What Mizzou Taught Me

Meen Choi for The Chronicle Review

As the chair of the women’s- and gender-studies department introduced me to the audience gathered at the University of Missouri’s Ellis Auditorium, I tried to hold back tears. Eighteen years earlier, I had enrolled at Mizzou as a bookish teenager. On this spring day, I was now a tenured professor and a published author returning to my alma mater to talk about my new book. The sight of an audience full of old classmates, former mentors, and the current students I had met through social media was so overwhelming I had to take a deep breath and steady myself as I approached the podium. I opened with this:

“Everything I’m good at today, I learned how to do it at Mizzou.”

It’s true. The faculty in religious studies rescued me from my lukewarm feelings about my time in the famed J-school and would eventually encourage me to get a graduate degree. I was a fixture at the campus Women’s Center, and I discovered feminism and theories of oppression while spending hours chatting about campus politics and pop culture with other center regulars. The excellent teaching in the Honors College is the model for my own classes, and I try to ask students the same types of provocative questions that my professors asked me — the questions that followed me home on semester breaks and shaped my summer research projects. My advisers’ generosity and support fueled my own availability to students sorting out their professional paths.

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

I adored my time at Mizzou — my instructors, my friends, my experiences, all treasures that I find any excuse to talk about.

But there was a lot to fear during those years.

As one of what felt like a handful of black students who enrolled in the fall of 1997, I soon underwent a typical “black orientation,” which wasn’t much different from the “gay orientation":

“Don’t walk through Greektown at night; someone will yell ‘nigger’ at you.”

“I think there was a lynching on campus back in the day.”

“People think you’re dumb because you are on a minority scholarship.”

None of this advice — handed down casually in the dining halls, around the front desks of dorms, or at the black-student government’s annual fall festival — was particularly shocking. Sure, there were racists at Mizzou, same as everywhere else.

The fear set in later, when I became part of a student movement that focused on holding the administration accountable for a rash of hate crimes on campus, the lack of resources for LGBTQ students, and a chilling climate for students who often existed at the margins of campus culture. This was before Twitter, GroupMe, Instagram. We printed T-shirts with the logo INCLUSION NOW! We passed out leaflets. We wore armbands. We disrupted a Board of Curators meeting. We wrote editorials in the school newspaper. We published a report on all the insulting graffiti on campus and first-hand accounts of bias. We felt we were slowly changing the campus climate.

Conjuring up those memories makes my stomach churn. We student activists received threatening letters in our mailboxes and, in the days of landlines, strange phone calls to our apartments. Email, still a novelty, delivered messages about who needed to shut up and die.

Pranks or promises? You never knew. Will someone follow me into a parking garage? Will I meet the authors of the strange letter I found at my doorstep in a dark corner of the library or an unattended bathroom? Will the man in the truck yelling “nigger” at us drive off — or will he hit the brakes, pull over, and teach us a lesson?

You sink into a hypervigilance that some read as paranoia. But the humiliation and fear become part of you. Every cell of your 19-year-old body holds the anxiety of the moments when you are put in your place because you dared to come into someone else’s home and thought you could make it yours, too.

I was fortunate that I survived most (but not all) of it. I found student activism, intellectual pursuits, and beloved community. I was one of the lucky ones. I had been a scholarship kid from a private school, so I was academically prepared, and I had been racially rejected enough socially that my resilience had been honed. Yet some of the kids from mostly black schools and communities found it hard to replicate those support systems when they got to the campus. For them, Mizzou started as a dream school but wound up being a waking nightmare.

As the nation watches the ire and the irritation, the eloquence and earnestness of the Mizzou students involved in Concerned Student 1950, they are watching in part a humiliation that can never find full articulation. Many black students at Mizzou, then and now, are in a constant state of absorbing contempt and feeling embarrassed that they ever felt anything at all. Campus protest is not only a response to the university’s failing to meet students’ wants or needs. It’s about a deep disappointment that college — the obsessive goal of so many young people — is no different from the rest of the world. But at least campuses are also where you learn that another world might be possible.

Black graduates of Mizzou know that Concerned Student 1950 is another flash point for a university that has been down this road before, and we are hopeful.

When critics mock students for wanting safe spaces, they often argue that political correctness is undermining education and that students today are “too sensitive.” Rarely do I ever hear any curiosity about what students are seeking shelter from; when my friends and I peered around the corners of our sprawling campus, dissenting opinions were the least of our worries.

In the relative sanctuary of our dorms, we would speculate about the whereabouts of Lloyd Gaines. Gaines was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the University of Missouri School of Law, which had barred black students from entry. He won his case against the state in 1938 but disappeared before he could enroll. His name graces the campus black culture center, where my friends threw me my 19th birthday party.

In telling each other the ghost stories of Mizzou’s past, we were recognizing the progress made over decades — look at how much has changed, we are here now! And in speculating about what happened to Gaines, wondering if the stories about his body being buried on campus were true, we were sharing our fear.

Shortly after the unrest in Ferguson unfolded, I organized a Twitter campaign named #FergusonSyllabus to help educators discuss the national crisis in the classroom. I figured that encouraging conversations about Ferguson was the least I could do to pay back the state that gave me so much. I soon became a “talking head,” responding to journalists from local and national papers, making a few appearances on cable news, and fielding invitations from student groups, encouraging open and honest dialogue. A colleague asked me, “Is this weird for you to be in the spotlight like this?”

“Not really; I guess this isn’t that different from when I was a student at Missouri.”

Everything that I’m good at today — stifling my fear, suppressing the desire to engage Twitter trolls who call me a hack or ungrateful or stupid, standing up for what I think is right — I learned how to do at Mizzou.

Marcia Chatelain is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of South Side Girls (Duke University Press, 2015).