Oral History Interview with Uche Bean

Title

Oral History Interview with Uche Bean

Interviewee

Uche Bean

Interviewer

Lyberti Bradley

Description

Uche Bean of Birmingham, Alabama was interviewed by Lyberti Bradley, Sewanee student, on November 30, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included discussing Bean’s parents support of the Black Liberation movement. 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

0:00 Lyberti Bradley: Record. Okay, so this is Lyberti Bradley. The time is 4:52 PM Eastern It is or Central. My bad. And it is November 30th, 2023 on a Thursday. And I am with

0:22 Uche Bean : Uche.

0:23 Lyberti Bradley: And you are from?

0:25 Uche Bean : I am from Birmingham, Alabama, and I served as a deputy director for the Division of Social Justice and Regional Equity for the mayor's office in the city of Birmingham.

0:36 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And where are you from originally? Birmingham?

0:40 Uche Bean : I'm from Birmingham. My mother is from Nigeria, hence the name Uche. But yes, I'm born and raised in Birmingham, have spent a majority of my life here.

0:51 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And how would you say, since you still live in Birmingham, how would you say it is different now that you're an adult than when you were growing up?

1:08 Uche Bean : I mean, maybe I'm a little biased because I get to look directly at how things are changing and growing from a perspective of municipal government. But, I really think that Birmingham has grown immensely in the past, I'll say decades from when I was a kid. Even just how the city looks, and is structured ; me knowing the history of the city, things are definitely different now. So I'm very appreciative of the fact I've gotten to see Birmingham transform in my mind.

1:43 Lyberti Bradley: Okay, that's really cool. I guess my experience is a little different because I'm from Brewton, but I'm not there all the time. So mean, I get to see how it changes periodically, but not over the long haul. So where would you say you found community as a child?

2:08 Uche Bean : So my father is actually what people consider an activist. He's also a Black Panther, very politically engaged and civically engaged. And so really my community started as a very young child. My father was also a part of the New African movement, which really was the predecessor for all of the Black Lives and the movement for Black Lives. So he's always been very black centered and centric in culture. And so he actually in the eighties changed his name to a more Afrocentric name. He used to be called Marlon Walker, and he changed his name to Kamal Africa, really to highlight what he considered to be his roots. And so community for me started off as hanging out in community in the areas where black folks were central, we're in Birmingham. So Birmingham has always been, I'll say in the most recent history, a black city. Currently it's over 70% black, one of the blackest cities in the country outside of Detroit.
3:20 And so for me, community has always just been in spaces where I consider blackness to be top of the line. So we were always out in community events. I've always been with him whenever he was advocating for certain people to run for office, walking around, knocking on doors. I mean, that started for me as a young child. I think he ran for office the first time that I can recall. I think I was probably like eight. And then of course just being at different community events that were based in blackness, Kwanza, that's just always been community. Being here locally at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, I was always there. So I've always been in community and that's how people have known me because of his activism and his advocacy for what he considered issues that by far affect black communities and brown communities and people of color or people whose socioeconomic standards are low or in poverty.

4:26 Lyberti Bradley: Okay, that's really interesting. The majority of people I've spoken to are family members, and so a lot of people find community at church or at school. But it's very interesting to know that your community started with blackness at the center, and I think that's going to be really helpful to this interview. It's going to provide a lot. You'll have more context about what I'm talking about. So where do you find community today?

5:02 Uche Bean : Actually, in the same places I was really just, in my opinion, fortunate and now in my role, I found it the same places now, but I'm able to essentially reconnect with those same spaces and I guess the generations that are now taking up those spaces and blackness. But now in today's time, I think it's become more diverse. So not only is it blackness, but we have L-G-B-T-Q spaces, spaces of non-binary intersectionality. I mean there's just so many indigenous spaces. Things have transformed when it comes to the space of what social justice and what activism looks like. And so fortunately, again, in my role, I am allowed one to have, maybe I'll say my predecessor, my dad helped me understand those spaces. So I've been really open. And so when I am in those certain areas where I'm dealing with people of different cultural background, I have more of an open perspective.
6:06 I actually just as far you mentioned church, I grew up in a Christian home with my grandparents, but my father and I practiced Islam and my mother was Buddhist. So I feel comfortable in diverse faith backgrounds. I feel comfortable culturally in different spaces because when we were part of the Islam community, we were part of both the nation and the world community. So we found people from all types of backgrounds. My father would take me and I would be around our East Indian brothers and sisters and Hindu celebrations. Again, my mom was Buddhist, so that had me around people, API people before they were called API. So I got the opportunity to hang around a lot of different cultures that I think a lot of people haven't been allowed to be at because the perspective was different. So now in my role, I get to really be engulfed in that space.
7:06 So community, I found it in the same space. I found it as a child, but now I think as an adult I'm able to actually appreciate it more and understand it more and understand the nuance to why it's so important to really highlight and embrace all of those cultures. We give voice to people that have not been allowed to be in certain spaces because of really just people not being open to allowing those voices or perspective because they knew that a change and a shift would happen. And also the necessity of equity, like being equitable. It's one thing to be equal, which you are providing everyone the access, but what if that access does not fit them? So understanding equity has been a huge part of my role, and that's where I find community, understanding, advocating, being empathetic, and also just being extremely open to sharing space with people that are not allowed in certain rooms or in conversation.

