From the Washington Post:
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But even as he and his friends were holding signs and chanting on Ferguson’s streets, he was surprised, as he sees it, to see his university do little to address the racial tensions simmering in the same state.
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There was national coverage, so for the school to not cover that or really address that, and we are only two hours away, I think was a huge mistake on their part and contributed to the current cultural environment that we have,” he said. “It just shows that there are racially motivated things — murders, assaults, other things — that happen and we are just going to sweep them under the rug.”
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The problems in Columbia began on Sept. 11. That’s when Payton Head, the Missouri Students Association president and an African American, was racially abused as he walked home.
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"Last night as I walking through campus, some guys riding on the back of a pickup truck decided that it would be okay to continuously scream N—– at me,” Head wrote on Facebook the next day. “I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society.”
African American students became upset when it took university chancellor R. Bowen Loftin nearly a week to respond to the incident.
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Shortly after midnight on Oct. 5, members of the Legion of Black Collegians (LBC) were in a campus plaza rehearsing for a play the following night when “an inebriated white male” called them “n—–s.”
This time, the university responded more promptly, with Loftin issuing a statement denouncing the incidents. “We support free speech in the context of learning, spirited inquiry and intellectual discussion, but acts of bias and discrimination will not be tolerated at Mizzou,” he wrote.
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A few days later, the white student was identified and “moved from campus,” according to the university.
The removal of the student did little to make Butler or his friends feel better.
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Another group of student protesters covered a statue of Thomas Jefferson with sticky notes with words such as “racist,” “rapist” and “hypocrite” in protest, Fusion reported.
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On Oct. 10, with the LBC abuse still fresh in their minds, Butler and 10 other African American students interrupted Mizzou’s homecoming parade by surrounding Wolfe’s gleaming red convertible.
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Butler and his fellow students chanted until Columbia Police pushed them out of the way, threatening to arrest them and rattling cans of pepper spray in their faces. (Cops did not spray anyone and nobody was arrested, Butler said.)
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"I thought, ‘What else do I have to do to prove my humanity’?” Butler told The Washington Post. “What else do I have to do, just because I’m a black person, to prove to you that I deserve to have a good experience on campus? That’s when I started to think about the action of the hunger strike.”
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Then, two weeks later, Mizzou’s racial tensions flared again when someone used their own feces to smear a swastika on a communal bathroom wall in a brand new residence hall. The incident seemed to capture the college’s predicament: each attempt at a fresh start besmirched by old prejudices.
“This individual used a symbol that targets cultural and religious minorities in a place where students call their home,” wrote Residence Halls Association President Billy Donley in a news release, adding that the vandalism was “an act of hate.”
A university spokesman downplayed the incident, however.
“It was some vandalism that was discovered several days ago in a residence hall in a restroom,” Christian Basi told the Columbia Missourian.
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"You may or may not know me,” it began. “Since Mr. Wolfe joined the UM system as president in 2012, there have been a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dynamically disrupted the learning experience for marginalized/underrepresented students at the University of Missouri.”
"The revolting acts that are occurring at Mizzou are a result of a poisonous infestation of apathy that has been spawning from University of Missouri system leadership,” Butler wrote. “Starting today … I will be embarking on an indefinite hunger strike in opposition to Tim Wolfe as the University of Missouri system president. During this hunger strike, I will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of my health until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost.”