Martese Johnson thought he was following all the rules. He had made it out of Chicago, he had been admitted to an elite school, and he was now among the most recognizable leaders on campus.
But as he’d soon learn, his individual accomplishment wouldn’t keep his head from hitting the concrete or keep the sharp sting of an officer’s knee from finding the small of his back during the late hours of St. Patrick’s Day 2015.
He and a few friends had been hanging out on campus that night and decided to head to Trinity, a popular bar just off campus. As he approached the door, the owner asked for his ID. Johnson had lost his VA driver’s license a week or two earlier but had a second ID card from Illinois. What he didn’t realize was that because his Chicago ID was older, and given how often his family had moved, the zip code on that photo ID was different than that on his driver’s license. As the owner quizzed him, he gave the wrong zip code—so the bar owner turned him away.
“I walked away and immediately I was grabbed from behind by a police officer; it was less than a minute before it escalated into three officers slamming me to the ground,” Johnson told me. The officers, he believed, assumed he had been turned away from the bar for being underage and using a fake ID. As the officers held him on the ground, a gash opened on his forehead and blood began to trickle down his face, mixing with perspiration and tears.
“I go to UVA! I go to UVA! How could this happen?” Johnson screamed to the officers, assuming they must have taken him for a local resident. “I go to UVA!”
He recalled, “I was just wondering how this could happen. I felt that I had done everything I was supposed to, I had checked all of the boxes. I came from a rough background but I had made it to somewhere better. I thought the police were here truly to protect us, and now at that moment I was surprised again. I never believed Charlottesville could be as bad as Chicago.”
Johnson was handcuffed and shackled and taken by police to a local hospital, where ten stitches would be sewn into his head. He spent the night at the police station, unaware that his name had already become a national rallying cry.
As Johnson lay on the ground, the officers atop him, his friends had pulled out their cell phones and recorded video of his frantic screams. Once the video was posted online, it took just minutes for his shouts and pleas to go viral. Other students knew who he was and filled in the blanks for those following the story from afar—here was a campus leader, thrown to the ground and wounded for having misstated his zip code.
By the time he was released from jail the next morning, Johnson had twenty thousand new followers on Twitter and four hundred unread text messages in his phone. His name had been trending on Twitter overnight, with dozens of articles already written about the incident. He didn’t want any of it. Frankly, he was embarrassed. He washed his face, put on fresh clothes, and went to an Honor Committee meeting, where he hoped to regain some anonymity. Instead, the other committee members immediately asked him what had happened, expressed their support, and sent him home to rest.
Johnson faced two misdemeanor charges—public intoxication and obstruction of justice. Eventually, they would both be dropped.
But Johnson’s arrest—and the viral videos that captured his pain—prompted the next round of awakening. He had done everything right. And yet here he was, his head cracked open with two officers on his back. If this could happen to Martese Johnson, it could happen to any black college student. The incident served as a wake-up call to college students on campuses across the country—the privilege of education, and the disguise of respectability, can’t protect you. Even on the nation’s most elite campuses, your black body remains vulnerable.
“My situation was the one situation, of those that sparked protests, where the black man hadn’t been killed. It shattered all aspects of respectability politics. I was a kid who did everything I was supposed to have done. I wasn’t some weed-smoking gangster who didn’t pull up his pants. I was a student, doing what I was supposed to do, and I still ended up being harmed by police.”
It had been months since Martese Johnson’s arrest. A summer had come and gone. But as black students flocked back to college campuses in the fall of 2015, they brought with them a renewed energy. That summer had included the anniversary of Ferguson, and the deaths of Sandra Bland and Samuel DuBose.
While dozens of campuses would see protests, the most memorable was, unsurprisingly, at the University of Missouri. About thirty football players, all black, crowded the multipurpose room near the back of the university’s Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center one Friday night in November 2014.
Across from them sat Jonathan Butler. It had been five days since the twenty-five-year-old graduate student had begun a hunger strike, and his fellow protest organizers were worried about him. The protest had drawn little notice initially, but as it approached its first weekend, national attention had slowly begun to shift to this university campus dropped between St. Louis and Kansas City. By the following Monday morning, it would be the biggest story in the nation.
Butler had been raised in Omaha, hailing from a prominent family of ministers and businessmen. Before Mizzou, he had gotten a degree in business administration, and now he was pursuing a master’s in educational leadership. He had only recently become involved in campus activism and described himself as an unlikely protester.
Butler’s demand was that university president Tim Wolfe resign or be removed from office. Butler, like many black students at Mizzou and their allies, believed Wolfe was derelict in his duty to ensure their safety in light of a spate of racial incidents.
