Stacey Milbern

Stacey Park Milbern (May 19, 1987 – May 19, 2020) was a South Korean and American activist for disability justice, advocating for fair treatment of those with disability in the United States. She served on the North Carolina Commission for the Blind and the Statewide Independent Living Council, as well as the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities under U.S. president Barack Obama. She also helped establish Disability History and Awareness Month in North Carolina. In March 2020, she engaged in mutual aid to provide food and medical care to homeless and disabled people in the San Francisco Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic before dying from surgical complications related to kidney cancer in May of that year.

Early life

Milbern was born at the U.S. Army Hospital in Seoul on May 19, 1987, with ullrich congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD). She was mixed-race, her father being White American and her mother being South Korean. She grew up in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in a military family, as her father was in the United States Army. As a child she relied on her family as caregivers, but when she began to identify as queer, she feared her parents' judgment and planned to move out, a choice made more difficult by her need for help in daily activities such as eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom. She attended Massey Hill Classical High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina.