Stefan M. Bradley ’98 MA History
The New Press: 2025
Ferguson, Missouri, became the center of a national movement for justice in 2014 when Black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by White police officer, Darren Wilson. Stefan Bradley, a young faculty member from Saint Louis University, joined the ensuing protests and became a key media activist.
Bradley writes of his experiences and those of more than two dozen other Black activists in the movement, through oral histories he conducted, in his book about Ferguson’s turbulent early days. He covers motivations and tensions of the uprising, problems of media representation (and misrepresentation), intergenerational conflict over protest tactics, and clashes with police and politicians.
Ferguson was a sleepy suburb of St. Louis at the time of Brown’s death. Yet, Bradley writes, as the uprising grew, “Black youth, as citizens, influenced politics at every level. In that way, they fortified American democracy by making law enforcement recognize their constitutional rights.”
The local Ferguson protests sparked broader movements and inspired a new generation of young Black political leaders, including former Missouri Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush, to seek and achieve victories at the polls.
Bradley—now the Charles Hamilton Houston ’15 Professor of Black Studies and History and department chair of Black Studies at Amherst College—shares authentic voices from the Ferguson movement, which also teach valuable lessons for future protest movements. Those lessons in leadership, political awareness, self-awareness, and a vision for a better future can inspire activists who wish to make a difference.