In January of 2021, Florida Gulf Coast University President, Dr. Mike Martin, convened a group of people from the campus community to talk about social justice and anti-racism.
This was about eight month’s after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May of 2020, and toward the tail end of months of widespread protests over his death.
FGCU President Emeritus, Dr. Wilson Bradshaw, sat down for an interview with the university’s Ombuds, Monique McKay, and FGCU’s assistant director of community relations, J. Webb Horton, to talk about issues around social justice and anti-racism. That conversation was never published.
Dr. Bradshaw grew up in a segregated south and did not attend his first desegregated school in Sanford, Florida until 9th grade.
He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology from Florida Atlantic University and his doctorate in psychobiology from the University of Pittsburgh. He served as president of Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota for seven years prior to becoming FGCU’s third president in 2007. He served as president for 10 years before retiring.
In this episode, we listen to the conversation Dr. Bradshaw had with Monique McKay and J. Webb Horton in January 2021, and then talk with him about how much has changed around issues of social justice and anti-racism over the past year and a half, including the new Stop Woke Act -- or HB 7 -- that governor Ron DeSantis signed into law on July 1.
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