They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  To be clear, McFaul wasn’t alone in his skepticism.

  To critics and many white Americans, the campus push to oust President Wolfe represented what McFaul observed: an overreaction to a series of unrelated racial incidents that no administrator could have prevented, and which President Wolfe was under no obligation to respond to. To supporters and many black Americans, the protests became a decisive victory, a validation of the unsuccessful struggles undertaken by countless others before them.

  And to organizers, activists, and observers of the ongoing Black Lives Matter social justice movement, the upending of the state’s most prominent and beloved college campus represented the next chapter in the still-accruing legacy of Ferguson, Missouri. The taking up of the protest mantle on these campuses marked a new evolution for the movement, as black men and women who would have had the privilege of staying at home and off the streets were overcome with the urgency of the moment.

  From Ferguson to Mizzou—it was fitting that Missouri played such a crucial role in the nation’s new reckoning with race and justice. The state sits near the exact geographic center of the nation, pulled at one time between the free states to the north and its fellow slave states to the south. It was here that a court handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision, ruling that a black man was not, in fact, in the eyes of our nation a man with inalienable rights.

  “It’s been a long boil,” said Scott Brooks, a Mizzou sociology professor who spoke at several of the 2014 rallies. “Students felt like they weren’t being heard and the university wasn’t taking them seriously. And in a post-Ferguson world, increasingly the students felt the mantra of ‘all deliberate speed.’”

  The headlines flowing out of Columbia reawoke and enraged many black alumni, who saw in these anecdotes an experience that was all too familiar.

  “Many of us found ourselves protesting similar incidents on campus,” a group of more than 780 black alumni wrote in an open letter in early November 2015. “We find it highly unacceptable that many of these issues are not only continuing, but have become more pervasive.” The letter outlined a list of incidents dating back to 2004, when a student wrote a piece for the campus newspaper blaming black students for vandalism, and recalled an incident in 2010 when two white students threw cotton balls on the lawn of the Black Culture Center. After the cotton ball incident, and with university officials considering a proposal to end affirmative action policies at state universities, black leaders on campus desperately approached the athletic teams.

  “The response was lackluster,” recalled Anthony Martin, a Mizzou grad who said that after several attempts, the campus activists essentially gave up on trying to get football and basketball players to join their demonstrations. “There just wasn’t at that time a lot of camaraderie between student organizations and athletes.”

  But as they walked graduation stages in the early 2010s, Martin’s generation looked back at what they considered an opportunity missed, and passed along a message to fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, student government leaders, and campus activists who were coming up behind them. “If you can get the athletic department and the student body leadership together, that’s a force to be reckoned with,” Martin said to me, recalling conversations with Head, who is his fraternity brother, and others. “When you mess with someone’s money, you mess with their livelihood. If you can get the athletes, the university can’t ignore you.”

  Now, buoyed by the boycotting football team, Concerned Student 1950 doubled down on its demands, and the number of activists camped out on the university quad swelled to dozens. Would they be able to pull off the kind of campus shakeup in 2015 that campus activists had desired for more than a decade?

  But they still weren’t sure. President Wolfe had told them as recently as the Friday before that he was not going to step down, a sentiment he reiterated in a statement over the weekend. Late Sunday night, with his hunger strike about to enter its seventh day, Jonathan Butler said he had almost no confidence that Wolfe would resign.

  The Mizzou activists, like many of the organizers in Ferguson and elsewhere, communicated constantly using a group-text app called GroupMe, firing off hundreds of messages a day in a group they titled We Gon Be Alright, after a hip-hop track by Kendrick Lamar that has become the unofficial anthem of this generation of black protesters.

  Thus far, the victories of Concerned Student 1950 had been few. Butler’s hunger strike had yet to gain much national attention. Some other campus activist groups were hesitant to cosign Concerned Student’s tactics.

  A message on Monday morning summoned the Concerned Student 1950 leaders to another meeting with the football team. The boycott had become the leading story in the nation, and now dozens of additional players—many of them white—wanted to hear from Butler directly.

  They crowded into a small theater in the university’s athletic complex, typically used to review game footage, and Butler took the microphone. “I shared with them my reasoning [for the hunger strike], why I was doing this. And I also shared with them my experience, going back to as an undergrad, in 2008, when I had the n-word written on my door, to…the cotton ball situation,” Butler said. “I just explained that through my undergrad career and now as a graduate student, nothing has changed.” As the meeting ended, the players decided they would join the protest. They would not play or practice until Butler’s demands were met. They gathered around Butler and posed for a picture.

  Just before noon the next morning, November 9, Butler met with the football team, and as Head dashed across campus in search of the Board of Curators meeting for which he was running desperately late, their phones buzzed with a new message in the group chat.

  President Wolfe had resigned. They had won.

