Former Mooresville resident Kami Ariella Barker, a 33-year-old former lawyer, author and professor of law, was crowned 2014 Ms. Wheelchair North Carolina on April 5 in Asheville.
Barker is a graduate of Mooresville High School who has a business degree and doctorate in law from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. On June 11, she will return to Mooresville High as the featured speaker for 6 p.m. baccalaureate services. The public is invited.
After graduating from law school, Barker worked as a litigation attorney for New York City and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, defending the city in employment discrimination and labor law actions.
After several years, she took a sabbatical from that job to move to Israel for four years, becoming fluent in Hebrew while practicing law. And 16 years after leaving North Carolina originally, Barker decided to return. Barker, who lives in Cornelius, will begin teaching at the Charlotte School of Law in the fall.
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Meanwhile, Barker decided to compete for Ms. Wheelchair North Carolina because, as a child with a disability and big dreams, she had no role model to look up to. She said she was treated differently throughout her childhood due to people’s ignorance about disabilities.
Because she became confined to a wheelchair the same year the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted, very few Mooresville town and school facilities were wheelchair-accessible – something she fought to change.
“The high school didn’t even have one bathroom I could use, and my band class had to meet in the old math classrooms because there was no elevator to access the band room” Barker remembers. “Ultimately, with the ADA and some amazing teachers and administrators, we got the schools to be accessible, and the only thing that made me feel different were the students.
“That’s what I hope going back and speaking will hopefully rectify — discrimination in its realist form, mistreatment. Kids are mean. We all know that. Not just to kids with disabilities, but certainly to us, because we are an easy target.
“What they don’t realize is they could be picking on the future attorney to Mayor Bloomberg, law professor, world traveler, Ms Wheelchair NC and possibly Ms Wheelchair America.”
Nevertheless, Barker noted that “it’s great to be back at the birthplace of my dreams. Mooresville and MHS are where I began to dream big and work hard at it and have fantastic teachers and administration, who encouraged me to do so.
“While I may not have sat at the popular table in the lunch room, I had incredible friends, who supported me and knew I could and would achieve whatever I put my mind to,” she said. “I am so humbled by MHS’s offer to let me speak to the class of 2014 to let them know that no matter how underestimated they may be, if they are determined and work with all their might toward achieving their dreams, like I did, they can do anything.”
While she had never had a role model as a child, a teenage Barker met a woman with the same disability of Spinal Muscular Atrophy that she has. Barker described her as “a beautiful business woman, married with a daughter, and a former Ms. Wheelchair NC. Finally, I met a role model, who gave me the courage to decide to go off to college alone.”
A few months ago, Barker was on Facebook and noticed an article about how the NY Fashion Week publication asked Ms. Wheelchair NY to participate as a model in one of its runway fashion shows.
“I remembered that beautiful woman I once knew as a teenager and thought she would want me to be a part of this changing time and help the south change too,” Barker shared. “So, I immediately looked up Ms. Wheelchair NC, and applied that week. I never expected to win and was so honored to win and hope to be a role model to children and other women with disabilities the way that woman was for me.”
Barker shared that she hopes with this title she can “fight to make the disabled community assimilated, something the ADA intended but has failed to succeed in accomplishing.”
During the Ms. Wheelchair NC competition, Barker was judged in the categories of personal accomplishments and achievements since the onset of her disability of Spinal Muscular Atrophy at the age of three; strong communication skills, specifically when dealing with the media, politicians, peers, and political activists; public relation skills; past accomplishments in the advocacy for persons with disabilities; self-confidence and poise; motivation; initiative; and creativity.
The Ms. Wheelchair North Carolina Pageant is a non-profit disability advocacy organization that seeks “to recognize the achievements of wheelchair-dependent women.”
In her role, Barker will be an official spokeswoman for the disability community in North Carolina.
She will represent North Carolina at the Ms. Wheelchair America Pageant in Long Beach, Calif. on Aug. 4-10.