A black philosopher at Texas A&M thought forcing a public discussion about race and violence was his job. Turns out people didn’t want to hear it.

Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Tommy J. Curry, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M;, was deluged with threats and hate mail. On a Thursday morning in May, Tommy J. Curry walked through the philosophy department’s offices at Texas A&M University with a police officer at his side and violence on his mind.

The threats had started a few days earlier. "Since you said white people need to be killed I’m in fear of my life," one person had written via email. "The next time I see you on campus I might just have to pre-emptively defend myself you dumb fat nigger. You are done."

Mr. Curry didn’t know if that person was lurking on the university grounds. But Texas is a gun-friendly state, and Texas A&M is a gun-friendly campus, and he took the threat seriously.

The professor supports the right to bear arms. It was part of how he ended up in this situation. In 2012 he had appeared on a satellite-radio show and delivered a five-minute talk on how uneasy white people are with the idea of black people talking about owning guns and using them to combat racist forces.

He was right about that. When a recording of the talk resurfaced in May, people thought the tenured professor was telling black people to kill white people. It flowed swiftly through the boroughs of conservative media and into the fever swamps of Reddit forums and racist message boards. The threats followed.

Anonymous bigots weren’t the only ones making Mr. Curry feel unwanted. Michael K. Young, president of Texas A&M, had called the professor’s comments "disturbing" and contrary to the values of the university. Mr. Curry was taken aback. His remarks on the radio were not a regrettable slip of the tongue. They were part of why the university had hired him.

A police officer met Mr. Curry inside his academic building and rode with him in the elevator to the philosophy department, on the third floor. In a hallway, the professor pointed to photos of his graduate students so the police officer would know who was supposed to be there. The officer told him to keep an eye out for unfamiliar faces.

Mr. Curry picked up his mail. There were a few angry letters, and also an envelope marked with a Texas A&M logo. He put the hate mail into a folder and carried the whole bundle downstairs. Back in the car with his wife, he opened the university envelope. Inside was a copy of a letter from a campus official that he had received a few days earlier by email — before his inbox was flooded with racist messages.

"I am delighted to offer my congratulations on your promotion to Professor at Texas A&M University effective September 1, 2017," said the letter. "This measure of your achievement is an indicator of the very high esteem in which you are held by your peers. We are honored to have you on our faculty."

As the car pulled away from campus, Mr. Curry reread the letter and rolled his eyes.

He has not been back since.

Professors are being watched, followed, and confronted. They are being brought to account for things they said and things they did not say. Modern technology has turned campus politics into a circus, and audiences come to see the freaks: The professor who thinks white-marble statues are racist, the one who wants white genocide for Christmas, the one who wants to see President Trump hanged. Preening elites exposed as ugly brutes.

Tommy Curry was the angry black one who said white people need to die. That was the caricature, anyway.

There was much more to it. The drama that unfolded at Texas A&M is about a scholar who was welcomed by a public university because of his unusual perspective and who became estranged from it for the same reason. It is a story about what a university values, how it expresses those values under pressure, and how that pressure works. It is about freedom and control, reason and fear, good faith and bad.

Mostly, it is a story about a black man in America who did exactly what he said he set out to do, and who became a cautionary tale.

It starts in Lake Charles, La., where the color lines were obvious to a black kid growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. His family lived in a mostly black neighborhood on the east side of the city. The white folks lived in on the other side of the highway. At the Woolworth store downtown, he saw the faded outline of letters that remained visible on the window glass: "No Coloreds."

His father sold insurance. He told Tommy stories about how white people used to break into black people’s homes and terrorize them. The family kept a shotgun behind the couch, and Tommy Sr. owned a pistol as well. "He constantly told us that there is a very real threat of white violence," says Mr. Curry. "The idea of black people having a right to defend themselves is just something I grew up with."

His mother, a social worker, told him to arm himself with an education. She and her husband were members of the NAACP, and they supplemented Tommy’s schoolwork with books about black inventors, screenings of Roots, and talks about how he could expect to be judged by the color of their skin. Tommy was a serious child who hoarded information. In high school, he read the fathers of critical race theory and decided he wanted to be a law professor. He had issues of The Daily Worker and Socialist Review sent to their house. "My parents thought the government was going to come get me," he says.

Mr. Curry joined his school’s debate team, where he learned how to arrange information into arguments and recite them at breakneck speed. He became accustomed to being the only black voice in the room, although he occasionally met other black boys in the debate scene. One was Rob Redding, a preacher’s son from Atlanta who was going to college in Lake Charles while tending his own dream of becoming a radio personality.

Mr. Redding, who was a few years older, was struck by the high-schooler’s confidence. "I remember him coming to the debate room, and a lot of people thinking he was very bright but maybe a little too self-confident, too self-assured," says Mr. Redding. "Even some black people, who should know better, would think he was too cocky."