8:16 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. And I'll ask you one more question about your background and then we'll get into the questions about Black Lives Matter. So you mentioned your current role. Could you tell me how you got there?

8:28 Uche Bean : Really funny story, actually, I was living in Texas and I was with my former partner, my ex. And so we were living in Texas, and I'm from Birmingham, but I was living in Texas. And so I know that we had a former administration under the former mayor of Birmingham. His name was William Bell, or is William Bell, he's still living, but he was the former mayor. And so I remember seeing someone announce their candidacy for Mayor of Birmingham, and it was a young man named Randall. And I called my dad from, I was in Texas, I called him and he's here in Birmingham. And I was like, "Hey Dad, who is Randall?" I didn't know who he was. And he was like, "Oh, he's a school board member." And I was like, "Oh, okay, cool." I said, "Yeah, he just announced that he's running for mayor." He had announced a whole year ahead of the primary election or the initial election.
9:29 And my dad was like, "Oh yeah, he's not going to win." And I was like, oh, okay. And at that point, and this was probably in 2016, yeah, 2016, I saw his following on social media and then I looked at everyone else's following in that was also that had announced or that was looking to run for mayor, and none of them had the initial following that he did. So as a millennial, I see that and I'm like, oh, whoa, this guy, to have that type of following and we're talking seven years ago is it kind of sparked something in me. And so I told my dad, I was like, I think you're wrong. I actually think that he's going to win or he's going to get in the runoff. And so he was like, ah, no. So he was skeptical. So long story short, of course Mayor Wolfen wins and he becomes the youngest mayor, which that was another thing that piqued my interest was that he was a young man, which traditionally I had never seen anyone in their thirties with an actual chance run for office.
10:39 That was something that hit me like, oh man, this guy, not only is he young, but he has a real chance and he's running a really different type of campaign, which that's why I felt like pushed him over the edge, that obviously he was doing outreach, but he was also using data and impact, and he was, again, he was running it. We saw Barack Obama run a campaign and that just hit me. And I knew for a fact that there was going to be something different. So he wins, and over that time period from a thousand miles away, I was online one of his advocates online, literally arguing with people on social media about why this man should win and be the next mayor. That was fun, got blocked by a few people. That was real fun. But anyway, so a year he gets in the office, and I think I saw the announcement where he was like, Hey, I got my transition team and I'm asking people, if you feel like you can add value to this administration, let me know, send your resume.
11:43 Literally it was a shot out of nowhere, just like, Hey, literally I think my email and I wish I could pull it up or something instead, I don't know how I can help. I've never done government. My background had primarily been in banking and nonprofit. I had no idea what anything dealing with government or politics. I had no idea, but I was just like, Hey, I don't know what I could do, but you have really inspired me and I really want to help. I really want to be a part of this. I really want to do something. And so here's my resume. Boom. So that was it. That was pretty much it. And initially because of my financial background, I think that they thought that I would be well put in the economic development department, but I actually just didn't want to do that. I didn't feel like that was where I wanted to go at that time.
12:43 And so they came back around and said, Hey, we're looking to, we're playing around with some ideas and we're going to start a division of social justice. And this came out of his transition plan, which really focused on what I think over a hundred or three. It was a lot of people, a thousand community members, and he had an actual team, a transition team that identified issues in Birmingham as it stood in the day of his election. So one of the reports was a social justice report. And so I went and reviewed the report, did some research, created a presentation, and I gave it to, I sent it to his chief of staff and his chief advisor, and they got my stuff. They knew my dad and the history there and how I had been around. And I got an interview. And then it really started from there.
13:40 And they had other team members that weren't necessarily dedicated to the vision of social justice, but they had other team members that really touched social justice issues like LGBTQ liaison, a cultural preservation, so many things. And they put us together and we became a team. And we just started really becoming the advocates in that space, looking at things from a social justice lens and also providing voice to community members that, like I said before, have been not allowed to speak about certain things and issues. So that's where, that's the story. And I've been in the city or with the city government and with the mayor's office for a little over five years now.

