Oral History Interview with Victoria Bradley

Title: Oral History Interview with Victoria Bradley
Interviewee: Victoria Bradley
Interviewer: Lyberti Bradley
Description: Victoria Bradley of Atlanta, Georgia was interviewed by Lyberti Bradley, Sewanee student, on November 28, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included discussing Victoria Bradley's experience in LA during riots after the death of Trayvon Martin. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.
Transcript: 0:14 Lyberti Bradley: Okay, are you ready now?

0:18 Victoria Bradle...: Yes.

0:20 Lyberti Bradley: Great.

0:21 Victoria Bradle...: Can you hear me better?

0:22 Lyberti Bradley: Yes, ma'am, I can.

0:24 Victoria Bradle...: Okay.

0:26 Lyberti Bradley: It is Lyberti Bradley from Sewanee, the University of South. It is November 28th, 2023 at 6:23 PM and I am with,

0:40 Victoria Bradle...: Victoria Bradley, and I am from Atlanta, Georgia.

0:45 Lyberti Bradley: Thank you Victoria Bradley for being here. Okay. Ms. Victoria, where are you originally from?

0:53 Victoria Bradle...: I'm from Brewton, Alabama.

0:59 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And where do you live currently?

1:02 Victoria Bradle...: Currently I live in Atlanta, Georgia.

1:05 Lyberti Bradley: All right. And how is where you live currently different from where you were raised?

1:16 Victoria Bradle...: It's different in a lot of ways. Mainly the demographics are different and the social kind of environment is different. I don't know if you want me to elaborate or not.

1:51 Lyberti Bradley: I do, please.

1:54 Victoria Bradle...: Okay. So where I'm from is a predominantly white town, small town, very small. And the social climate is more of subtle racism, I guess from, let me take back the word subtle, it's a little more than that. Right. Pretty much there's just this underlying racism or racial tone to everything there versus living in Atlanta. This actually makes me think about how similar they are living in Atlanta. The demographics are very different in that it's predominantly black and obviously that makes for a slightly different social undertone, right, because you're interacting more with people that, in my case, look like me.

3:47 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. I was going to ask you that, but yeah,

3:54 Victoria Bradle...: However, this sort of, it's changing here. So I'm going to say that it's changing in the sense that of course, we know that gentrification is happening here and where many, many communities of black people are being priced out of living in the city of Atlanta, among other things. Yeah.

4:46 Lyberti Bradley: Alright.

4:47 Victoria Bradle...: It's a very broad question, so there's a lot to say about it, but I'll leave it there.

5:02 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. I mean, you can elaborate as much or as little as you like.

5:07 Victoria Bradle...: I believe, I'll leave it right there. I may be able to dive back into it in another question.

5:20 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. So you say, Brewton, is a predominantly white town, so where did you find community in that space?

5:35 Victoria Bradle...: To be honest, mainly church.

5:39 Lyberti Bradley: Okay.

5:45 Victoria Bradle...: Church was really the only place where I could see a lot of people that basically look like me or shared a similar background as me and that I could relate to on some level because at school and even work as an adult, there was not a lot of people that I could relate to. So yeah, family and church. At church, we looked out for each other and support each other in the best way we could.

6:49 Lyberti Bradley: And in talking about church, what denomination are you, if you still currently practice the faith and what's the name of the church that you went to?

7:05 Victoria Bradle...: I'm nondenominational and I went to one church here once but, I don't have a church here.

7:13 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And by here you mean Atlanta, correct?

7:18 Victoria Bradle...: Right, Atlanta I have no church and in Brewton, I went to Christ Kingdom Ministry Center, which happens to be my dad's church.

7:39 Lyberti Bradley: And what's your dad's role at the church?

7:42 Victoria Bradle...: He is the pastor.

7:49 Lyberti Bradley: Understanding that you're not in church in Atlanta and church was a big part of the community you had as a child, where do you find community? Now?

8:03 Victoria Bradle...: That's interesting because it's been a lot harder to find community here, but at my current job and at the job that I had before, now there are groups of people that I've become friends with. I would say friends and I have a sort of community there. It is very loose, but the community, none the loose. And that's pretty much what I have here, which is interesting considering the fact that demographically, there are lots of people that share my background here.