Then again, Mr. Curry was a first-generation black student with dreams of blazing through the white worlds of competitive debate and higher education. Mr. Redding knew that the young man would need all the confidence he could muster.

Mr. Curry used debate scholarships to attend Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he won an award for his prowess as a cross-examiner. After getting his master’s in Chicago, he went back to Carbondale to work on a doctorate in philosophy. He carried his debating style into the classroom, earning a reputation as a "take-no-prisoners Afrocentrist," according to his adviser, Kenneth Stikkers, a professor of philosophy and Africana studies.

Mr. Curry showed little deference to the canon, often challenging the universal claims that Western philosophers made in their work. That annoyed a lot of people in the department, but Mr. Stikkers liked Mr. Curry. He considered him a model student who "inhaled" the texts his adviser recommended, reading them closely even if he disagreed with them. "It was always a delight when he’d come to see me," says Mr. Stikkers, "because I was always going to learn something."

“The idea of black people having a right to defend themselves is just something I grew up with.”

Mr. Stikkers, who is white, understood that not everybody would find Mr. Curry’s iconoclasm as energizing as he did. Philosophers consider themselves open-minded, he says, but the department was still a white neighborhood with expectations of how a black guest should behave. Mr. Curry was not interested in playing that game. In comments on Mr. Curry’s papers, the professor found himself repeating a refrain: "Don’t unnecessarily antagonize your audience."

Mr. Curry’s patience for that advice was limited. "He would say at times that he liked nothing more than pissing white people off," says Mr. Stikkers. "I think he did get a certain thrill from that."

During the time when Mr. Curry was studying at Southern Illinois the people of that state elected a young, mixed-race law professor to the U.S. Senate. Carbondale liberals had high hopes for Barack Obama as a unifying political figure and a symbol of how far race relations in America had come.

Mr. Curry did not share their optimism. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, he heard that the police had opened fire on a group of unarmed black families on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans. It would take years for courts to determine the guilt of the officers, but Mr. Curry didn’t need an official judgment to convince him it was true. The aftermath of the hurricane bolstered his belief that antiblack racism in America was a storm that would never end.

"The evidence of the last 50 years has convincingly demonstrated the failure of multicultural coalitions, civil rights legislation and integration," he wrote in a 2007 paper. "The current task of radical Black thought now rests in the development of alternatives in light of this disappointment."

Alternatives like violence.

"Historically, the use of violence has been a serious option in the liberation of African people from the cultural tyranny of whiteness," he wrote, "and should again be investigated as a plausible and in some sense necessary political option."

It was a provocative thesis, and Mr. Curry knew it. He did not consider himself a violent person. Even when he was a teenage socialist, his revolutionary vision had been passive: White capitalism would collapse under its own weight, and black unionists would help build a more egalitarian society in its ruins. Anyway, philosophy was supposed to be about asking hard questions without fear or prejudice, and Mr. Curry was not interested in steering clear of topics just because they made his white colleagues uneasy.

Mr. Stikkers urged him to pre-emptively defend himself against charges that he wanted to incite violence. In the paper, Mr. Curry explained that he wanted to raise violent resistance in the context of American racism "not as a call to arms, but as an open-ended political question."

Still, the young philosopher knew he was treading on dangerous ground.

"To some," he wrote, "for a black scholar to even ask if violence should be used to combat racism is a career faux pas."

The paper was published in Radical Philosophy Today, and Mr. Curry put it on his curriculum vitae. Two years later, he earned his doctorate from Southern Illinois, and Texas A&M brought him on as a "diversity hire," he says. The university’s philosophy department, like philosophy departments everywhere, was all white. "They sold it to me based on the idea that they were trying to change," he says.

Black philosophers are rare in academe. In 2013 a group of researchers counted 141 black professors, instructors, and graduate students working at U.S. colleges, accounting for about 1 percent of the field. At Texas A&M, Mr. Curry turned heads almost immediately. In 2010 he taught a course that used hip-hop as a lens into philosophical ideas. The rapper 50 Cent was on the syllabus alongside Thomas Hobbes.

Mr. Curry and his hip-hop philosophy course irked some conservative students on the campus, which was only 3 percent black. That fall, in an article for Campus Reform, a new website devoted to exposing what it sees as the liberal excesses of academe, Steven Crumpley, a member of the university’s student government, criticized Mr. Curry’s course as having "little to no educational value whatsoever." (Mr. Curry says the student was not enrolled in the course. Mr. Crumpley, who was an accounting major, did not return messages from The Chronicle.)

But some students credited Mr. Curry for introducing them to a new way of seeing themselves and the world. "I think there need to be more courses like this in the university," wrote one student last fall in an evaluation of the hip-hop course, "with an open environment where students can share their thoughts and ideas without feeling ashamed."

