Bettye Travis Passes Away

Former NAAFA president Bettye Travis has passed away at the age of 55 due to cancer. LA Times:

Personal experience led Travis to the conclusion that fat people were "one of the last marginal groups that are still targeted, that it's still OK to make fun of," she told the New York Times in 1999. Having lived through the crude jokes, ostracism and assumptions that "fat" equals "lazy" or "ugly," she set out to change the way society thinks about size.

"We were taught that fat people are stupid or worthless, but we aren't buying that anymore," she told a reporter for the Boston Globe in 1999. "That is what we're hoping to get people to realize, that being fat is not a crime. It's what we are, and we are proud of it."