14:22 Lyberti Bradley: Okay, that's really cool. I used to have a lot of interest in government, but then I realized I might like lab better. I don't know if I can do that many people every day.

14:35 Uche Bean : Yeah.

14:38 Lyberti Bradley: So I'll ask you some specific questions about the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, this first one will seem very specific, but it'll make sense as we continue. So you mentioned your use of social media. When did you first encounter social media and what year was it, or how old were you?

15:01 Uche Bean : Oh, that was such a good question. Oh my god, I'm getting old. I want to say probably 20 years ago, probably 2000 and maybe over 20 years ago, 2000 or 2001, 2002, 2003, something like that, right after the millennium, right after 2000, and that was MySpace and Black Planet. I had a Black Planet page, a MySpace page. I had all the pages, but MySpace was probably the most popular. And then Black Planet, oh my gosh, these are some old websites, my goodness. But anyway, I had those and I was kind of different than people in my neighborhood. So I grew up in a very black neighborhood here in Birmingham, but I went to a predominantly white private school here. So we had a computer lab, and so we were able to access stuff. So I remember having a MySpace, I had a computer at home too, so we had Dial-up, internet, and I had MySpace and Black Planet in 2005.
16:15 I was a junior, or no, sophomore. I was a sophomore in high school, and a person came, we were in a computer lab, and I totally remember the day I found out what Facebook was. This guy was in the lab, he was a senior, and he was like, have y'all heard of Facebook? And I was like, what is that? It's like a social media, and I don't even know if that's what they called it back then, but it was like, it's an online website where you can add people and stuff. And up to that point, Facebook had only been allowed for people with .edu addresses. So if you were in the university, you could get a Facebook. No one else got a Facebook. So I felt really cool because my school had, we had our own email addresses for my school. It was a private school, so they were prepping us for when we got to college.
17:16 And so I had a whatever my school email address.edu or something like that. So I was able to make, and Facebook also was only permitted for, you had to get invited, so you couldn't just get on facebook.com and go make a page. You had to get invited by someone that was already on Facebook. And so a senior invited me to Facebook. So I was one of the first few people that I knew with a Facebook account, which means it didn't get used often because I didn't have any friends that were on there outside of at school. So those are the first couple of our first few social media. So I started Facebook and literally at its super infancy, there was still a guy's face right there at Facebook. It was real funny. And so now to see it changed, I mean, almost 20 years later, I'll have my 20th anniversary of Facebook around this time next year, which is crazy. So yeah,

18:17 Lyberti Bradley: That's interesting that you say around the early two thousands. I was born in 2002, so I'm 21, and I'm also a private school kid. I went to the Alabama School of Math and Science, and I boarded there from my sophomore year to my senior year. We didn't have a private .edu account, but we had our own Gmail. We had used Microsoft that little space to do our emails and stuff. But I find it very interesting that you had access to an EDU, so you got to see the early progression of social media. And I feel like a big part of the Black Lives Matter movement is the utilization of social media to spread awareness and information. And we've talked a lot about that in our class. We even went through a little run through of how we got from Facebook to where we are now. And I just thought that's really interesting that you bring it up because the majority of the people I've spoken to for this interview are either millennials or right before millennials. So they were maybe 20 or so when they got Facebook, and they didn't use it very often. So I just found that really interesting.

19:50 Uche Bean : I was a teenager. I was like 15 when I got on Facebook.

19:55 Lyberti Bradley: I don't think, I'm trying to think. When I got my Facebook,

19:59 Uche Bean : I got a Facebook before I started driving. That's how I know. Yeah,

20:05 Lyberti Bradley: I got a Facebook specifically for school because we had our own school Facebook group, and I had to have one to see all the announcements and stuff. And now I think about it. I never use it unless I'm looking at other people's stuff, but I use it myself. So a question I wanted to ask you is how do you feel your office interacted with people during and after the death of George Floyd in particular? Did you guys have any interaction or did you have any interaction with the Black Lives Matter movement?