Mr. Curry didn’t want to confine his teaching to the classroom. In 2012 he reconnected with Mr. Redding, the acquaintance from his debating days in Lake Charles, who had followed his dream of becoming a radio host. His show, the Redding News Review, played online and on the airwaves in several cities.

Mr. Redding began featuring Mr. Curry in a segment called "Talking Tough With Tommy." Each Thursday the professor would call in and lecture about race, fear, and complacency during the Obama years. He warned them of what might happen as white America began to feel the levers of power slipping from its grasp. "We despise black people who are pessimistic about the political situation," he said in one episode, "as if history hasn’t already borne out what happens when black people make progress, even if it’s illusory."

Earlier that year, grim news from a Florida suburb had reminded the nation of how precarious the political situation was, no matter who was in the White House.

“To some, for a black scholar to even ask if violence should be used to combat racism is a career faux pas.”

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, had been stalked and killed in a gated community where he was staying with relatives. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, had seen Mr. Martin and assumed he was up to no good. He grabbed his gun and followed Mr. Martin. There was a confrontation. Mr. Martin broke Mr. Zimmerman’s nose and injured the back of his head; Mr. Zimmerman then shot Mr. Martin in the chest.

The case brought attention to "stand your ground" laws, which gave the residents of some states, including Florida, the right to use lethal force rather than retreat if they fear they might be in serious danger. (In court, Mr. Zimmerman was later acquitted.)

That December, Django Unchained was released in theaters. The film starred Jamie Foxx as a black gunslinger who frees his wife and murders her white slavers with guns and explosives. In a Saturday Night Live monologue, Mr. Foxx joked about how great it was that he got to "kill all the white people in the movie," prompting white pundits to accuse the black actor of racism.

Mr. Curry made plans to talk about Django on Mr. Redding’s show. He wanted to place the film in the context of Nat Turner’s slave revolt, the writings of the civil-rights leader Robert F. Williams, and the history of black people’s taking up arms.

Once again, conjuring visions of black-on-white violence would be risky. The audience this time was not subscribers to Radical Philosophy Today. It was the public airwaves and the internet. "He knew that saying that, on its face, would be controversial," says Mr. Redding. They decided the professor should focus on self-defense.

When it came time to record the segment, Mr. Curry spoke without a script.

"When we have this conversation about violence or killing white people, it has to be looked at in the kind of these historical terms," he said.

"And the fact that we’ve had no one address, like, how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is, for black people saying, ‘Look in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.’ I’ve just been immensely disappointed, because what we look at, week after week, is national catastrophe after catastrophe where black people, black children, are still dying."

White conservatives speak reverently of gun rights, said Mr. Curry. "But when we turn the conversation back and say, ‘Does the black community ever need to own guns? Does the black community have a need to protect itself? Does the black individual have a need to protect himself from police officers?’ We don’t have that conversation at all."

The segment aired, and nothing happened. Mr. Redding posted Mr. Curry’s piece on YouTube in December 2012 with the title "Dr. Tommy Curry on killing whites," then forgot about it.

Until Rod Dreher found it.

Mr. Dreher, too, was from Louisiana. Born 12 years before Mr. Curry, he grew up in St. Francisville, a small town 160 miles northeast of Lake Charles.

Only a few years before he was born, white vigilantes there had stalked and terrorized black men who had tried to register to vote in the town center. In 1963, a tenant farmer named James Payne told a Justice Department official that a white mob had showed up at his house a day later. The intruders disarmed him, threatened to burn his family alive, and fired a bullet from his own pistol into the ground between his legs.

Mr. Dreher had a fling with progressive politics during his college years, at Louisiana State University, but his ideology took a right turn and he moved to the Northeast, where he cultivated an urbane conservatism and waded into the culture wars.

Personal experience made him wary of vigilantism. In a 2001 column for the New York Post, Mr. Dreher bemoaned an elaborate funeral procession that black mourners had arranged for Aaliyah, the 22-year-old R&B artist who had died in a plane crash. "A traffic-snarling, horse-drawn cortege in honor of a pop singer most people have never heard of?" he wrote. "Give us a break!"

Mr. Dreher has vivid memories of what happened next. Callers flooded his voice mailbox with messages. They cursed him out, hurled anti-Semitic slurs (Mr. Dreher was raised Methodist and had converted to Catholicism), called him a racist, and said he should be fired. All of the callers had "black accents," he later recalled. Mr. Dreher tried to brush it off. He recorded a cheeky voice-mail greeting that instructed his critics to press 1 to leave a death threat, 2 to leave a bomb threat, 3 to get him fired, and so on. ("Please remember to speak as grammatically as you can," he added.)

Still, the outrage scared him. "Every time a black man got within 10 feet of me, I thought, ‘Could this be one of the people who made the death threat?’ " he wrote. He eventually hid out in his apartment. He felt safe going out in public only after planes struck the World Trade Center towers a few days later, briefly uniting black and white New Yorkers in their rage against Muslim terrorists.