  When Butler stepped to the microphone Monday afternoon to make his first public statement since Wolfe’s resignation, his T-shirt declaring I LOVE MY BLACKNESS AND YOURS—a slogan made popular by several national Black Lives Matter activists—he declared his allegiance, loud and clear, to the movement birthed in Ferguson.

  “When we look at what has been happening on campus in terms of activism with black students…it would be inappropriate if I did not acknowledge the people who got us here,” Butler said. “When we look at post-Ferguson activism, the movement that was started in terms of igniting the fire with black students was ignited with three queer black women who started MU for Mike Brown.”

  By the time I arrived on campus, the Mizzou protesters were struggling to figure out what would happen next. They hadn’t exactly been ready to win; they hadn’t expected Wolfe to resign—at least not as quickly as he had. Now what?

  What began as a last-ditch personal protest had become one of recent history’s most significant victories for student activism. The throng of media who had come to cover a football team’s boycott were instead now scrambling to contextualize a university coup d’état with roots tracing back through years of unaddressed campus racial tension endured by black students as reliably as the school’s white leaders chose to ignore it. Here was a campus protest built to dismantle institutional racism whose organizers had first been emboldened by a police shooting in a small St. Louis suburb a year earlier.

  A cloud of chaos would hover over campus for the following week, with the president’s resignation prompting clashes between activists and the media about the framing of coverage, as well as about the right of reporters and photographers to access protests held in public space. New conversations started up about race on campus, not just at Mizzou, but at universities nationwide, as did a fresh spate of racial threats, primarily from the same anonymous online trolls who surface each time the nation begins to grapple with race. For at least one night, these threats thrust the school’s black community into a state of traumatized paralysis.

  Critics couldn’t understand the abrupt resignations, or the grievances being voiced by the media-shy protest groups. In these young activists, they saw a group who were at best misguided, at worst liars
and frauds; these critics demanded definitive proof that racist incidents had occurred. But even as questions were being raised in the national media about whether or not these actions had taken place, similar acts of racial hatred kept happening at Mizzou.

  In the days after Wolfe’s resignation, a drunken white man appeared in the middle of campus, yelling threats at students who walked past; Yik Yak message boards filled with violent threats toward black students that prompted hundreds to skip classes and avoid campus; and the sign outside the Black Culture Center was vandalized overnight, the word “black” covered in spray paint.

  When that news broke out on the night of Tuesday, November 10, 2015, more than a hundred student leaders were assembled for a once-a-semester joint meeting of student organization heads. As they sat in a conference room, they quickly began spreading the word to their fraternities and sororities and other organizations. State troopers soon arrived at the meeting and escorted the entire group across campus to the Black Culture Center, which had been secured by police. Meanwhile, reports of drunken white students screaming racial slurs at black students had prompted social media hysteria. Most likely there were a handful of foolish, bigoted students out and about that night—but judging by social media, a reasonable person would have assumed that the entire campus was besieged by hooded terrorists.

  By now, Head had heard from several students that white men claiming to be KKK members were on campus. That was not confirmed, but in the heat of the moment, the rumors felt frightening. Head and others began reaching out to the various law enforcement and civil rights contacts they had gathered in the subsequent days—school administrators, Jesse Jackson, an official at the Department of Justice, and, of course, their parents. Head posted a Facebook status urging students to stay inside and away from windows.

  Dozens of black students poured away from the school, crowding into off-campus apartments. Butler and other activists used their group texts to organize car pools. Worried mothers and fathers of black and white students frantically called their freshman and sophomore sons and daughters, who stayed holed up in their dorms if they couldn’t find a ride off campus.

  No one was hurt that night, but many were traumatized. Just hours after triumphant victory, it was a painful return to reality: the resignation of the president hadn’t changed the culture of the campus and the state in which they lived.

  One of the hardest things for many of the activists I interviewed on and off campus was figuring out what should come next. Should they continue to fight? Should they find “real” jobs? Should they become politicians? Gadflies? Full-time activists?

  Equally hard was deciphering what, exactly, the victories they had earned would mean both in the short term and in the long term. They had run out the top university administrators and forced a campus to acknowledge a discontent it had long ignored among its black student body. But would things actually get better? And what would be the collateral consequences? The following fall, enrollment at Mizzou dropped by twenty-six hundred students, a clear cost of the stigma associated with the unrest.

  A few days after Wolfe’s resignation, Butler and the others led a march through campus. They chanted and cheered, danced and gyrated through campus buildings and the row of fraternity and sorority houses that make up Greektown. It was a defiant display of jubilation, a declaration to their campus that this fight, though seemingly settled, still wasn’t over. There was still work left to be done.

  The march that day ended in an auditorium, the kind that hosts plays and concerts on almost every college campus in America. Gathered by the stage, the fifty or so students who remained, almost all black, stood in a circle, holding hands or with arms over shoulders. Then someone turned on the sound system. For what may have been the millionth time, the beginning chords were heard of “Alright.” The young activists were soon jumping and dancing to the declaration of perseverance that had become their battle hymn.

