Today, faculty, students, graduate students, and student-athletes at the University of Missouri will be engaged in protests as the Board of Curators calls a special meeting to address a long-simmering racial tension and protest surrounding racial incidents on campus. The #ConcernedStudent1950 protests center around the hunger strike of Jonathan Butler, a graduate student who began the strike in response to several unaddressed incidents of bigotry on the campus and aim to have university president Tim Wolfe resign.
The most recent additions to the protests have been the University of Missouri Football Team and the group of faculty members known as #ConcernedFaculty. On Saturday, November 7, Missouri RB Russell Hansbrough announced via Twitter that several football players would be joining protests and abstaining from football activities until Wolfe resigned. According to the Tweet (below), about 32 students, who appear to be mostly black, were involved in the initial walkout.
A day later, Missouri football head coach Gary Pinkel announced greater team support of the walkout via Twitter, posting “The Mizzou family stands as one.” The message and photo attached to the tweet indicate much broader support from athletes and program staff of several races (below).
Monday, Nov 9, 2015 · 4:20:30 PM +00:00 · Vann R Newkirk II
Wolfe is announcing now at 11:15 AM EST that he is resigning from his position as system president, stating “It is my belief that we stopped listening to each other” and that the lack of response “forced students like Jonathan Butler to take immediate action to effect change.”
Read more below.
At the same time, faculty and graduate students joined the protests. According to an email sent by Dr. Elisa Glick on behalf of #ConcernedFaculty members:
We, the concerned faculty of the University of Missouri, stand in solidarity with the Mizzou student activists who are advocating for racial justice on our campus and urge all MU faculty to demonstrate their support by walking out on Monday November 9 and Tuesday November 10, 2015 along with other allies such as the Forum on Graduate Rights. Faculty will meet at the Carnahan Quadrangle starting at 10am and will be present throughout the day to respond to student questions in the form of a teach in. Students are encouraged to check email for information from their professors.
The walk out has been called by The Concerned Faculty group in tandem with a solidarity walk out of graduate students led by the Forum on Graduate Rights, which has been working to unionize graduate workers on campus.
On Sunday, November 8, the Board of Curators also announced that it would be holding a special meeting today, parts of which will be closed to spectators by special Missouri law.
These protests come to a head after two months of activism by black campus students and student groups, including Butler, Missouri Students Association president Payton Head, the Legion of Black Collegians, and the social media #ConcernedStudent150 group. On September 12, Head wrote a Facebook post about bigoted epithets aimed at him and others on campus, detailing an incident in which white students yelled the n-word at him from the bed of a pickup truck. Tensions escalated when members of the Legion of Black Collegians also faced racial epithets. In response, black students protested during homecoming on October 10 and surrounded Wolfe’s car. During that incident, KMIZ-TV reports that Wolfe did not respond to student concerns and that the car allegedly bumped student protesters, including Butler.
On October 20, the #ConcernedStudent1950 group issued this list of demands to the University, which included a formal apology from Wolfe, his immediate removal from office as system president, and an increase of the black population at the school, which is currently seven percent black, by ten percent. Four days later, students found a swastika drawn in human feces in the bathroom of a residence hall. On October 27, student protesters did get a meeting with Wolfe, who did agree to address racial issues on campus but did not agree to step down.
Butler announced his hunger strike on November 2 with this Facebook post. This strike and increasing actions from student protesters led to more media attention on the protests and culminated in today’s action and special meeting.