Maude Schuyler Clay for The New Yorker Rod Dreher was writing regularly for "The American Conservative" about campus politics, which seemed only to have gotten more toxic since he was in college. Mr. Dreher came to regret the Aaliyah column, admitting that it was "insensitive," but he nevertheless saw himself as a victim of racial venom coursing through parochial networks. He blamed black radio hosts for using their influence to mark him as the enemy of a race.

He eventually moved to back to Louisiana and cultivated an online following as a blogger for The American Conservative. His take on the Trayvon Martin case was that Mr. Martin had "overreacted" to Mr. Zimmerman’s confronting him with a gun, and that black people had overreacted to Mr. Zimmerman’s just acquittal. Mr. Dreher didn’t see Django Unchained, he said, because revenge fantasies were corrupting. His audience eventually grew to about a million readers per month.

By the time Mr. Dreher learned about Mr. Curry, he was writing regularly about campus politics, which seemed only to have gotten more toxic since he was in college. The racial terrorism of the 1960s was in the past, as far as he was concerned, and yet the "social-justice warriors" remained on the warpath. Worse, college administrators indulged those students’ petty outrages.

This spring, a reader sent Mr. Dreher an email: A black professor at Texas A&M was saying racist things about white people, and the university was letting it happen. (The tipster used a pseudonym, according to Mr. Dreher, but he guessed it was a student.) He Googled Mr. Curry’s name and soon found the "killing white people" YouTube clip that Mr. Redding had posted. He also found the professor’s 2007 paper on "violence against whiteness."

To his ears, Mr. Curry sounded like a bully. "That rat-a-tat-tat way of talking reminded me of people I’ve encountered in the past who are so busy talking at you that they don’t actually listen," says Mr. Dreher. "He reminded me of political and religious extremists I’ve run across in my life in that way. That stuff sets me on edge."

So he decided to expose Mr. Curry on his blog. Mr. Dreher embedded the "killing whites" radio segment and quoted from other radio appearances in which the professor had talked about how white people would never voluntarily surrender their advantages.

"What does any of this racist bilge mean?" wrote Mr. Dreher. "To prove his own human worth to Tommy Curry, a white person has to despise himself? Good luck with that, Tommy Curry."

He published it on a Monday, this past May 8, at 8:30 a.m.

Later that morning, an email arrived in Mr. Curry’s inbox from Kelly McNally, a booker for Tucker Carlson Tonight. Mr. Carlson, the Fox News Channel host, wanted to interview the professor — about health care and how race is discussed on college campuses, she told him. ("We had seen reporting on the professor’s comments," Ms. McNally later told The Chronicle. "That is what prompted us to reach out to him.")

Mr. Curry declined, but he would not be able to avoid the spotlight for long. Mr. Dreher’s post sent the professor’s words racing across a network that was primed for racial outrage — like New York City’s black-radio scene circa 2001, but much more powerful. The internet’s right-wing news belt had expanded under President Obama. Websites like Infowars and Breitbart, once on the fringe, had found a champion in President Trump, who seemed passionate about defending white America’s borders and voting rolls from usurpers like Muslim refugees, undocumented Latinos, and poor blacks.

One of the first online hubs to notice Mr. Dreher’s article about Mr. Curry was r/The_Donald, a Reddit forum devoted to the lionization of President Trump. "‘When Is It OK To Kill Whites?’" somebody wrote there, posting a link to The American Conservative. "THE HELL?!?! This guy teaches at Texas A&M!! Liberalism at Universities as gotten completely out of hand!!"

Cristina Laila, a writer for The Gateway Pundit, a blog devoted to exposing "the wickedness of the left," also saw Mr. Dreher’s post about Mr. Curry. "This is more proof that rasicsm [sic] is ok," she wrote, "as long as the attacks are against whites."

How Rod Dreher Set Off a Chain Reaction Explore this interactive graph to discover how the American Conservative blogger's challenge to Tommy J. Curry traveled through the online channels of partisan, nonpartisan, and trade news and commentary.

Infowars was next. On May 10, Paul Joseph Watson, a commentator writing for the site, posted his own take on Mr. Dreher’s discovery. "Presumably," he wrote, "the university thinks that advocating for the death of an entire group of people based on their skin color is something that correlates with their values."

Mr. Watson’s article opened a line to another audience: neo-Nazis. That evening somebody posted a link on Stormfront, a forum for white racists. Some of the people who responded seemed to welcome the thought of a race war. They liked their chances.

"My West Point and 82nd Airborne cousins are more than happy to accommodate those of us who may need a little help in just such an emergency," wrote one person. "So please, oh pretty please, do TRY to initiate hostilities sooner rather than later."

