scooter and then in my high school I used a power chair. So much of my childhood memories, I think are really about surgeries and going to physical therapy.” Later, she said some of those surgeries were unnecessary and raised awareness of that issue for other people living with disabilities.
Milbern became active on several commissions in her state and successfully advocated to add disability history to North Carolina’s high-school curriculum. The governor appointed her to the North Carolina Statewide Independent Living Council.
Milbern, who identified as queer, criticized the disability movement for excluding transgender people and people of color and expressed dismay at Jerry Lewis’s annual muscular dystrophy telethon for, in her words, showcasing “disabled people as nothing more than the objects of pity.” She earned a bachelor’s degree from Methodist University in North Carolina and moved to California’s Bay Area when she was 24, getting a master of business administration degree from Mills College in Oakland.
A career in social activism
After moving to California, Milbern started the Disability Justice Culture Club to promote the disability justice movement. In 2014 U.S. Pres. Barack Obama named Milbern to the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. She co-led the impact campaign for the 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, which IMDb described as telling the story of how “a revolution blossomed at a ramshackle summer camp for teenagers with disabilities, transforming their lives and igniting a landmark movement.” The film’s executive producers included Barack and Michelle Obama. In a 2017 interview with the Disability Visibility Project, Milbern laid out her vision for what the future might hold for the disabled community:
I would want people with disabilities 20 years from now to not think that they’re broken. You know, not think that there is anything spiritually or physically or emotionally wrong with them.
In 2019, leading up to a northern California power blackout, Milbern helped launch a grassroots campaign called #PowerToLive, which included a crowd-sourced survival guide for people who depended on electricity for life-saving equipment such as ventilators. “We believe this is a life-or-death issue,” she said at the time. “We don’t want our people to die or wind up institutionalized. People with the least resources are banding together to help one another.”
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And in 2020, working out of her East Oakland home during the coronavirus pandemic, she teamed up with friends from the Disability Justice Culture Club to put together kits of masks, vitamins, gloves, and hand sanitizer to give to people living in homeless encampments.
Death and legacy
Milbern died on her birthday in 2020, at the age of 33, following complications from surgery. Under the hashtag #StaceyTaughtUs, people posted social media tributes about her influence on their lives. On her birthday in 2022, Google honored Milbern with a doodle by Art Twink, a disabled queer Bengali American artist, during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
In 2023 the United States Mint announced that Milbern would be honored in its 2025 American Women Quarters Program. The Mint called Milbern “a visionary leader and powerful activist for people with disabilities,” adding that her “speeches and online writings inspired empowerment, inclusiveness, and interdependence.”