The University of Missouri, a majority-white campus of thirty-five thousand with about twenty-five hundred black students, is a school at which, despite the small percentage of black students, racial activism has brewed for decades. Like many colleges in the Midwest, Mizzou features a student body that is a cocktail of races, political beliefs, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Overall, the campus is relatively liberal compared to the more conservative section of Missouri that surrounds it. A thick spirit of discontent had settled at the core of the black student body during the past year as they watched the unrest unfolding in the streets of Ferguson, just two hours away.
It took just two days from when Butler stopped eating for members of the football team to inquire about his protest. First they wanted to know why he was doing it, a question they asked fellow members of Concerned Student 1950, a small but growing activist group of which he was a member and which was named after the year when black students first successfully enrolled at the university. Then they wanted to know how they could help.
Like many Division I athletes, members of the football team were segregated on campus in special dorms and had special course schedules. They felt removed from the rest of the student body as a whole and from the rest of the black student body in particular, even though the majority of the team was black. If change was coming to Mizzou—where it seems nearly every black student knows of a friend, roommate, or professor confronted by racist taunts or slurs—they wanted to play a role.
“I got the text message that the football players wanted to meet and I ran to get there,” said Reuben Faloughi, a Mizzou graduate student and one of the original eleven activists who founded Concerned Student 1950. This could be their chance, the activists knew. This would be their moment.
The movement’s presence on Mizzou’s campus had begun three months earlier, thanks to the work of three women, all University of Missouri seniors. The trio was gathered in Naomi Daugherty’s campus apartment in August 2014 when they decided they had to do something. Daugherty, Ashley Bland, and Kailynd Beck were angered and hurt as they watched their Twitter and Instagram feeds flood with images of the spot in Ferguson where Michael Brown had been shot and killed by a police officer.
Like many of Mizzou’s black students, Beck had grown up in St. Louis, and she was getting most of her updates not from media outlets but from the posts of high school friends and family members who had arr
ived in Ferguson to protest.
“A lot of my people were literally on the ground where it happened,” Beck told me. “So I said: ‘Why don’t we start something together?’”
First the women started an “MU for Mike Brown” account on Twitter and Facebook; then they set up an email address. Within an hour, more than sixty students had messaged them to say they wanted to join the protest group. The group caught fire as students returned to campus eager to do something about the unrest developing just an hour and a half away from their dorms.
The lack of an official statement from university officials on Michael Brown’s death only stirred the discord. Enraged by the eighteen-year-old’s death and by what they saw as inattentiveness by the university administration, MU for Mike Brown was soon hosting vigils, rallies, demonstrations, and, most crucially, weekly planning meetings for would-be activists.
Two die-ins, during which participants lie flat on the ground in public spaces, held on campus drew hundreds of participants. Many, including Butler, traveled to Ferguson to participate in the protests there. But the newfound racial activism came as the nation, and the state of Missouri, remained bitterly divided about the events in Ferguson. In November 2014, as the grand jury concluded that the evidence did not support indicting Officer Darren Wilson, a new round of riots began in Ferguson, and with them declarations of “we told you so” from those skeptical of the growing protest movement.
The president of the police union in Columbia, Missouri, organized a “Darren Wilson day” in honor of the police officer who killed Michael Brown. Dozens of students took to Yik Yak, an anonymous message board app popular on college campuses, to decry the protests. “They were calling us monkeys, and niggers,” said Ashley Bland, one of the MU for Mike Brown founders. “It was blatant, it wasn’t even hidden racism.” In early December, after the grand jury’s decision, a popular campus nightclub gave out wristbands that read HANDS UP, PANTS UP. The establishment said it was a play on their dress code, while activists saw it as a mockery of a popular protest chant. The following Friday, at least ninety students protested outside the nightclub, blocking traffic and chanting. The nightclub apologized in a Facebook post.
Those protest actions, the counterprotests, and the clashes between these two mobilized groups were symbolic of what was to come. As the daily vigils in Ferguson and Baltimore began to wane, the mantle was soon taken up on campuses across the country. Young men and women saw themselves in the protest leaders, and in the names and faces of the men and women who had been killed by police.
Mizzou student body president Payton Head, twenty-one, could barely remember what day it was, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing as he wandered into his office late on a Friday night in November 2015. The room was full of student government colleagues and campus activists. In the past week, they had successfully run out their university president and his boss, the chancellor, had come under vicious attack by political partisans, and in the process Head had become the new faces of black campus activism.
Sunk into his chair, Head picked at a Chipotle bowl before pausing to look up at the Albert Einstein quote he had written in Mizzou gold above his desk: “The world will not be destroyed by evil, but by those who watch without doing anything.”
A week earlier, Head had been in Kansas City with activists as they confronted university president Tim Wolfe outside a fundraiser. Head had worked closely with Wolfe and liked him, and up until that point he had thought the president might be able to calm the anger of the black student body while retaining his job. When Wolfe tried, and failed, to explain to activists what systemic oppression was, Head changed his mind. If the university president could not adequately define and explain the role of systemic oppression, how would he effectively lead a university to address it? It was clear that Tim Wolfe hadn’t been listening to his own students.
