![]() But we also need to be sure we are not coopting their legacies just so we can say fat community is diverse. It's our duty to learn more about them and to recognize them as important to fat history whether or not they were important to the formally organized fat rights groups of their times. There are also the champions of other social justice movements-especially Civil Rights, Black Pride, and the Movement for Black Lives-who were or are fat Black women and femmes. Some of them are notable others are everyday people who touched those around them but were not public figures. Certainly, there are Black women and femmes who fit that bill. Their visibility as fat people is important. Although NAAFA is first-and at 52 years this year, the longest running fat rights organization on earth-we must acknowledge and understand that fat individuals who live unapologetically in a fatphobic society are defying expectations and thereby doing de facto fat rights work that benefits us. ![]() Since receiving that journalist's request, I have been trying to track down anyone who can tell me more about the first Black participants in NAAFA (if you can, please reach out at is recognized as the first fat activist organization. Through recent interviews with people who were around during those years, I have not been able to identify any Black women who were involved in creating the Fat Underground, either. Some of them helped found the Fat Underground in CA. ( Bill and I discussed this history last fall in the NAAFA Webinar Series.) There were Jewish women involved in the early days of NAAFA. Asked now, Bill notes that NAAFA probably should have been doing outreach to Black folx in its early days. NAAFA was founded in NY in 1969 by Bill Fabrey, a young, white, thin man who was motivated by the injustices his fat white wife faced. Black and Jewish women didn't found NAAFA. Months after that Instagram post, a journalist reached out to NAAFA and asked if one of us could write about the Black and Jewish women who founded NAAFA. Fat activism has a much longer history than many people realize. I was born a few years after the fat liberation movement began, and I first heard of the size acceptance movement in the early 1990s. Light and Sonya Renee Taylor? But roots? Not me. Who doesn't want to be included in the company of Juicy D. The Instagrammar in question pointed out that if we are going to say things like "honor Black women & femmes," we should be backing that up by actually knowing fat activist history and naming the names of the people we mean. Some time ago, I was tagged in an Instagram post about remembering that Black fat people are the roots of fat activism. By Tigress Osborn, NAAFA Director of Community Outreach
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