This TED Talk features disability rights activist Judith Human, recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic 2016.

I was born in 1947, a long time ago.

And when I was 18 months old, I had polio.

I was in an iron lung for three months and in and out of the hospital for three years.

Now, we had lots of neighbors in our Brooklyn neighborhood, and some of them were really very helpful for my parents.

Some of them were really afraid of contagion, and they wouldn't even walk in front of our house. They

would literally walk across the street. I think this was a time when my family really began

to realize what disability meant to some people, fear. And it wasn't even a sure thing that I would live at home, although I didn't learn about

this until I was 36 years old. I was having a discussion with my father one night, and he said,

you know, when you were two years old, one of the doctors suggested to your mom and I that

you live in an institution, that they could just go ahead with

their lives and raise their kids and kind of be done with having to deal with all the disability

related things. I didn't believe my father, not because he was a liar, but I had never heard

this story. And my mother, in fact, validated that. She never wanted to tell me.

But in reality, I don't know why I was really surprised by this story. Because when I was five

years old, and my mother, like mothers and fathers all across the United States, was taking me to

school to enroll.

She pushed my wheelchair to the school in walking distance to our house, pulled the wheelchair

up the steps into the school, and we were greeted by the principal, not really greeted,

but the principal said, no, I couldn't come to that school because it wasn't accessible.

But he told us not to worry, because the Board of Education, in fact, would send a teacher to my house.

And they did, for a total of two and a half hours a week.

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