The Ferguson Uprising of 2014 and the Struggle for Democracy in 2025
A Conversation and Book Signing with Stefan M. Bradley
Date: Tuesday, August 12th, 2025
​Time: 4:00PM
Location: Art Barn Deck at Featherstone Center for the Arts
Fee: free

Stefan M. Bradley was a young professor at Saint Louis University when Black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a local white police officer. Bradley quickly became a participant in the protests that ensued, giving on-the-ground interviews to Chris Hayes, CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and others.

​Author of the recently published If We Don’t Get It: A People’s History of Ferguson, Bradley shows how Brown’s murder sparked a grassroots movement for democracy, led by Black youth, which transformed the way we talk about race, justice, and policing in the United States.

What is the state of that movement today, in the face of unparalleled threats? And what is the role of ordinary people in fighting back?

Bradley will be joined by Jamel K. Donnor, the Fred Huby Memorial Professor of Education at William and Mary, in a wide-ranging conversation about history, justice, and the renewed fight for American democracy. Book signing to follow. Books will be available for purchase from Edgartown Books. 

Stefan M. Bradley is the Charles Hamilton Houston ’15 Professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College. He has appeared on C-SPAN Book TV, NPR, PRI, as well as in documentaries on the Oprah Winfrey Network and the History Channel. The author of several prizewinning books, including Upending the Ivory Tower and Harlem vs. Columbia University as well as If We Don’t Get It: A People’s History of Ferguson (The New Press), he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Praise for If We Don’t Get It:

"If We Don’t Get It couldn’t be more vital to the resistance pages of history."
—Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

"A powerful reminder of why all roads from our current struggles for Black freedom and abolition lead back to Ferguson."
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

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