Head had been elected on a platform that emphasized inclusion, and most of his prior campus government work had centered around issues of diversity, social justice, and equity. A year after he had become the public spokesperson for the student body, his on-campus office was overflowing with university apparel, the walls and counters covered in pictures: one from his White House fellowship, one each from meetings with Senators Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt, and the official photo from his run for student body president, which included his campaign slogan boldly across the top: BELIEVE WITH US: IGNITE MIZZOU.
The slogan was taken from a speech by the school’s chancellor to mark the university’s 175th anniversary, given near the historic columns that stand on campus, which that night were illuminated by bright lights resembling flames. “Keep the fire rolling,” the chancellor implored. Head took the urging to heart.
Raised in Chicago, Head first visited Mizzou because his twin sister was interested in the journalism school. They both fell in love with the campus and were soon enrolled. Head loved his classmates and Columbia but found himself unnerved time and time again by the stories he heard from fellow black students. Many upperclassmen had tales of being confronted by drunken men with Confederate flags. A close friend of Head’s showed up at a party at a fraternity house only to be told she couldn’t come in—only white girls were welcome, they explained to her. She transferred.
In 2013, the spring of his sophomore year, Head was walking through Greektown, the stretch of fraternity and sorority houses near campus, when a group of white kids sitting in the back of a pickup truck began screaming the n-word at him. “At that moment, I didn’t know what to do,” Head said. “My high school was like eighty-seven percent black; I didn’t know how to deal with racism blatantly being thrown in my face.”
It’s the kind of story that many of Mizzou’s black students say that they too can tell. Dewy-eyed freshmen get the same warning from campus elders in Mizzou’s black community: It’s going to happen to you, just wait.
That fall at Mizzou, activists participated in a series of other, less race-based protests, against sexual assault on campus, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the decision by President Wolfe to cut health care for graduate students. But, above all, the semester-long protests were propelled by a series of racial incidents on campus that began when, in September, Head was again confronted by a pickup truck.
Head was walking with a friend late one night, on their way to the cookie shop in downtown Columbia, when a pickup truck drove up and the white men inside began screaming the n-word at them. “What made me most angry about that situation was the fact that I had been working on inclusion initiatives this entire year,” Head said. “I’m getting to the end of my time in office and I’m still seeing the same things.”
Head took to Facebook, writing an impassioned post about the incident, calling for change on campus. It was unacceptable, the student body president declared, that nearly every black student he knew on campus had a similar story. Something, he said, had to change. “I didn’t realize the platform that was out there,” Head said. Like Martese Johnson, he had ascended to roles of power and privilege on campus and realized his personal responsibility to speak up in the face of injustice.
“If Payton had posted this being a sophomore from Chicago, everybody would be like ‘Okay, that’s bad.’ But Payton posting from the privilege of the MSA [Missouri Students Association] president’s office, there’s a platform where people actually listen,” Head told me.
The post went viral; it was shared hundreds of times, prompting media coverage from both local and national outlets. But it still took six days before the campus administration addressed the incident, calling Head and asking him if he would help write the chancellor’s statement.
The campus activists decided they’d had enough. Four days after Head’s incident, three students, Ayanna Poole, DeShaunya Ware, and Jonathan Butler, issued a call to action to sixty student leaders. Eight people responded, and the group of eleven decided they would confront Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin and President Wolfe at homecoming.
“We have this dange
rous culture of apathy where things aren’t being addressed,” Butler said. “If leadership wasn’t going to do something, we had to do something.”
At the homecoming parade, the group surrounded Wolfe’s car, linking arms and launching into speeches decrying the racial attacks and declaring they felt unsafe on campus. The university president didn’t talk to the students, and police soon arrived to disperse them. The activists were shocked that the president hadn’t gotten out of the car to speak with them.
In the days that followed, the activists assumed Wolfe would reach out to them to smooth things over and discuss what had happened. He didn’t.
The inaction dismayed student leaders. Head called the president’s office himself, privately urging Wolfe to reach out to the student group and make amends. His pleas were ignored. “Every day we had to wait for him to respond was another slap in the face,” Reuben Faloughi said.
After more than a week, the students from the homecoming protest set up a meeting with members of the administration themselves. The protests earned the support of large swaths of the student body, but they certainly weren’t without detractors. Several preexisting activist groups on campus didn’t like the tactics of the eleven students, who then formed Concerned Student 1950. Even among the university’s black student body, some thought (and still think) that everything was being blown out of proportion.
“I’ve heard of a couple of racial incidents, but I don’t think it necessarily warrants a hunger strike,” said Rodney McFaul, a junior at Mizzou, who is black and who, like me, grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He reached out to me when he heard I was headed to campus to cover the unrest. “I’m not sure what removing the president of the university will do to combat racism on campus; no administrator is going to be able to convince students not to be racist.”
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