Mr. Curry had succeeded in getting people across the country to talk about racial violence in the name of self-defense. Now they were talking about how Texas A&M University needed to defend itself from Mr. Curry.

To hundreds of people on the forums of TexAgs, a fan site, the answer was clear.

"Can we not fire him?" wrote one person.

"What an embarrassment to Texas A&M," wrote another. "Waiting on a response from President Young, knowing it will never come."

Mr. Young, a lawyer, was hired to run Texas A&M in 2015 after a four-year stint as president of the University of Washington. He had served on the 50th Anniversary Commission of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which made segregation illegal in public schools. Meeting the family members of the black plaintiffs, Mr. Young said later in an interview, had helped him appreciate the toll of racial alienation and the importance of courage in the service of educational opportunity.

"One young man in particular told me that his grandfather, who had been the father of one of the plaintiffs, had lost his job, lost his livelihood, been ostracized out of the community he was in, because he took a stand in this," the president said. "And at that point I realized how incredibly important that courage was."

At Texas A&M, Mr. Young had earned a reputation as an able navigator of public-relations crises having to do with racism. In 2016 white students had taunted a group of black and Latino high-school students who were visiting the campus from a Dallas preparatory school. One woman reportedly asked the prospective students what they thought of her Confederate-flag earrings; other students told the high-school visitors to go back where they came from.

Mr. Young responded by announcing an investigation and then traveling to Dallas to personally apologize to the students who had been harassed. He was later praised widely for making a heartfelt response without rushing to judgment.

"Knee-jerk responses have to be avoided at all costs," Mr. Young told The Chronicle a few weeks afterward. "That becomes a challenge, too, because your first instinct is to side with the people who are outraged." The key to beating the outrage machine, he said, is to know exactly what your university stands for. If you do that, "even if it doesn’t play out the way the Twitter world initially thinks it should, you never have to back away or apologize."

Texas A&M officials knew early on that Mr. Dreher’s article might become a problem. On May 8, hours after it went up, somebody from the university’s office of marketing and communications noticed the vicious chatter about Mr. Curry online. He notified the university’s security chief, who called the professor.

Amy Smith, senior vice president for marketing and communications, advised Theodore George, head of the philosophy department, on how to respond to inquiries about Mr. Curry. "Barring direct threats by him to others, Dr. Curry has a First Amendment right to offer his personal views on this subject," she advised him to say, "no matter how incendiary and inappropriate others may consider them to be."

It soon became clear that would not be enough.

Porter Garner III, head of the Association of Former Students, was receiving angry calls from donors. They thought Mr. Curry was encouraging violence against white people. Mr. Garner had advised Mr. Young to say something publicly to ease their minds.

It was something to consider. The association raises about $10 million for Texas A&M annually, but its greater value is in the connections it builds and maintains on the university’s behalf. Although Mr. Garner’s group isn’t Texas A&M’s biggest fund raiser, "we are the initial cultivator of all relationships" between the university and its current and future supporters, he says.

The professor’s comments had not yet been covered in the mainstream press, but alumni were writing to Mr. Garner, calling him, stopping him at events to ask if this guy really worked at their alma mater. "The Aggie network is wide, it is diverse, it is well-informed," says Mr. Garner, "and I suspect if a few Aggies know something, a lot of Aggies know something."

Many of those Aggies might not have been "fully informed" of the context of Mr. Curry’s words, he says, but some of them were longtime donors, volunteers, and friends of the university, and their concerns were "pretty rational" and "very respectful."

Bob Daemmrich After a series of statements and clarifications, Michael Young, president of Texas A&M;, issued one more: "For those of you who considered my comments … impinging upon the centrality of academic freedom at this university, I regret any contributions that I may have made to misunderstandings in this case." Mr. Young says he disagreed with the idea that Mr. Curry was inciting violence. But as president, he felt an obligation to take the concerns seriously.

Public outrage can be perilous for a public university, especially when race is involved. After black students and their allies caused a national stir by protesting racism at the University of Missouri at Columbia, the university’s fund-raising efforts took a big hit, and Mizzou became a punching bag for conservative state legislature. Two years later, freshman enrollment has dropped by 35 percent, and the university has temporarily shuttered seven dormitories.

Texas A&M’s president says that finances were not on his mind as he weighed what to do about Mr. Curry, but that he acknowledged the importance of staying in the good graces of constituencies beyond the campus. "People send their children to A&M, and students come to A&M, because it’s a very special place," he said in an interview. "I didn’t want anybody to doubt what they believe it stands for is what it stands for."

On May 10, Ms. Smith presented Mr. Young with two options for a new response to people who were complaining about Mr. Curry.

The first option offered an assurance that calls to violence are against the university’s core values.

