Nineteen Fifty-Six Vol.4 Issue 2

a food pantry, clothing back and basketball court where
they host community activities.
There’s also a community garden where they harvest and
give away food, even allowing people to have their own
plots, though it is currently closed due to construction.
Doughty-Walker said as long as she could remember
her family has had a “servant’s heart” and a passion for
the Tuscaloosa community, specifically those who were
underserved. She said they would use what they had as
a resource before they could carry out their ministry
through the shelter.
She said before they created the shelter, there would be
nights when her dad would open their house for people to
sleep overnight when it was too cold outside.
“So, it’s kind of evolved from helping people at home into
this massive ministry of God is doing through us for the
community,” Doughty-Walker said.
Sheyann Webb-Christburg is also no stranger to serving
her community and being a mother to many. From Selma,
she is now primarily based in Montgomery, Alabama, and
is known as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “smallest freedom
fighter.”
While describing her proximity to the Civil Rights
movement, Webb-Christburg emphasized the need for
courage and how our Civil Rights leaders sacrificed so
much during the movement.
“You have to have courage, and they had to not only have
courage but they made a lot of sacrifices,” she said. “People
left their homes; they left their children.”
She understood the need to do what was right even if it
was something she did not like. She said it took “a great
deal of determination and commitment.”
Still determined and committed, Webb-Christburg
started a youth program called KEEP Productions in 1980,
which still exists today, making it 42 years old.
“I started my own youth development program to help
young people to build self-esteem, to inspire and motivate
them, and to really impress upon them based on my
experiences that they did matter,” she said.
Christburg said she considers herself a mother of the
community— a mother of change, who has been able to
help create a ripple effect of change through her program.
“I have seen the reality of it in many ways when over
thousands of young little girls and little boys and they’ve
moved on to do positive things to become educated,”
she said. “And I still see them as adults now, and they are
change agents in their own rightful age wherever they
are.”
Yet, in the conversation about “mothers of the
community,” some people are overlooked and left out
of the conversation, specifically those in the LGBTQ+
community.
Lauren Jacobs, a UA alum and assistant director of Magic
City Acceptance Center, said she doesn’t think LGBTQ+
people are uplifted when they should be, in general, let
alone in conversations of community engagement and
even within the LGBTQ+ community, there are “mothers
of the community” who have had significant impacts on
history who are at times ignored from the conversation
like Martha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans women
of color who were pivotal figures in the Stonewall Riots.
“If we’re making a really inclusive understanding of
what [mothers of the community] means, does it include
trans women? Does it uplift BIPOC trans women? Does
it celebrate— not just like, accept, but actually celebrate
Black and brown, queer, and trans folks? Not enough, no,”
she said.
Nabila Lovelace, a writer, poet and instructor
in the University’s gender and race studies
department, challenged the title of “mothers of
the community” and instead offered “caretakers
of the community” because a crux of community
work is not done by a singular group of people
but by the intergenerational connection of elders,
queer spaces and children.
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