‘I Believe I Can Leave This Place Better Than I Found It’

Reminders of their race are constant. On the streets, when drivers yell slurs at them. In class, when their mostly white peers expect them to speak for all black people. And in social settings, when the racial divide seems most unbridgeable.

Just 7 percent of a student body of 35,000, black students here at the University of Missouri are used to feeling invisible at times, singled out at others. They are hardly alone. Black students across the country in recent months have shared similar stories of isolation and prejudice.

Turmoil at Mizzou

In 2015, student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in Missouri and its aftermath.

• Students Should Feel Like ‘Equal Partners,’ Says New Diversity Officer
• Melissa Click, Professor Who Riled Free-Speech Advocates, Is Fired
• What It’s Like to Be Black at the U. of Missouri
• Thrust Into a National Debate on Race, 2 Missouri Chiefs Resign

But what happened here this past fall — a homecoming protest, a televised hunger strike, a show of support by the football team, the resignations of the system president and campus chancellor — made Missouri a stage on which black students’ frustration, in all its dimensions, played out for a national audience. On the campus and beyond, their cause has resonated. Yet many people are unsympathetic to some of the tactics protesters have employed, or are confused by what black students mean when they talk about being made to feel that they don’t belong. What is it that they go through? What do they want to change?

The Chronicle asked several black students at Missouri to describe what their lives here are like, and what they’re working toward. As they navigate college or graduate school, they say, they often feel caught between not wanting to speak for an entire race of people and knowing that if they don’t say something, stereotypes will lie unchallenged, and black and white people will stay in their own corners.

“If you continue on that path, seeing that separation as OK, you’re setting a course for misunderstanding,” says AnDrea Jackson, a senior. “You’re basically setting yourself up to repeat history.”

Missouri’s black population is concentrated in St. Louis and Kansas City, where neighborhoods remain largely segregated. As a result, many students, black and white, set foot on the flagship campus in Columbia having little experience with classmates of a different race.

Ms. Jackson grew up in St. Louis, 100 miles east of here, but in an uncommonly diverse neighborhood. Now 39, she also has moved around a lot, including out of state. She was shocked by how overwhelmingly white the campus here is. “A lot of white students who come from small towns are like, ‘This is so diverse!’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s not,’” says Ms. Jackson, a journalism major who earned an associate degree in Georgia. “It didn’t take long for me to have an identity crisis.”

The social segregation struck her one night as she was leaving the black-culture center, a second home for many black students. New students had been talking with upperclassmen about how to navigate campus life: heavy stuff like dealing with racism and day-to-day details like where to get their hair done. As Ms. Jackson was walking back across the campus, a stream of white students poured out of a building where they had wrapped up a homecoming-related event. Many black students consider homecoming, every fall, a largely white tradition.

Why is it, Ms. Jackson wondered, that when it comes to social life, Mizzou has two parallel tracks, white and black (or, sometimes, multicultural)? How could the university get unstuck from its past? In Atlanta, she says, people liked to learn from one another because they were different. Those differences actually brought them together, she says. “Here our differences separate us.”

Teah Hairston has been wrestling with identity, too, and with the divisions she sees in the classroom. That struggle will probably influence her choice of career. She grew up in a diverse part of Sacramento, Calif., where, she says, “I didn’t have to pay attention to being black.” Instead what united people she knew was being poor.

Now a graduate student in sociology, Ms. Hairston is conscious of how often she walks across the campus without encountering another black person. That the general curriculum reflects a white, male perspective she finds troubling, and that just 3 percent of the faculty members at Missouri are black weighs on her. “A lot of people in this department want to go on to be a professor,” she says. “And I don’t. I don’t feel like I belong in this culture.”

She teaches undergraduate courses, and she’s the first black instructor some of her students have had. They tell her they like her because her informal teaching style makes her relatable, and her classes relevant to their lives. But ill-informed views on race crop up on course discussion boards. One student this fall questioned how the graduate student who had gone on a hunger strike at Missouri could have experienced discrimination if his family is, as reported, well-off. Others have acknowledged that black and white students don’t interact much socially and asked why that’s wrong if it’s what both groups prefer.

Ms. Hairston uses students’ comments to start discussions about race, inequality, or sexuality. “I try to give them different ways to think about things,” she says. “I’m not necessarily trying to change minds.”

Black students say they frequently have to deal with snap judgments. Despite being a third-year doctoral student in psychology, Reuben Faloughi still gets introduced as an athlete (he played football as an undergrad at the University of Georgia). In those introductions, there’s a distinct undertone, he says: “This guy can’t ever be a scholar. He’s here for entertainment.” Once a professor asked him to play rap music, as if that was all he listened to. “These are small things,” he says, “but they add up.”

The ignorance and intimidation some students experience has shocked them. Corie Wilkins, a senior, remembers having been on campus all of two days when a car passed by and the driver yelled “Nigger!” out the window at him and his friends. “If you say that to somebody on the street in Chicago, the consequences are understood,” says Mr. Wilkins, who grew up on the city’s South Side. “And these guys were so fearless when they said it. At that point I knew, this is going to be a problem here.”

