BWAP 2025: Creating Community ~ Mei Hippe

When I think about living a life of protest, I think about something exciting and adrenaline-inducing. I think of marching in the streets and yelling and large-scale mobilizations. I think of big names in history; of icons; of legacy. This is in no small part because of how I imagined the Civil Rights Movement looked. But something I learned in Alabama was how the movement was sustained by community.

People approached strangers at restaurants and asked them to come to marches and protests. They worked behind the scenes, debating ideas and strategies for how to care for each other. The people who made the movement work were not its public faces, but the foot soldiers – people whose names were not publicized or iconized. They were committed to doing the hard work of getting to know each other and building networks of community care and support. This struck me in particular when learning about the Montgomery bus boycott.

Many people know the story of Rosa Parks’ arrest after refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger. What many people don’t know is that this was a planned protest. That night, a woman named JoAnn Robinson, along with three other people, printed over 30,000 leaflets to pass out to Black people in Montgomery, telling them to boycott the buses. Within a few days, Montgomery’s Black citizens started the boycott, organizing a free city-wide carpool using personal vehicles and hearses borrowed from funeral homes for more than a year. The boycott lasted until the Supreme Court declared segregation on buses was unconstitutional and the city of Montgomery complied. This movement and its victory wouldn’t have been possible without the strong community networks in Montgomery’s Black community, created and sustained by the movement’s foot soldiers and allies. They sacrificed for each other and built something beautiful and strong with their sacrifice.

I think there is an ongoing cycle in today’s world. Every now and again, we pause and let ourselves engage with the horrors of other people’s realities – or even our own reality – and get fired up. We may protest or engage in difficult conversations with friends or post something online, but eventually, we use up all of our energy and return to our creature comforts and the places we have privilege. We fall back into the complacency of our daily lives, which revolve around feeling safe and happy. And then the cycle starts again the next time something tragic happens.

It’s easy for anyone to get caught up in this cycle, especially as students. Right now, we can live in academia and focus on homework and exams and spend our days thinking about the good we’ll do and who we’ll become when we graduate. I personally struggle to know when and where to engage; and when it seems like nothing I do really impacts anything, it’s easy to just focus on my own life.

I think the key to breaking this cycle is not building more energy, but building more community. When we witness the suffering of people we are in community with, we engage differently. It ceases to be something that leaves our minds when the news cycle shifts, or something we view as disconnected from ourselves. When we build this kind of community, I think we can find that being happy and being engaged in a life of social justice are not mutually exclusive, because community does not just sustain a movement; it also sustains us. In community, we find care, mutual aid, and support. It is where we learn to be happy even in the midst of adversity.

Pres House is a place of deep love and community care, and I think we can go even deeper. We can do more to talk with each other about the reality of race in our lives, and we can sustain that conversation for more than just a news cycle. But it will take all of us choosing to break the silence, lean in, and love each other – even when it’s hard.

Mei Hippe (she/her) is a senior studying health promotion and health equity and global health.

Photo: The BWAP team at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.