The second option was exactly the same as the first, plus this sentence:

"While professors have a First Amendment right of course to offer personal views on their own time, university policy prohibits them [from doing] so in a way that creates an appearance that they are speaking for the University."

"Let’s go with option two," the president told Ms. Smith. "I think this is good."

That morning, the dean of Texas A&M’s liberal-arts college asked Mr. Curry to meet with administrators. The professor agreed but told them he wanted another person of color in the meeting. He didn’t want to feel surrounded by people who didn’t get it.

At the meeting, Mr. Curry says, he got the impression that university officials wanted to draw a distinction between his radio commentary and his work for Texas A&M.

Mr. Curry stood his ground. He told the university officials there was no difference. Earlier in the year, a panel of judges from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy honored Mr. Curry’s radio work by giving him an award for public philosophy. ("Our committee was impressed," wrote the chair of the panel, "by how seamlessly Dr. Curry is able to fuse his work as a professional academic philosopher with a very public and intellectually rigorous engagement with lay audiences across a variety of platforms.")

His radio commentary wasn’t some offbeat rant, the professor told his bosses. This is part of what you hired me to do.

"They backed down a little bit," says Mr. Curry. He says they told him to put his defense in writing so they could use it to respond to people who were contacting the university to complain.

The professor wrote in the third person, assuming that his bosses would adopt his voice as their own.

"The inflammatory phrase ‘When is it OK to Kill white people,’ " he wrote, referring to Mr. Dreher’s headline, "deliberately misconstrues Dr. Curry’s distinction between revolutionary violence and self-defense."

The professor continued: "Dr. Curry, drawing from the Second Amendment tradition, suggests that the law’s failure to protect the lives of Black, Latino, and Muslim Americans requires new conversations which may require self-defense and more radical options than protest. In no way does his work promote or incite violence toward whites or any other racial group."

The professor sent the text to his department chair that evening. Two hours later, Mr. Curry was sitting in his apartment, at his computer, when a message arrived from President Young. It was addressed not to him, but to everybody.

"As you may know, a podcast interview by one of our professors that took place approximately four and a half years ago resurfaced this week on social media, seen for the first time by many of us," wrote Mr. Young.

"The interview features disturbing comments about race and violence that stand in stark contrast to Aggie core values — most notably those of respect, excellence, leadership and integrity — values that we hold true toward all of humanity."

Mr. Curry read the email with dawning anger.

He’s throwing me under the bus, the professor thought.

Mr. Young continued:

"As we know, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the rights of others to offer their personal views, no matter how reprehensible those views may be. It also protects our right to freedom of speech which I am exercising now.

"We stand for equality.

"We stand against the advocacy of violence, hate, and killing.

"We firmly commit to the success, not the destruction, of each other."

Have no fear, the president assured them: Texas A&M’s core values remained intact.

The alumni association is not the only nonprofit organization Texas A&M relies on to raise money. There is also the Texas A&M Foundation and the 12th Man Foundation, which contribute close to $100 million annually. The George Bush Library Foundation helps underwrite the expenses of the presidential library and the Bush School of Government and Public Service.

Ms. Smith, the communications vice president, immediately sent Mr. Young’s statement to the presidents of all those organizations.

"Thank you Amy!" wrote Mr. Garner.

"Thank you Porter, and all of you for what you do for our beloved university," Ms. Smith replied.

Mr. Young was pleased.

"Beautifully done!!!!" he told Ms. Smith.

“Paying a professor to share radical ideas on behalf of a university has nothing to do with free speech.”

The communications chief felt good about the statement. Fair was fair: Last December, when the white nationalist Richard Spencer visited Texas A&M, Mr. Young made it clear that the university did not share his values, either. After trying and failing to bar Mr. Spencer from speaking on campus, university leaders organized a unity-themed rally in the football stadium. "If you’re a purveyor of hate and divisiveness," said John C. Sharp, the chancellor, "and you want to spew that kind of racism, this is the last campus on earth that you want to come to to do that."

In light of the situation with Mr. Curry, Ms. Smith found herself moved by the chancellor’s words.

"It is even more meaningful now," she wrote to the president the next morning, "as we articulated our core values again yesterday in a new-but-related situation that shows we mean this equitably."

The statement did little slow the momentum of the story. The outrage machine was just warming up. Conservative writers struggled to square their love of free speech with their horror at Mr. Curry’s words.

"Certainly, no one should be stopped for sharing and debating ideas; the country has seen too many prohibitions of speech in past years," wrote Rob Meyer, editor of Red Alert Politics, a Washington-based blog. "However, paying a professor to share radical ideas on behalf of a university has nothing to do with free speech."

Mr. Garner, of the Association of Former Students, was still getting calls from alumni who thought Mr. Young had not gone far enough. Some said the president should have condemned Mr. Curry more forcefully. Others were upset that the professor wasn’t fired.

