Stormy Stewart

Title

Stormy Stewart (Abstract)

Interviewee/ Narrator

Stormy Stewart

Interviewer

Madelyn Smythia

Date

February 18, 2024

Location of the Interview

Zoom

Length

46 minutes, 4 seconds

Abstract

Stormy Stewart was born in Virginia in 2002. She was born into a military family that moved around a lot as she was growing up. She lived in Virginia, Connecticut, Washington D.C, Maryland, Alabama, New York, and Naples, Italy. She is about to complete her B.A.’s in English and Creative writing at Sewanee: The University of the South and is planning to attend graduate school in New Mexico. Growing up, Stormy discusses how she found community with the quieter kids in her classes who had issues making friends and how that differs from her older sibling. She discusses how her current community today is within the local sorority Kappa Omega in Sewanee, TN. She then goes on to discuss how she receives her news through social media and then does further research. She then discusses how her first interaction with the Black Lives Matter movement was in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to protest police brutality and inequality. She discusses her community’s split reaction to the BLM movement in 2020 using a comparison between the two parts of Virginia she had lived in. She talks about how she joined a few of the 757 BLM Facebook groups and worked to spread information during the major period of demonstrations in 2020. She expressed that she wanted to
go to several of them, but that her family wouldn’t allow it and it wasn’t completely safe for her to do so. She is a supporter of the movement who is still involved in informing others of new developments and is still actively researching what's going on. She states that a lot of the change that has come from the movement has been mainly social and not systemic. She hopes to become a more active voice and participant in the future and remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the movement.