As we celebrate Disability Pride Month, we look to the heroes who created change at the intersection of race and disability. In times when history failed to witness their full humanity, they pioneered change anyway, lifting others as they climbed. We remember them this month, celebrating their brilliance and their power, and we build with our own power today a mausoleum that honors their lives, a sacred place we return to and tend, so that what history tried to bury instead gets remembered with intention.

This month also marks 36 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. In most decades, an anniversary like that would be a celebration. This year, it looked more like a protest. Disabled activists and allies gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for the ADA36 March & Rally, not to commemorate a settled victory, but to defend one that is being quietly reopened. That tension, between how far the disability rights movement has come and how fast some of that ground is being contested again, is the right place to start a conversation about who built this movement in the first place.

Because here is what often gets flattened when this history gets told: it wasn’t just built by disabled people. It was built by Black disabled people, working at the exact seam where racial justice and disability justice were never actually two separate movements, even when their stories get told as though they were.

Fannie Lou Hamer is remembered for many things, but especially this sentence: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” What’s remembered less often is that she meant it literally as well as figuratively. Childhood polio left her with a permanent limp. A 1963 jailhouse beating in Winona, Mississippi, left her with kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye that she carried for the rest of her life. And in 1961, a doctor sterilized her without her consent during what was supposed to be a minor tumor removal, a practice so common across the Jim Crow South that Black communities had a name for it: the “Mississippi appendectomy.” Fannie Lou Hamer’s disability wasn’t a footnote to her activism; it was the terrain the state tried to use to break her—and the terrain she turned into testimony instead.

That refusal to let the state’s violence be the final word didn’t end with Hamer. A decade later, that refusal found a new front in Brad Lomax. In 1977, disability rights activists occupied a San Francisco federal building for 26 days, demanding the government finally enforce disability protections under the Rehabilitation Act. The sit-in survived long enough to win because Lomax connected the mostly white disabled protesters with the Black Panthers, who delivered hot meals and supplies every single day of the occupation. Disabled organizer Corbett O’Toole put it plainly afterward: the Black Panthers saved the sit-in. Brad Lomax died at 33, and his name rarely makes it into the version of this story that gets told at anniversaries.

The alliance Brad Lomax built in Oakland didn’t stay in Oakland. Two decades later, it found its clearest legal expression across the country in the case of Lois Curtis, who spent her childhood in and out of institutions and psychiatric hospitals because Georgia had no other category to place her in. In 1995, Atlanta Legal Aid took her case, and in 1999, she became the lead plaintiff in Olmstead v. L.C., the Supreme Court decision that established a legal right for disabled people to live in their communities instead of being warehoused away from them. People in the disability rights movement still describe Olmstead as “disability’s Brown v. Board”. Its lead plaintiff was a Black woman who spent decades “othered” and institutionalized before the law caught up to what she’d known all along: she belonged in the world, not apart from it.

Hamer, Lomax, and Curtis did this work before disability justice had that name. The two builders below gave the movement its language, and they’re still building with it.

Haben Girma became the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School and has spent her career arguing, correctly, that the barrier was never her disability. It was ableism, the assumption that access is a favor rather than a right. As the daughter of Eritrean refugees and a Black disabled woman, she’s one of the sharpest living voices insisting that access isn’t charity work. It’s civil rights work, and it’s overdue.

Where Girma reframed the argument, Leroy Moore built the infrastructure to carry it. Moore founded Krip-Hop Nation and co-founded the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid, building institutions that specifically center Black and Brown disabled artists who get overlooked twice over: once for their disability, once for their race. Moore is still building in real time, which matters because a mausoleum only stays sacred if someone keeps walking back into it, adding names, tending what’s there.

In June 2026, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo arguing that neither the ADA nor Section 504 actually requires states to serve disabled people in the most integrated setting, the exact protection Olmstead established. Legal experts are careful to note that the memo doesn’t overturn the decision. But it signals a retreat from enforcing it, quietly shifting the burden onto individuals and disability rights organizations to defend a right that federal law was supposed to guarantee without a fight.

Days later, Congress introduced the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act (S. 4865 / H.R. 9401), bipartisan legislation that would write the Olmstead protections directly into statute, so they can’t be reinterpreted away by a future memo. The bill is named for Latonya Reeves, a Black disabled woman who was institutionalized as a child in Tennessee and, with help from the Memphis Center for Independent Living, escaped to Denver, where she found support from the Atlantis Community and spent decades helping other disabled people do the same. This is the moment where philanthropy’s role becomes clearest. When federal enforcement retreats, the burden shifts to disability rights organizations, movement lawyers, and community-led groups to defend rights that were supposed to be guaranteed. Whether that defense is possible depends, materially, on whether the funders and donors who moved dollars toward this work in the last cycle are still moving them in the next one.

Borealis Philanthropy’s Disability Inclusion Fund, backed by donors including the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy, opened its 2026 collaborative grant round this spring specifically for U.S.-based groups run by and for disabled people building a more liberatory world free from ableism. Third Wave Fund’s Disability Frontlines Fund was built the same way good movement funding should be: by listening first. Before making a single grant, Third Wave interviewed ten BIPOC disability justice leaders to shape its strategy, and Leroy Moore—the same Leroy Moore still building Krip-Hop Nation today—was one of them. The fund that resulted exists to move money to grassroots BIPOC groups practicing disability justice, not as an afterthought to racial justice funding, but as its own explicit strategy.

This is evidence that when funders ask disabled people of color what they need instead of guessing, real dollars follow. The risk isn’t that this kind of funding doesn’t exist. It’s that pilots and single funding cycles get treated as proof of concept rather than a floor, and the work quietly loses momentum the moment the initial grant cycle ends.

So here are the actual asks:

• Foundations & Donors: If your giving already centers racial justice, look at whether it also centers disability justice, because for Fannie Lou Hamer, Brad Lomax, Lois Curtis, and so many organizers since, those were never two different asks.
• Advocates: Contact your representatives about cosponsoring the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act; a bill only becomes law if people outside the disability community are paying attention to it too.
• Board Members & Donor Advisors: And if you sit on a foundation board or advise a donor-advised fund, ask a concrete question rather than a rhetorical one: which of the funds already doing this work is your portfolio renewing past its first grant cycle?

The ADA turns 36 this year, and we are choosing to celebrate while also demanding more justice, because of the fight that Fannie Lou Hamer, Brad Lomax, Lois Curtis, Haben Girma, and Leroy Moore have carried forward, generation after generation. They’ve done this before, and they’ve never once done it without propelling the rest of us forward, whether we were paying attention or not. The question this Disability Pride Month isn’t whether Black disabled leaders will be remembered. It’s whether philanthropy keeps funding them like the present tense they actually are.