20:51 Uche Bean : So that's a really fun story. So after the murder of George Floyd, of course, this is still the early stages of the pandemic. So we had actually been told to leave the office because it happened that summer and we had been asked to get out, I think everything started in March. I think we were actually, I think we had been told to leave maybe a month before April. So the senior director, Denise Gilmore called me and the other deputy director, Josh Coleman, who also is the L-G-B-T-Q liaison, and she said, Hey, we need to come meet in the office. So we're in there masked up. And she was like, we can't just sit around. We need to, because we had been seeing a lot of protests, not only nationally, but locally here in Birmingham. Birmingham is a historically civil rights city. And so we saw a lot of individual protesting, and we had actually been on the, I don't want to say frontline, but we had started having these, what we like to call high level meetings with the police department, with the fire, the mayor, with all the executive leadership team, because we're trying to manage all of the protests that are going all over the city because some people were popping up making requests.
22:11 So if you want to do a protest or parade or March or anything and see, you got to get a permit, otherwise it's not lawful. And so basically we were just monitoring all of them. We've been monitoring social media. We were on the front lines of all that. So what happened was our senior director was like, I really think we should have something. The mayor, we need to speak on this because this is something that is big with our city and we really need to have a conversation about it. And so we actually put together in about 48 hours something we call the Rally for Peace and Justice. So it was presented by the mayor's office, who the store is real interesting. So we put together a march to take place at Kelly Ingram Park, which is the historical park by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and by the 16th Street Baptist Church where the four little girls were killed in September of 1963.
23:11 So it's right there. It's where historically you saw pictures of the water hoses being let off by Eugene Bull Connor as the Public Safety Commissioner, and you saw the dog that was in that same area. So we decided to have a rally there, and we invited faith leaders from different backgrounds. We invited activists, other public speakers, leaders in the community. It was really just supposed to be in solidarity with what we saw nationally. And it's obviously not the first time that we had seen the murder of a black person at the hands of either a vigilante or a police. We had seen the situations with Mike Brown, with Trayvon Martin, with, and at that point, Breonna Taylor and all that hadn't even happened yet. So we were reacting to, well, had it happened, my dot, trying to remember, obviously it unfortunately is smashed in my head at this point.
24:10:00 It's just been so many because I can't even remember at this point. But yeah, so we had all seen that. And so we did put it together in 48 hours and definitely had a very large response. And it almost kind of also meshed in with other protested marches that had been taking place downtown. And so pretty much a whole bunch of people gathered downtown. So it was going, okay, girl, I even made a playlist. I had done all this. We had talked to the news. The mayor had spoken. I mean, it was a whole thing. So at one point, a known activist comedian here in Birmingham named Funnyman, Jermaine Funnyman Johnson, I love Funnyman by the way, but he was so upset about what had been going on. And also just let me mention that downtown Birmingham at the downtown park, which is called Lin Park, which was actually named after Charles Lin, a confederate soldier, there had been confederate statues all over the park dedicated to the Confederacy, which is wild because Birmingham didn't even exist during that time.
25:25:00 And so they had basically, after Birmingham had been created, the daughters and the sons of the Confederacy basically rallied together to put monuments as they've done all over the country dedicated to the big losers, the big confederacy, the big losers. And so this statue had actually been a big conversation back in 2015 during the Mike Brown George Floyd situations, and the former mayor, William Bell had actually put a box around the statue. The city of Birmingham was then fined $25,000 by the state of Alabama because the governor of Alabama created a law called, I think it's the Preservation Law, basically the law. It was really like real talk just for these confederate monuments and statues just to pretty much honor those statues and make sure that nobody could one, change the name of schools, buildings, whatever, anything that was pre, I want to say 1960 something like it's like 1960 preservation act.
26:34:00 Anyway, so back to the rally. So Jermaine was actually another, I'm sorry, Ricky Smiley was supposed to be the person that spoke. He spoke, and then Jermaine came up right behind him. So funny man actually was just very upset, and I get it. It was emotional for him. And so he goes up there and he says, Hey, yo, we need to take that statue down. I'll meet you at the statue at this time after this rally's over. And so a hoard of people, black and white and everything, went to the statue at Lin Park, and then people attempted to tear down the statue physically, they put rope around it and had a truck out there. It was wild. And so it went from that, and basically everyone dispersed from Kelly Ingram Park and a whole entire riot broke out in downtown Birmingham following what we had considered a peaceful rally.
27:33:00 People were injured and the police were asked to stand down. We didn't want a situation where it became a police brutality situation. And so the police did not, the police just tried to calm people down and not fight. The mayor actually came out in the middle of these crowds. It was mayhem. And he got on a bullhorn and was like, please go home. It was a whole thing. You could look it up. It's real serious. It made me super sad because our point was really to stand in solidarity with Brother Floyd and all the other lives that were lost in a way that upholds oppression and systemic racism, but it turned into rage. And also other people weren't from Birmingham that really wanted to cause anarchy, and it was just unfortunate. But needless to say, that's what happened. And so we did take a space in there trying to advocate for what we saw. We also dealt with the mayor, ended up removing the Confederate monument. We were fined again, and we were fined a total, I think of like $50,000 from the state. We raised the money, but that happened and we dealt with a lot. I remember actually getting phone calls from people threatening the life of the mayor, I'm assuming racist white folks. They were on the call saying, we're going to hang that N-I-G-G-E-R. And so yeah, just dealt with a lot of things during that time. So yeah, that was what happened during that time. Yeah.

