Drew national attention for her opposition to ‘the charity mentality.’
From the Charleston [S.C.] Post and Courier:
Harriet McBryde Johnson, a tenacious, well-known Charleston disability and civil rights attorney, died suddenly Wednesday. She was 50.
South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal said Johnson was a fierce advocate for the disabled, a nationally revered attorney and a titanic figure in state legal history.
Johnson was perhaps best known for her 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story “Unspeakable Truths.” The first-person piece described her journey to Princeton University to debate ethicist Peter Singer over his advocacy for the legalization of selective infanticide of children with disabilities. The cover of the magazine carried a photo of Johnson in her power wheelchair with the headline “Should I have been killed at birth?”
He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.
Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”
Johnson also drew national attention for her opposition to “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics” of the annual Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. She protested the telethon for nearly 20 years.
She was the author of the unconventional memoir Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, a wry exploration of her life in “Cripworld,” and the young adult novel Accidents of Nature, about teens at a summer camp for children with disabilities in the 1970s.
Johnson, who had a congenital neuromuscular disorder, ran a solo law practice in Charleston.
News and Courier profile of Harriet McBryde Johnson is here.
Profile from New Mobility is here.
Late addition: June 7, 2008, obituary from the New York Times is here.