Missouri racism protests a sign of the times

"Mob rule" is how Heritage Foundation fellow Andrew Kloster described protests by black students that forced University of Missouri president Timothy M. Wolfe to resign Monday. That may be what it looked like from his conservative perch, but to me the students provided an imperfect example of how people with the least power can engineer change in America.

I say imperfect, because in the end it took money to get the attention the students sought in pointing out Wolfe's apparent indifference to several racist incidents. The university stood to lose a million dollars if its football team carried out a threat to show solidarity with the protesters by not playing in Saturday's game against Brigham Young University.

A number of incidents spurred the protests. In September, student government president Payton Head, who is black, described in a Facebook post how racial slurs were shouted at him by passengers in a passing pickup truck. That led other students to come forward with similar stories. On Oct. 5, an apparently drunk white student came on stage and shouted racial epithets at black students rehearsing a homecoming skit. Then several weeks later, in an apparently racially motivated incident, a student drew a swastika in human feces on a dormitory wall.

Compared with the racial violence that African Americans have endured over the ages – including lynchings and church bombings – the Missouri incidents may seem mild. But that doesn't mean the university's president should have ignored them. Not even a hunger strike by a black graduate student motivated him to take definitive steps to ensure racial comity. His failure to act was interpreted by black students as tolerance for racism.

I found Wolfe's behavior fascinating because it was so different from how a similar protest by black students complaining of racism was handled at my college. Of course that was 40 years ago, when the militant black power movement was taking root at many schools. After a fight between several black and white students heightened tensions, our entire campus was shut down for a "day of dialogue." Students and faculty broke out in small groups to discuss racism.

That approach wouldn't have been easy to pull off at Missouri's Columbia campus, which has 35,000 students, about 7 percent of them black. Baker University, 170 miles to the west in Baldwin City, Kans., had only 800 students when I was the black student union president, but the percentage of African Americans was about the same. Despite MU's larger size, Wolfe should have found a way for black and white students to interact. Instead, his inaction suggested that he thought the protesters were overreacting.

The protesters called their organization Concerned Student 1950, in recognition of the year Missouri admitted its first black students. The students blocked Wolfe's car at last month's homecoming parade. Dispersed by police, they gathered on the campus quad and sang "We Shall Overcome." Blacks on the football team later announced that they wouldn't play until Wolfe resigned or was fired and, surprisingly, their white teammates and coaches said they supported them. "The Mizzou Family stands as one," head Coach Gary Pinkel said in a Twitter post. "We are united. We are behind our players."

The Missouri faculty issued a statement of concern about Wolfe's ability to lead the university. Finally, prior to a meeting with the school's governing body, the Board of Curators, Wolfe announced Monday that he would step down. "It is my belief that we stopped listening to each other," Wolfe said. He added that, "I take full responsibility for this frustration, and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred."

Wolfe is right to blame himself for the situation. But in a way, his inattention to the racism that black students were desperately complaining about makes sense in today's America, where too many people would prefer to pretend that racism is a relic of the past that you read about in books or see in movies. They're wrong.

Certainly, with a black president now and an African American among the leading contenders to succeed him, it would be foolish to argue that this country hasn't changed. But when I see black college students in 2015 having to resort to the same demonstrative tactics that black college students employed in 1975 to draw attention to racism, I can't help but be sad. And wonder if my grandchildren will one day have to similarly take to the streets in protest as well.

Harold Jackson is editor of The Inquirer Editorial Board.