“People are realizing and shouting and marching and demanding. They’re not forgetting. I think that’s the most important part.” 
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

In her novel, The Hate You Give, Angie Thomas talks about a young Black woman's journey to activism after witnessing her friend get killed by the police. Starr deals with the weight of being Black in a majority white school and hast o reconcile who she is around her white friends versus who she is in her neighborhood. The Hate You Give has been dubbed "the black lives matter" book because it centers a teenager. 
Much like the student sit-ins of the 1960s, the current Movement for Black Lives has seen a huge surge of young people who support and are involved with the movement. Starr is an example of that, a teen for whom activism did not come easy, but was inevitable. 

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In the fall of 2015 students at the University of Missouri protested racial injustice on campus. Ultimately they were able to oust the president of their campus.

The story is always, however, told from the point of view of the football players who refused to play that weekend. The young Black women behind the scenes and at the frontlines, however, must not be forgotten.

But why do so many Black and other women of color on college campuses choose to take on activism? Why add the hustle of organizing when they could just be students? Below are their responses.

 "I think I've had experiences of you know going to class like in high school, going to class, and you know playing sports but I feel like this constant feeling of being excluded. I was just tired of that. I wanted to feel like I belonged." -Tiana

"I don't know I felt like a pull. I couldn't go on with my daily life." -Sasha

• "I don't know how explain it... It was really important to me in the sense that I felt like I had to do it. Like I didn't have a choice in a way. It's too important to let it die down and let it go away because I feel like things aren't going to get better from here. So if nobody's doing anything about it, what's going to happen? -Jasmine 

Not only did activism feel like "a pull" to these young women, it also served as a space for sisterhood, support, and joy:

"Right before [a white supremacist event on campus] the formation video came out and I will never ever ever ever ever forget planning for that event and being in a room full of women of color and like watching the formation video [voice gets excited]." - Nami

OK LADIES NOW LET'S GET [IN]FORMATION

"It's fulfilling in the sense that there is a lot of camaraderie and love that. I don't think you get that, especially on a PWI-campus. You don't get it from the administration, you don't get it from your classmates, you don't even get it from your professors half the time. So in that sense it can be very very fulfilling." -Jasmine