Fear gripped MU during last year’s racial protests; according to news reports

Five months after the University of Missouri administration was toppled by a series of race-related student protests, emails may reveal the depths of fear that gripped the Columbia campus at the time.

Emails correspondence among some key campus leader were requested by electronic news operations to learn a bit of what was going on behind the scenes at Mizzou during protests in October and November of 2015.

Student protests that called for the resignation of the university system president, culminated with a tent city erected on a campus quadrangle, a student hunger strike, and the football team refusing to play a game. It led to then President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigning.

Heat Street and National Review report that their email request yielded 7,400 pages of records and their analysis of them show that “By mid November, the mood on campus had become even more hostile... Racist comments and rumors had circulated on Yik-Yak; the black student-body president erroneously reported that the KKK was on campus, to the horror of many black students; and non-minority students and faculty quietly wrote to the administration that they felt increasingly targeted, silenced, and fearful.”

This story was originally published April 20, 2016 at 3:09 PM with the headline "Fear gripped MU during last year’s racial protests; according to news reports."