SupportAggies.com, a website registered to Eric Schroeder, a former chairman of the Texas Aggie Conservatives student group, called on the Texas Board of Regents to fire both Mr. Curry and Mr. Young. The website encouraged alumni to sign a petition pledging to withhold all donations to Texas A&M and its affiliated fund raisers until the board took action. (Mr. Schroeder, who graduated in 2014, declined to be interviewed on the record.)

"President Young claims to ‘stand against the advocacy of violence, hate, and killing,’ " read the petition, "yet he continues to support Professor Curry’s dangerous indoctrination of young students, engraining [sic] impressionable pupils with hate against whites and an appreciation for violence."

Alumni were not the only ones upset. Mr. Young’s attempt to get out ahead of a national story created another outrage closer to home.

Paying professors to share radical ideas does have to do with academic freedom, a privilege that is sacred on college campuses, if nowhere else. Members of the Texas A&M faculty were coming to the conclusion that Mr. Curry’s 2012 comments were part of his work as a scholar.

The right of the professor to study and teach without interference from above is enshrined in Texas A&M’s bylaws. According to university guidelines, "each faculty member must be free from the corrosive fear that others inside or outside the University community, because their views may differ, may threaten his or her professional career."

To some of Mr. Curry’s colleagues, the statement the president sent out to mollify the professor’s critics was not an affirmation of the university’s core values. It was a betrayal.

Joe Feagin, a long-serving sociology professor, wrote to Mr. Young the next morning.

"Michael," he wrote, "I wish you had contacted me about the Curry matter."

But the president hadn’t, so Mr. Feagin aired his concerns to a student reporter instead. In an email to The Battalion, a campus newspaper, the sociologist argued that the Second Amendment arose out of the desire of all-white militias to arm themselves against the black people they had enslaved. Mr. Curry’s 2012 radio lecture, he said, was based on good research.

Nandra Perry, an associate professor of English, teaches about the Bible as literature. "In the process of teaching that course," she told the president in an email message, "I make all manner of perfectly benign observations rooted in my academic expertise that could easily be recorded, edited, and taken out of context in order to smear my character or pit people against each other."

She had assumed that the university would have her back if anybody used a classroom recording to attack her. Now she wasn’t so sure. "To call this incident a blow to academic freedom," Ms. Perry told the president, "doesn’t begin to do justice to the chill it will have on my teaching and indeed the teaching of almost everyone I know."

Perhaps the most scathing rebuke to the president came in a letter signed by every faculty member in the Africana-studies department, where Mr. Curry also holds a faculty appointment. The history of black thought, they said, includes more than Martin Luther King Jr.’s crossover hits. By dismissing Mr. Curry’s comments on violent resistance as "personal views," they said, Mr. Young had delegitimized the professor’s expertise and dismissed centuries of history.

"Blacks in the United States live with the daily fear that a traffic stop, or a trip to the store or the park, could be the end of their lives," wrote the professors. "Yet we cannot talk about black resistance? Historically or contemporaneously? Are you aware that Dr. Curry’s work falls within a longstanding epistemological tradition in black diaspora and colonial studies?"

They demanded an apology.

When Mr. Dreher heard that the Texas A&M professor was getting death threats, he wrote a follow-up blog post. Anyone threatening violence against Mr. Curry, he said, should be ashamed and, if possible, arrested. "I hope Dr. Curry is armed," he added, "so that if anybody shows up at his house threatening him, he defends his home and family by any means necessary."

Still, the American Conservative writer stuck by his interpretation of Mr. Curry’s 2012 radio commentary. "I don’t believe Tommy Curry is encouraging black people to go out today and cut throats," Mr. Dreher wrote. "I think he is entertaining dangerous thoughts here, same as far-right white radicals." (He later would write a third post, which was removed, comparing the professor to Emperor Palpatine, the Star Wars villain who encourages morally complex characters to "give in to the dark side.")

Mr. Curry read the second blog post somewhat differently than Mr. Dreher had meant it. That evening the professor wrote an email to Mr. Young with a headline that was provocative, if a bit misleading:

"Rod Dreher retracts."

“To call this incident a blow to academic freedom doesn't begin to do justice to the chill it will have on my teaching.”

The president decided to make another statement, and his advisers spent several days discussing how to thread the needle.

Karan L. Watson, who was provost at the time, judged that the number of people mad at the president for not firing Mr. Curry outnumbered the number of people who were upset on the professor’s behalf. Many faculty members, she noted in an email to a colleague, approved of how Mr. Young had handled the situation.

Still, the provost suggested that the president use the new statement to apologize to Mr. Curry.

"To all those whose work is contextualized by understanding the historical perspectives of events that have often been ignored," Ms. Watson suggested saying, "and especially the professor and his work discussed in the podcast, I apologize."