29:36:00 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. So I have about seven minutes left. So final question will be twofold.

29:43:00 Uche Bean : Okay.

29:44:00 Lyberti Bradley: I wanted to ask you what you feel like the current state of race relations is in Birmingham and in the United States, and then also what do you see the future of the Black Lives Matter, black movement, Black Lives being? I know that's a big question.

30:03:00 Uche Bean : It's fine. I'll be concise. Race relations here. Birmingham is a black city. We have a black mayor, we have black leadership in the county. Black people have only been in power no more than 60 years, maybe I'll say 50. And when I say power, I mean a majority. There have obviously been elected officials who are black, but again, you saw a focus on black power that has just not been longstanding. It's only been about 50 years. And so when I think of race relations, we're in the state of Alabama. And I think that unfortunately, whereas we have pots of black leadership nationally and in urban centers, I still think that some of those urban centers, especially those in the south, are still being condemned by more conservative voices that really aren't necessarily in the business of caring about inequities. So race relations in Birmingham, I do think that there are people, like you have white lives for black lives, we have people that understand.
31:14:00 We have activists that are non-black. And I think that there's also an understanding that without the voices of non-black folks, a lot of things wouldn't be where they are. We had to have allies that understood that wrong was wrong in order for us to get where we are. So race relations, I mean, I don't think that there's a, per se race war brewing here. I think Birmingham is a black city. And so I think we hold on to that pride of being black. And I love Birmingham for that. And our history is so rich and deep. It didn't used to be a black city. Of course, we deal with white flight and people moving to more suburbia areas that are white and leaving Birmingham to be black. So race relations, I don't really have a thing on that. I think that the mayor is a great leader.
32:04:00 And so when it comes to dealing with folks that are not black, he's great in that, because we're in a world right now that I think blackness needs to be always preserved because it's important. But I also think the necessity to be able to work with everybody, because I'm really not one, I don't do the oppression Olympics, so I'm not going to say who is dealing with what, but I'm always black centric, so I'm always going to think about black folks in those conversations first. Okay. Movement for black lives. I hate that unfortunately, that in news recently, it had some issues with finances. But I think that the concept is what I, hold on. Even if you go to my Instagram, I do have Black Lives Matter in my intro. They do to me. But I also believe black lives have to matter to us as black folks.
32:56:00 And that means that that means not to blame. I don't believe on black crime. I believe in proximity crime. But what I do believe is that black people need to have a conversation, not just about policing, because we have non-white police officers, we have black police officers, and I know we have situations like what happens to the brother in Memphis, Kyrie Nichols. But I think we're going to have to have a strong conversation about what institutions created, not just police officers, but also created racist doctors that created racist judges, that created racist elected officials that systemically continued to oppress black folks. So it's not just police officers, it's not just a profession, it's a system, a country that was literally built on free black labor that did not consider black people as humans and also did not consider black people, period. So we have to start having those conversations outside of just a movement.
33:58:00 A movement is a time. We need to have longstanding generational conversations on how this country has molded the lives of black people, not just the movement for Black Lives, because black folks have always been a movement on their own. We have been the most oppressed people in this whole world, not just this country. And so for us to have that conversation of this time, we've been fighting for years. We have been fighting for simple human decency for years. And so as far as now,I say all that to say I'm not pessimistic about it. I believe that black people are fighters. We're innately fighters, and I feel like we're going to continue to fight, and I feel like we're going to find our place in our salvation or our freedom at some point. But I'm extremely proud of where we are now, and I think that the movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter, I think these are important. And I think they elevated necessary conversations for black folks and for everyone in this country. And I just hate that black folks had to be the martyr for that.

35:19:00 Lyberti Bradley: Okay. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time out to speak to me, and I'll let you know what happens with the project. I'll keep you updated for sure. Okay. Whenever I get the transcript back, I will fix it up and then I can send it to you and let you look at it. You can tell me what left in it. And I think that's about it. But I really, really appreciate it, and I am so thankful to have this perspective for my project.

35:50:00 Uche Bean : Absolutely. Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you. And as you go forward, please keep my contact information Okay, my dear.

35:56:00 Lyberti Bradley: I'll have a good one.

35:58:00 Uche Bean : You too. Bye-Bye bye.