Justin Dart Jr.

Justin Dart Jr. was born into a wealthy Chicago family and contracted polio at eighteen, losing the use of his legs. A university refused to let him become a teacher because, it said, a man in a wheelchair could not keep order in a classroom, an early lesson in the barriers facing disabled people regardless of their ability. He built a career instead in business, running companies manufacturing goods in Japan and later in Texas, and became wealthy enough to fund disability activism for the rest of his life.

Appalled by conditions he saw in an institution for disabled children in Vietnam in the 1960s, he turned increasingly to advocacy, and in the 1980s, as a Reagan-appointed federal disability official, he travelled to every American state and several territories, holding hearings and gathering firsthand testimony from disabled people about discrimination in employment, transport and public life. The material he collected became key evidence for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and he was present, wearing his trademark cowboy hat, when President George H. W. Bush signed it into law in 1990.

He kept working after the act passed, arguing that a law on paper meant little without enforcement and continued discrimination, and became an outspoken advocate for disabled people's voting rights, urging them to see the ballot as a tool of power rather than charity.

He died in 2002, having been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the year before.