COLUMBIA, Mo. – What started Monday morning as a celebration for University of Missouri activists in achieving victory with resignations of both the system’s president and the flagship campus’ chancellor has quickly shifted to an atmosphere many students are saying is more unsafe than ever.
Clashes with journalists, heated online debates, threats posted to social media and called into the Black Student Center, and instances of black students reporting white individuals calling them to hurl racial slurs have exacerbated the racial tensions that prompted the activism to begin with.
Many students planned to skip class on Wednesday, November 11 following threats and rumors about what was happening on campus on Tuesday night. A Starbucks near campus was closed because too many employees of the store felt unsafe coming to work. The University of Missouri Police Department said it would increase patrols, and some deans and faculty emailed students offering them the option to stay home.
One member of the Concerned Student 1950 group, who wished to remain anonymous, said a majority of black students living in dorms are now living in “safe houses” off campus.
“A group of seven of us cannot walk alone because we are all people of color,” she said. “The campus is a ghost town right now. No one feels safe to go to class.”
She said students were asking for police escorts to go to their dorms, but the police “were not doing it.”
Major Brian Weimer, of the campus police, said the department has been providing escorts but sometimes the wait is long. When asked if he thinks students should be concerned about threats, he said, “Campus is operating as normal. We have strong law enforcement on campus. There’s nothing specific to ramp it up more.”
The student said it’s ridiculous that the university claims the campus is safe.
“They had the nerve to say that there is no threat to campus, even though your whole black population evacuated campus,” she said. “What does that mean?”
The Concerned Student 1950 group has received numerous death threats via social media and activists are “really stressed right now,” she said. That is why students were trying to preserve a safe space around the protest tent camp that they established on Carnahan Quad, she said.
“Everything escalated so quickly that I don’t think we were ready for any of this to happen,” said another student, a junior at Mizzou who also requested anonymity out of fear. “It came out of nowhere. I never thought I was going to fear being on campus until last night.”
Around 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 10, this student said she was followed by three white college-aged men as she left the student center.
“There were some voices behind me, but I didn’t think anything of it,” this student said. “But then they started saying things like, ‘Hey, n***er.’ They kept getting closer to me. So, I just kept walking.”
This student, who was wearing her work uniform, said one of the males remarked, “I didn’t think n***ers had jobs. I thought they only took them.”
The three white males continued to harass her, this student said, asking where she was going, what she was doing, and calling her racial slurs. She started running, which she said prompted the men to shout, “I guess n***ers can’t take the heat.” When she got in her vehicle, she drove away and called the university police department.
The police told her they would search for suspects, but called her Wednesday morning to say they haven’t found anything so far, she said. It wasn’t her first encounter with racism on campus, she said, though it was the scariest.
“Two people have shouted at me and called me the N-word since I’ve been on Mizzou’s campus, but it was never someone following me into a dark place, like last night,” she said.
At the time she called in the threat to her, university police were also investigating a series of other threats on campus, some of which were posted to social media, like the anonymous app Yik Yak. Popular among college students, Yik Yak only allows users within a short radius of an area to post to a feed.
On Wednesday morning, campus police announced they had arrested a student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri who allegedly posted one of the threats.
Throughout the day Tuesday, Yik Yak was filled with users criticizing the mostly-black student protesters. Some complained that campus racism was blown out of proportion; others said they were tired of being called racist because they were white. Some left comments asking for academic buildings to be declared “white safe spaces,” saying “the South will rise again” and threatening “ready for someone to get hit with a brick.”
Brooks Buffington, co-founder & COO of Yik Yak, released a statement Wednesday condemning the online harassment and threats.
“Let’s not waste any words here: This sort of misbehavior is NOT what Yik Yak is to be used for. Period,” Buffington said.
Freshman Mickell Miller said she already doesn’t feel welcome at her own school.
“I was just in math class and there were people saying [the protests are] pointless, that nothing is going to change,” Miller said.
The university did announce one change this week, in addition to the resignations of system president Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin: the appointment of Chuck Henson as vice chancellor in charge of diversity and equity on campus, a newly created position. Henson, whose academic background is in civil rights law, said for now he will spend a lot of time listening to student concerns.
“What I can do is engage eye-to-eye,” Henson said, “and there will be a long period of listening.”
Alanna Diggs, who leads the Four Front Minority Student Leaders Council at Mizzou, said the resignations of Wolfe and Loftin represent the beginning of change, but it must be followed up with more diversity in administrative positions, more action by lower-level administrators still in power, and cultural change among faculty and students.
“Marginalized students on this campus feel physically and psycho-socially unsafe on our campus, especially walking through Greek town or downtown,” Diggs said.
“Don’t forget about how negatively community reacted to the football team’s boycott. How is it that so many community members seem to care about black lives only when they are on the field?”
Mariah Stewart reported from Columbia. Tyler Kingkade reported from New York. Rebecca Rivas of The St. Louis American also contributed reporting from St. Louis.
This story is published as part of a partnership between The St. Louis American and The Huffington Post.
