Stefan M. Bradley — If We Don’t Get It: A People’s History of Ferguson – with Ibram X. Kendi

Stefan M. Bradley was a young professor in 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 key media activist during the protests that ensued, giving on-the-ground interviews to Chris Hayes, CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and others.

In If We Don’t Get It, Bradley, now a named professor of Black studies at Amherst College, 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.

Bradley conducted over two dozen oral history interviews with young Black protesters. Through the authentic voices of the movement’s participants, Bradley describes the motivation and tensions coursing through the uprising’s early days and weeks, the problems of media representation (and misrepresentation), intergenerational conflict over protest tactics, clashes with the police and politicians, and much more. If We Don’t Get It also explores the new generation of elected officials, including Congresswoman Cori Bush, who emerged from the local movement’s ranks.

A rich story with deep relevance for the protests of our own time, If We Don’t Get It offers a gripping account of how young activists, without previous political experience, succeeded in changing our national political narrative.

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.

Bradley will be in conversation with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning author of sixteen books for adults and children, including ten New York Times bestsellers—five of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. In the summer of 2025, he will join Howard University as Professor of History and Director of its newly established Howard Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Kendi is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest author to win that award. He also authored the international bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, which was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” Dr. Kendi’s other bestsellers include How to Raise an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. His next book is Malcolm Lives!. It is the first major biography of Malcolm for young readers in more than thirty years, appearing in May 2025 on the centennial of Malcolm’s birth.