Activists forced the University of Missouri president to resign this week in a profound moment for US civil rights. But how did they there? And what’s next?

A group of students, football players, coaches and educators at the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus forced the resignation this week of their president, Tim Wolfe.

University of Missouri president and chancellor resign amid race protests Read more

The university chancellor, R Bowen Loftin, also announced he would step down at the end of the year. It was a profound moment in American civil rights and academic activism.

When news broke that Wolfe would resign, hundreds of students were gathered with about a hundred professors. Cheers erupted, tears flowed and dancing broke out.

Within seconds, the questions were being spoken aloud: what next? What do we do now? Do we stop camping? The answer to the last question was no. “This is a movement, not a moment,” the assembled kept repeating. They knew Wolfe’s departure was just one step. (The chancellor wasn’t far behind.)

How did they get this far? At Mizzou, a confluence of circumstances converged to propel campus outrage – and activism – whose lessons are likely to be absorbed by national movements.

Ferguson is only 100 miles away

The Mizzou campus is about 120 miles from Ferguson, where the Black Lives Matter movement kicked into high gear in August 2014, after the death of Michael Brown. Many students have traveled to Ferguson to take part in the protests, and Ferguson demonstrators have shown up at Mizzou. When explicitly racist trouble happened on campus this year – as when student body president Payton Head was repeatedly called “nigger” and a swastika made of feces turned up in a bathroom – the response was steeped in the newly urgent milieu of Black Lives Matter. When Wolfe reacted poorly to students bringing their concerns to him at the homecoming parade in October, Mizzou students were ready for the fight.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students celebrate the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri.

Football was just a part of the story

A group of black football players joined the movement, refusing on Saturday to participate in any football activities until Wolfe resigned. The football players’ strike has been held up as the immediate cause of Wolfe’s resignation. In striking, they exposed how reliant American colleges and the NFL are on black labor and how easily striking black athletes could shut them down. But they were part of a much larger story of outrage and protest that culminated over the weekend. Among others who had been protesting was Jonathan Butler, who had been hunger striking for a week, the original 11 members of the group Concerned Student 1950, coaches, graduate students and professors who were also refusing to work.

Mizzou’s health insurance policy incited the wrath of graduate student workers

In August, Mizzou informed graduate student workers that it was suspending all subsidies for their health insurance, reportedly with only 14 hours notice. The university proposed giving cash payments instead of subsidies, which would have fallen short. The university eventually backpedaled, and has now said it will offer health insurance next year, but Chancellor Loftin earned the wrath of the well-organized graduate student workers. Deans of nine departments called for his resignation just hours after Wolfe fell.

Mizzou cut off access to reproductive services for women

In September, the university “announced it will no longer grant hospital privileges to the only doctor providing abortion services at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia”, thus blocking the only path to legal abortion in the community. The same month, Mizzou terminated 10 decades-old contracts with Planned Parenthood, taking away “birth control and abortion training rotations” for its medical and nursing students. This enraged feminists and students of medicine. Mizzou history professor Keona Ervin said that beneath the fights about race, economic justice for grad students and reproductive rights was an “undercurrent of black activism that’s been on campus since the 50s, really”. That was the decade when Mizzou first admitted black students, more than a century after its founding.

Black queer activism is alive and well at Mizzou

Like the Black Lives Matter movement at large, black activism at Mizzou is intertwined with queer liberation. Such protesters refer to Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, and speak of wanting to dismantle patriarchy as well as racism. When hunger striking student Jonathan Butler spoke at a press conference after Wolfe was gone, his shout-out to “three black queer women” who had made his actions possible drew raucous and enthusiastic applause from the audience. Mizzou is also home to football player Michael Sam, who was embraced by the Mizzou community when he came out as gay before becoming the first out player to be drafted by the NFL. Sam came back to campus on Monday to stand with his fellow Tigers.

Michael Sam (@MichaelSamNFL) We are a Family here at the University of Missouri and as a Family we will protect each other. #OneMizzou pic.twitter.com/S1ITuREKSS

Black Mizzou students were fed up with black people being under-represented

Black students are under-represented at Mizzou. The school’s undergraduate population is 79% white and 8% black, while the state is about 83% white and nearly 12% black. But the shortfalls don’t stop there: as one member of Concerned Student 1950 said in a press conference, the group demands a black faculty presence of more than a few percent and “black psychologists in mental health spaces”. It was taking their grievances about being called racist names to Wolfe during October’s homecoming game that drove students to seek redress from Wolfe in the first place, according to Jonathan Butler. As Guardian sports writer Les Carpenter wrote, one need look no further than the comments section of the main Mizzou fan football site, Tigerboard.com, to find “threads of rage and hate and overt racism”.

Missouri’s history of racial oppression dates back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820

Missouri was the last slave state admitted to the union, in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The state, founded more than three decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, has been a site of battles over racial inequality ever since. It’s the state that passed “one of the harshest laws” regarding slavery for “teaching reading and writing to any Negro or mulatto” in 1847. It saw some of the most blatant examples of white flight and the most vehement resistance to school desegregation well into the 1990s. It has been exposed since Michael Brown’s death for the way it jails its poor in debtors’ prisons, segregates its students, allows a crisis of payday lenders, disproportionately arrests its black drivers, and imprisons its black men. The University of Missouri didn’t admit its first black student until more than a century after it was founded, in 1839. The group at the center of recent protests, Concerned Student 1950, derives its name from the year when the first black student was admitted.

Some young activists at Mizzou did not trust the media, and want to tell their own story on their own terms

One of the most fascinating things about ‪the Mizzou hunger strike was its nearly complete rejection of traditional and corporate media. Signs abounded outside of their encampment, banning media and declaring a “safe space”, while chants of “back off” usually used against cops were deployed against journalists who were kept out by students and linked arm in arm (and one faculty member reportedly calling for “muscle”). The Concerned Student 1950 group repeatedly told students not to talk to any media but to email them. “We will decided if and when we answer any questions,” one student who wouldn’t give his name said, “and we will decide the terms.”

But not everyone took that position, with some posting this sign:

The images from this event depicted more joy than pain

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The scene at the University of Missouri on Monday.

After a year of organizing protests in response to black beatings, shootings, chokings, “suicides”, mass slaughter and death, the spectre of violence loomed over Butler’s hunger strike, but it was kept at bay with his survival and victory.



Instead, images emerging from this demonstration were of young people dancing and singing as they learned of Wolfe’s resignation.

The movement’s goals are even bigger

Like much of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Mizzou students weren’t asking for equality – they were making demands for liberation. And they’re not happy or satisfied with where they are. Butler said it was “disgusting” that he had to go through what he went through just to get a shot at what he deserves. Even Wolfe admitted as much.

And the protesters have more demands, including a hand in picking Wolfe’s successor and a meeting with the governor. They are also demanding shared governance of their university as black students – something even white, tenured faculties at colleges across the country have abandoned.

If you were to make a word cloud of overheard speech from Mizzou protesters, the words “love” and “justice” would probably be the biggest. Asked what they had learned about love and justice this week, one of the Concerned Student 1950 members answered: “If you’re marginalized, fight. Fight! Because you will get what you want.”