On May 17, a week after Mr. Young put out his statement about Texas A&M’s values, he released a statement clarifying them. He said he was committed to academic freedom. He acknowledged that scholars often find their work oversimplified or misunderstood. He reiterated the university’s position that racial violence is always bad.

As for how he had handled the outcry over Mr. Curry, the president was guardedly contrite. "For those of you who considered my comments disparaging to certain types of scholarly work or in any way impinging upon the centrality of academic freedom at this university," he said, "I regret any contributions that I may have made to misunderstandings in this case, including to those whose work is contextualized by understanding the historical perspectives of events that have often been ignored."

The personal apology didn’t make it in.

Seven weeks after setting the Curry drama in motion, Mr. Dreher took his 13-year-old son on a trip to Italy. In Tuscany they watched the Palio de Siena, a horse race that has been run for centuries. Afterward they marched along the street in a crowd behind the winning team. "It was everything I hoped it would be for him," he wrote in an email.

They were in the land of Dante, the poet Mr. Dreher credits with helping him shed the anger he had carried through most of his life. His own father, a formidable man with a quick temper, had not understood his sensitive, bookworm son — had called him a "sissy" and blamed him for letting himself be bullied in school. His disapproval weighed heavily on Mr. Dreher well into adulthood, and the writer drifted in and out of depression. Decades later, moved by Dante’s Divine Comedy, he forgave his father.

Mr. Dreher believes that forgiveness is the only practical solution to racial resentment, too. "We inherited the good and the bad," he wrote, "all consequences of an infinite number of choices made before we were born — choices made by sinners, just like us."

In 2015, Mr. Dreher marveled at the "Christ-like love" of the teenage children of Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, one of the nine black parishioners killed by the white supremacist Dylann Roof at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Ms. Coleman-Singleton was a speech pathologist and a high-school track coach. Mr. Roof shot her five times. The next night, at a vigil for their mother, Chris and Camryn Coleman-Singleton told an interviewer that they had already forgiven Mr. Roof.

Mr. Dreher saw their gesture as both inspiring and necessary.

"There will always be haters, of all kinds, and sometimes those haters will murder in service of the hate that consumes them," he wrote. "But to deny that things have changed for the better, and can change for the better if we work at it, is to deny to ourselves the hope that inspired Martin Luther King and the civil rights heroes."

Mr. Curry is no hero, says Mr. Dreher, who thinks that the professor’s talk of racial violence is reckless, and that he should cut it out before he inspires somebody to do real harm.

"Tommy Curry’s big fat radical mouth gets to me," he wrote in an email from Italy, "because of the consequences of the things he believes and says. It’s not a joke."

Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle "If that’s the American dream," Tommy Curry says of his experience as a black professor, "then I’d hate to see what the actual nightmare is." Back in America, Mr. Curry was more worried about the consequences of what Mr. Dreher believed and said about him.

The writer’s airing of Mr. Curry’s 2012 comments stirred up feelings that were far from Christ-like. For two weeks, the professor rarely left his apartment as messages arrived by email warning him of what might happen if he did.

"You and your entire family of low-IQ, affirmative-action herpes-infected african monkeys might need to be put to death."

There were dozens like that. The professor forwarded them to the campus police department. Mr. Curry says a detective told him some of the messages appeared to have been sent from within the county.

Police officers made a point to drive past his apartment building often for several weeks. But Mr. Curry worried about whether his 6-year-old was safe at her elementary school. Driving her home at the end of the day, he would circle the block a few times to make sure they had not been followed.

Nobody came to his door, knocked him down, disarmed him, fired a bullet between his legs, or made him beg for his life. The mob that came for Mr. Curry reflected his own time. It was digital and diffuse, everywhere and nowhere.

The goal, however, was the same as ever: fear. And it worked.

The Currys left town. They were already planning to move, but Mr. Curry and his wife decided to leave early to stay with family. His daughters thought they were going on vacation. He does not plan to bring them when he returns to Texas A&M in the fall.

The hate mail tapered off, but Mr. Curry’s name still occasionally appeared on conservative websites. After a few weeks he got another message from Ms. McNally, the Fox News booker. "We would very much appreciate the opportunity to hear from you," she wrote, "and offer you the opportunity to explain your work and teachings, which I know have garnered significant attention of late."

But the professor was tired of explaining.

In his life, Mr. Curry has embodied both the promise of racial progress and its limitations. He was able to study at an integrated school, but his hometown remained divided by the legacy of segregation. He was hired by a university that wanted more black professors, then mocked by conservative students who assumed his insight was worthless. He earned honors from his colleagues, then anger from strangers and a tepid defense from his bosses.

"If that’s the American dream," says Mr. Curry, "then I’d hate to see what the actual nightmare is."

He plans to return to Texas A&M in the fall as a full professor. He knows there are people there who want him gone. He no longer trusts the university to defend him. He only hopes he can defend himself.

Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.