There’s also a cluelessness he sees among some white students. I’m not racist, they tell him, because I have black friends, or I like fried chicken and sweet-potato pie. It’s OK to say “nigga,” they say, as long as I drop the “r.”

“No,” says Mr. Wilkins, “you cannot say that, ever.”

Racial slurs are frequent. This fall the student-government president, who is black, posted on Facebook his reflections on being yelled at by white men in a pickup truck. “I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” wrote the president, Payton Head. “For those of you who wonder why I’m always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it’s because I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here.”

Tiana Glass knows the feeling. She looks to the faculty for mentors or role models and doesn’t find many. The only two black professors she’s had in three years have been in black studies. Classmates tell her she must be here because of affirmative action. An administrator, knowing little about her, thought she couldn’t afford a study-abroad trip to Ghana. “People are making assumptions,” she says, “based on my blackness.”

Ms. Glass looks back on a summer transition program for incoming students and thinks of friends she made who have since dropped out. She understands the reasons: culture shock, alienation, money. Eventually she found a home in the women’s-studies department, where two faculty mentors have offered support and a sense of belonging. If not for them, Ms. Glass says, she would have left long ago. “Mizzou is good at recruiting, but you have to retain,” she says. “And I don’t see that.”

To understand the protests at Missouri this past fall, you need to go back to August 2014. The fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., was a defining moment for many black students. They began to talk more about structural racism, and to organize, bringing to light the discrimination they experienced at the university and linking it to how the black residents of Ferguson were treated. It was the first time some of the students had considered taking a new approach to race relations on campus.

They formed the group MU4MikeBrown and held rallies. They staged a die-in in the student union. They met with administrators to talk about the tense racial climate and lack of diversity in the student body and the faculty. They discussed slurs scrawled on dorm-room doors and cotton balls strewn on the lawn of the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center, an offense in 2010 that resulted in two white students’ being charged with littering. Little seemed to come of it all, black students said, other than forums and promises that they were being heard.

Still, coming together was a powerful experience. “It touched me to the core,” says Mr. Faloughi, whose initial act of protest was to participate in a demonstration and die-in, which drew hundreds of people. “It was the first time I saw that many students committed to the cause.”

This past fall, after Mr. Head’s Facebook post, Danielle Walker wondered what the chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, would say. Surely, she thought, the student government president’s words carry weight. But days went by. “Oh,” Ms. Walker, a graduate student in public policy, remembers thinking, “you all are really not going to say anything.”

Six days after Mr. Head’s comments, the chancellor finally put out a letter. There was no mention of race or details about the incident. Mr. Loftin simply said that the university opposed bias and discrimination and was working “to address the issues brought forward.”

Ms. Walker is familiar with that kind of response. As an undergrad here, she was a diversity peer educator, leading discussions in dorms. She would ask people to think about the biases they were raised with and would stress that acknowledging prejudice doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. But students rarely opened up. “I’d get what I call pageant responses,” she recalls: bland and uplifting comments like, I accept everyone for who they are. White people, she says, often prefer to see racism as a series of isolated incidents. This isn’t the 1950s anymore, classmates would tell her. We have a black president.

Ms. Walker observes racism in more subtle interactions. A professor once told her that her Afro was too big and that she needed to sit in the back of the classroom so others could see. Peers say she speaks well, as if she doesn’t match their expectations of how a black person should sound. After Michael Brown was shot, people attempted to offer reassurance: We know you’re not one of those people, Danielle. Michael Brown didn’t respect police authority.

Ms. Glass, the women’s-studies major, was taking a course in cross-cultural communication when Ferguson came up. That’s where she’s from. My mom always told me to be respectful toward the police, a white student said. Ms. Glass wondered if her classmate knew what it felt like to be afraid to talk to a police officer.

Black students have continued to mobilize. Ms. Walker formed a loose coalition called Racism Lives Here and staged marches and demonstrations. She was tired of many people’s not hearing what black students had been saying all along. But activism was stressful, and she dealt with migraines all semester. As she walked to class, she says, students would pass by and say things like, “You’re what’s wrong with Mizzou.”

The group Concerned Student 1950 also formed to bring attention to race, its name a nod to the year the first black student was admitted to Missouri. During homecoming, members staged a protest, linking arms and speaking about the black student experience.

As demonstrations gained momentum, some students’ perspectives shifted. Until this fall, when Ms. Jackson, the journalism major, heard insensitive or ignorant comments from classmates, she would feel that it was on her to correct the bias. The protests — and the pushback — led her to think that the problems were deeper than individual acts of ignorance, she says. “I got angry at what I was hearing and seeing: That we’re overreacting, that we’re whining, that we need to get over it, that we’re making things up, that the mere idea of being the only black person in the room is not such a big deal.”

“I won’t say that my perspective was shattered,” she continues. “But you understand that there are moments that are teachable moments, and there are moments when you have to fight.”

The hunger strike and other tactics, such as protesters’ demand that the system president resign, divided black students, although they say those tensions were played up by outsiders, including the news media. For every “act of rage” that got attention, says Mr. Wilkins, the Chicagoan, “there were 10, 20, maybe 100 peaceful demonstrations or peaceful talks.”