  Alls my life I has to fight

  I didn’t yet know all of the details of the story’s end, but as I listened to the jubilant chants and watched as dozens of students jumped and danced in unison, I could feel the truth emanating from the words echoing into the auditorium rafters.

  We gon’ be alright, we gon’ be alright, we gon’ be alright

  AFTERWORD

  Three Days in July

  The Movement for Black Lives—as activists had begun calling the protest movement—and the national push for police reform had faded from the national consciousness during the first months of 2016, in stark contrast to its constant presence in 2014 and for most of 2015. There were bursts of attention—ongoing fallout in Chicago following the release in late 2015 of the video of Laquan McDonald being shot and killed, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, most significantly—but in each instance Americans’ focus on race and justice landed like another strong wave, only to recede right back into the wide ocean.

  Six months into 2016, I was fact-checking our latest piece. My colleague Kimberly Kindy and I had analyzed the number of Americans killed to date and discovered that even after more than a year of protests and outrage, police nationwide were on pace to take more lives in 2016 than they had in 2015. Yet none of the men and women killed by police in 2016 had received the same level of attention from the media or had galvanized activists as had those killed just months earlier.

  The calendar had been predictably dominated by the presidential election, but even there, policing had yet to become a major focus of debate. For racial justice activists, the election was an opportunity to pressure candidates to adopt positions on policing and criminal justice reform, as well as to speak out on other issues of racial disparity. It remained to be seen how successful they would be.

  “People know that the police are still killing people. What we’ve got to figure out now is what a victory looks like,” Kayla Reed, the Ferguson protester still working for the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis, told me in early 2016. “There isn’t going to be a single bill passed that will suddenly encompass all of the ways the system marginalizes black and brown people. We have to redo the whole damn thing.”

  Many of the young activists who had been driven into the street by the police killings of 2014 and 2015 had begun to move away from daily protesting and organizing work. Kayla Reed and Johnetta Elzie had both reenrolled in college classes. After his run for mayor, DeRay Mckesson had rejoined the Baltimore City Schools as an administrator. Shaun King, now a New York Daily News columnist, Kwame Rose, and Martese Johnson had all assumed roles as surrogates for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, rallying voters on his behalf.

  Many of them and others in the movement felt they needed to catch their breath. Robust conversations circulated about the viralization of the deaths of individuals and the fetishizing of black death. Perhaps, some argued, not every video needed to be shared and played on a constant loop. “It’s traumatic to see a hashtag of someone killed by the police every day; it messes with your psyche,” Reed said. “And [the protest movement] is bigger than just the police.” How could such a boisterous and seemingly omnipresent protest movement just fade from the streets? Where had the movement for black life gone?

  As I finished a round of fact-checking, a tweet from DeRay Mckesson with the hashtag #AltonSterling caught my eye. It took me seconds to find the video, shot with a cell phone camera, of Sterling’s final moments on July 5, 2016—two officers are yelling at him, they Tase him, they tackle him, and then the bullets are fired into his chest.

  The Post has an overnight reporting desk, a team of night-owl reporters who handle late-breaking news, so I flagged the shooting for my colleagues to make sure they had seen it. And then I went home to wait.

  I paced my living room, and later my bedroom, refreshing Twitter. I follow a few thousand people, and with each refresh of my phone a new group of them were voicing pain, anger, and outrage as they, too, watched the video.

  We each cope with these deaths differently. I escape
by reporting: making calls, digging into the police department that was involved, and tracking down the friends and family of the slain to better understand how the moment of their death fits within the context of the rest of their life. Doing this keeps my mind busy. Often we all have an urge to “do something.” For me, reporting is that something.

  The videos that surface at night are typically the hardest. The night of Sterling’s death, I tried to do a little preliminary reporting, but I couldn’t. It was too late to call anyone.

  I set an early alarm, knowing that my job the next day would be to find witnesses, law enforcement officials, and context. And then I lay restless. How do you sleep when you know that soon you’ll need to tell the story of the death of yet another black man? I was taken back to the countless days when the fierce urgency surrounding the latest black person killed by the police had dictated my sleep, work, and life. It felt like the night the video of Walter Scott was released, the afternoon the officer who killed Sam DuBose was charged, and the night the KKK was rumored to be at Mizzou after President Wolfe’s resignation.

  When my phone went off, I’d been asleep only minutes. I jolted out of bed. Before I could catch my breath, a frantic day of reporting and writing was already behind me. I stayed in the newsroom until late that night, finalizing our coverage of Sterling’s death and the national outrage it had awoken.

  Sometime around 11 p.m., a friend from college sent me a link to a live Facebook video feed from a woman in Minnesota. An officer had just shot her boyfriend, she screamed. As the camera panned, you could see a dying Philando Castile struggling to seize his final breaths. Over the woman’s shoulder stood the officer who had shot him, his gun still trained on the dying man.