Shakeena Bradley · Sewanee: Black Lives Matter Oral History Project

Interviewee/ Narrator

Shakeena Bradley

Interviewer

Lyberti Bradley

Date

November 30, 2023

Location of the Interview

Zoom

Length

34 minutes, 40 seconds

Abstract

Shakeena Bradley was born in Brewton, AL where she found community in her church, while she currently resides in Brewton, she has lived in several places in the Southern United States including Tennessee, Atlanta, GA, and Montgomery, AL. She has also done her fair share of travel internationally and domestically with Toronto, Canada being one of her favorite places that she has visited. She attended Duke University for her undergraduate degree and greatly enjoyed her time there. We continued the interview by discussing her connection to the Black Lives Matter movement.
In her time at Duke, she was a part of the Black Student Alliance or BSA and Black Dance. These were spaces on campus where she found community and was able to express and celebrate her blackness. At that time, the university was one of the first to participate in the emerging social media platform, Facebook, she also remembers using Myspace and Black Planet. These were her first introductions to social media and she still uses Facebook to this day. She also stated that she has a long-standing relationship with Yahoo News and she uses it as one of her news sources in conjunction with her research.
After providing contextual information about the start of the movement from the interviewer, she discussed her opinion on the movement. She feels that the movement was a necessity, as black people in the United States are still waiting for justice and systematic equality. The narrator also spoke to the awareness that the movement was able to bring to civil injustices, especially on social media. She also mentioned the educational aspect of the movements citing its ability to inform people about America’s long history of discrimination and outright racism that many were mis- and/or uninformed on.
Shakeena is trying to “regather” her hope for the future of race relations in the United States as at the height of the movement’s online discourse she felt it was futile to try and convince her counterparts that black lives were important and valuable.