9:19 Lyberti Bradley: And speaking of finding your community at work, what do you do?

9:26 Victoria Bradle...: So I work for a law firm, a records and information management specialist slash assistant to the assistant administrator of the office.

9:54 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And how did you get into this job?

10:03 Victoria Bradle...: Honest answer, is that my sister helped me get this job because she works there as a legal secretary.

10:13 Lyberti Bradley: Okay, that's great. And a couple more questions before we get into the nitty gritty. So who inspires you and why?

10:29 Victoria Bradle...: I think a lot of my inspiration really comes from my kids.

10:39 Lyberti Bradley: And how many children do you have?

10:42 Victoria Bradle...: Four.

10:44 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And how old are they?

10:47 Victoria Bradle...: Four children. Children ages 21, 18, 14, and three.

11:04 Lyberti Bradley: Wow, okay. That's a big gap at the end.

11:10 Victoria Bradle...: Yes, it's

11:13 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And why do they inspire you?

11:21 Victoria Bradle...: Well, I see them as sort of in different ways. So they all kind of represent different parts of me at different times in my life. I really see it. But interestingly enough of they always do a little more than I did at the time that they represent for me. So that's inspiring because it's so many. I feel like I have just really a lot of different avenues of myself that I've always wanted to explore more. And I feel like they definitely are sort of branches of that in their own ways, of course. So I love seeing them go farther than I did in certain areas of my life without even having them, having to push them as hard.

13:02 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And what culture outside of your own do you feel influences you the most or that interests you the most?

13:15 Victoria Bradle...: I don't see that on here, but really honestly, I'm a glutton for knowledge. So almost every culture I'm interested in outside of my own, I really don't have a particular culture that I'm just not fascinated by. Really anything that I hear from any culture always interests me and I always want to know more.

14:14 Lyberti Bradley: Just before we start asking questions about the topic at hand today, which is Black Lives Matter and the movement therein, there is questions that I'm showing you on this document, but I will likely go outside of some of these questions and if you don't feel comfortable answering any of those questions, you don't have to reply.

14:41 Victoria Bradle...: Okay.

14:44 Lyberti Bradley: So the very first question I want to ask you is how do you get your news? What sources do you use to receive news?

15:09 Victoria Bradle...: Well, I have all these apps that my children have just to follow them on social media, so mainly social media apps, but also I read articles, I look up articles on Google. That's about it.

15:52 Lyberti Bradley: And I wanted to ask, and you don't have to answer, but how old are you and how has that impacted your experience with social media?

16:12 Victoria Bradle...: I'm 39.

16:15 Lyberti Bradley: Okay.

16:19 Victoria Bradle...: So social media really sort of got popular when I was in college, and so sometimes it can really be overkill in terms of receiving a bunch of information at once. It can be overwhelming. And so at times it makes me turn it off. So I'll go days, weeks, even months or years with certain apps that I don't go on there.

17:07 Lyberti Bradley: So being that you are 39, I believe that makes you a millennial, and I know that when you're in college, Facebook and I think Twitter would've just started coming around about that time. So would you say that you've been one, do you have Facebook and two, are you a pretty active user?

17:41 Victoria Bradle...: I haven't, but I barely use it.

17:46 Lyberti Bradley: Okay.

17:48 Victoria Bradle...: Yeah.

17:49 Lyberti Bradley: So is there any app in particular that you spend a good amount of time on?

18:01 Victoria Bradle...: This is embarrassing, but I'd like to watch the little shorts on Snapchat.

18:08 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And would you say that there are some news type stories on these Snapchat shorts?

18:19 Victoria Bradle...: There are.

18:22 Lyberti Bradley: Okay.

18:23 Victoria Bradle...: It's all kind of news and I mean, I would say it's mostly entertainment news, but they're political and there's political news and current events and stuff too.

18:46 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. Well, I asked you all those questions to put into context kind of where you were and how you first encountered the Black Lives Matter movement.