People were also quietly working behind the scenes. Marquise Griffin got involved in discussions with classmates and professors in the College of Education, where he is pursuing a master’s degree. Those conversations were constructive, he says, in ways he generally doesn’t see elsewhere on campus.

Through his job in the parent-relations office, he heard from lots of angry mothers and fathers during the height of the protests, when dozens of students were camped out on the quad. “I don’t think my son or daughter should be exposed to all these protests,” they told him over the phone. And he would wonder: “Why don’t you? That should be part of what it means to learn.”

He didn’t actually say that. His instructions were simply to let parents vent. But occasionally, he says, someone would stop and ask him about his experience. People knew from his voice that he wasn’t white. So he would tell them: Since enrolling in June, he’s been harassed and intimidated on several occasions. It’s particularly bad after football games, he says, when drunken white men drive through the streets of downtown Columbia and unleash expressions of “toxic masculinity.” Once a big blue pickup truck, its headlights off, followed him to his apartment building.

After hearing Mr. Griffin describe his experiences, a caller would usually go silent for a few seconds, then refer to isolated incidents of racism. One parent told him she’d been sexually harassed a lot in college, as if to say that we all have to deal with bad stuff.

“That’s part of the culture in Columbia,” says Mr. Griffin. “Basically, people are asleep. To try to wake them up is to jolt them to a reality they don’t want to face.”

The turmoil at Missouri resulted in new leadership and a sense of urgency. The interim president, Michael Middleton, is deeply respected by black students. As a black undergraduate at Missouri in the 1960s, he lived that generation’s struggles, and his activism led to, among other things, the creation of the Legion of Black Collegians (the black student government) and the black-culture center.

Minority students are glad to see that the university has created an Office for Civil Rights and Title IX, concentrating functions formerly handled by several offices to deal more directly and openly with their concerns. And they are encouraged that a new position — vice chancellor for diversity, inclusion, and equity — has been created (Chuck Henson, a black professor of law, is filling it on an interim basis). A race-relations committee, including students, faculty members and administrators, formed last spring and meets regularly.

That said, students remain wary of what may ultimately prove to be token efforts. They are unsure how to go about improving campus culture. They’re mindful that progress needs to be tangible but also that change is hard.

Rhodesia McMillian, a doctoral student in educational leadership and policy analysis, is one of many students working with the administration on improving the recruitment and retention of minority students and faculty.

Her group, MU Policy Now, advocated for Mr. Middleton’s appointment, and she is part of a systemwide graduate-student leadership-development program. She’s committed to pushing Missouri to do more to retain more minority faculty members, noting that the professor who encouraged her to apply to the Ph.D. program has since been recruited away.

Ms. McMillian feels confident in her power to affect change. “I don’t need a bullhorn in the streets,” she says. “All I have to do is set up a meeting. If I don’t feel my concerns are listened to, I can take my talents elsewhere.”

Mr. Griffin, the graduate student who fielded calls from white parents, plans to continue engaging his classmates and professors. People in education policy and leadership, he says, need these discussions.

At the height of campus tensions, Mr. Griffin’s friends and mentors asked if he would transfer. “I was like, Of course not. Even though it has been rough, being a graduate student and a graduate assistant and a social activist here, I’m exactly where I need to be. I believe I can leave this place better than I found it.”

Ms. Walker, the former diversity peer educator, wants to see Missouri put together a full history of the university, one that is explicit about the role of race in its evolution and character. She wants to see more minority staff members in key positions, including in student health, counseling, and the civil-rights office.

Concerned Student 1950 remains active. The group is working to set up a meeting with Missouri’s Board of Curators, which recently held a listening session for students to talk about their experiences. Ms. Hairston spoke about her upbringing in Sacramento, having been homeless, and why it’s important for the university to embrace diversity. Asked why she came forward, Ms. Hairston, who is pregnant, says that when her child is in college and may experience some of the same problems, “I can’t say I didn’t try to make things better.”

Some student organizers will soon graduate, leaving behind a campus they hope can reinvent itself. Mr. Wilkins, who plans to pursue a master’s degree in divinity, says that he’s inspired by how students and professors, black and white, came together this fall, but also that he’s frustrated by continued resistance.

Mr. Wilkins, who sits on the race-relations committee with Mr. Middleton, expressed his frustration during the height of the turmoil. “I told him I was tired and that I don’t see much change,” recalls Mr. Wilkins. “He says, ‘Yeah, but you have to continue. I’ve been at this 50-plus years. If I haven’t given up, neither can you.’ "

“I will never forget that,” says Mr. Wilkins. “There was nothing to do but shut up and get back to work.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

Correction (1/4/2016, 10:48 a.m.): This article originally mischaracterized Michael Middleton’s role at the University of Missouri. He is interim president of the university system, not interim chancellor of the flagship campus.

Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to the editor. The Chronicle welcomes constructive discussion, and our moderators highlight contributions that are thoughtful and relevant. Add your comments below; we’ll review them shortly. Read our commenting policy here.