19:13 Victoria Bradle...: So I think, did Black Lives Matter start before Covid because I didn't really have any kind of social media , so that's the thing, I don't watch a lot of news because it's overwhelming current events and stuff, it's easily overwhelming for me. So for my first encounter, I will say it's during Covid. It's like when I saw it really coming to the forefront and just seeing a lot of that on my feed.

20:24 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. Well, just to give you a little bit of a historical background, the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2016, so that's about four years prior to the beginning of Covid, which I guess we would say is 2020.
20:49 It was a much smaller movement then. And it really kicked off with a tweet made by one of his leaders named Alicia Garza. And she wrote a letter after the death of Trayvon Martin, and it started from a quotation and it says the post itself is entitled A Love Letter to Black People. And then the quotation that kind of gives us the name of the movement says "Black people, I love you, I love us, our lives matter." And so that's how we got the phrase Black Lives Matter. So really we can say that the movement started with the death of Trayvon Martin, but it was also part of other what you would call black liberation movements that were much smaller and didn't have as much national impact
22:10 Trayvon Martin's death. That being said, what is your opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement and is it any way personal to you?

22:35 Victoria Bradle...: So that's a heavy question, right? Because obviously I understand the impact of saying Black Lives Matter, right? Because historically we haven't, even as people from this country, the United States, we haven't even recognized as citizens for the majority of the lifetime of this country. However, we laid the groundwork and the foundation of this country. So the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement is strong, I say for me because finally someone had the courage to say it out loud and it's sort of like the elephant in the room because for everything that this country depends on black bodies for they so quickly dismiss us as human beings. So yeah, that's it.

24:23:00 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. So I don't have Zoom premium unfortunately, so I only have 10 minutes left, so I'm going to ask you a couple more questions. See, we can follow up if you would like.

24:35:00 Victoria Bradle...: Okay, I'll try to hurry.

24:38:00 Lyberti Bradley: So I would ask, what's your community's reaction to Black Lives Matter? The movement,

25:12:00 Victoria Bradle...: So I actually was in California whenever people started rioting for Trayvon Martin and I actually walked onto a riot at that time and had to turn around and flee very quickly. But just to see the police force there with their shields and wands and guns and stuff was kind of sobering, I guess for me that made me realize what a big deal this was. However, I returned to Alabama where I feel like a lot of people there are sort of stagnant in terms of, I mean, just because we're outnumbered here there or they are outnumbered there. And so it is much more quiet, I don't know how to describe the feeling there, it's just kind of resolve to defeat in some ways. And then here in Atlanta, it just seems like it's a for-profit type movement, even among my community, we support black businesses and anything like that, but it's just about the money and not necessarily about what it really means in my opinion. So yeah, those are the three different kind of viewpoints that I've had concerning the movement.

28:14:00 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. So in these last, I'll ask you two more questions and then we can close out. But in your opinion, post the peak of the movement, has Black Lives Matter been successful?

28:39:00 Victoria Bradle...: No, sadly, I don't think it has been for all the recognition that it's gotten, there really hasn't been any reparations. I mean, reparative things done to, I would say I would venture to say really that it's kind of spurred the underlying hatred really, that this country really has for us. And I'm not blaming the movement. I think it was vital and necessary, but I think that it kind of sadly shows what's been underneath for so long.

29:57:00 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And then my last question to you is what do you see as the future of one race relations in the United States and then the future of Black Lives Matter movement? And I know that might be a lot, but

30:19:00 Victoria Bradle...: Okay. Yeah, but I'll try to answer as well as I can in this two minutes. I don't necessarily, I don't know, I don't want to say sound defeated myself, but to me it's like dealing with a narcissist. You have to cut them off cold. And I feel like America is the narcissist, right? And until we literally cut them off, either by way of the black dollar or moving out of here, will they really hear us?

31:25:00 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. Well, I want to say thank you for your time and thank you for answering my questions.

31:36:00 Victoria Bradle...: You're welcome.

31:37:00 Lyberti Bradley: I hope you have a great rest of your evening.

31:40:00 Victoria Bradle...: Thank you. Goodnight.

31:43:00 Lyberti Bradley: Goodnight.

Part of Victoria Bradley