MU hunger striker reflects on the long road to progress

Hauling a laptop in his bag, Jonathan Butler looked like another graduate student shuffling across the tiled floor of Jesse Hall.

His winter stocking cap and thick-framed glasses might as well be a disguise. Butler is no regular student. On Tuesday morning, Butler, 25, was emerging from a weeklong hunger strike and his central role in the campus drama that upended the University of Missouri this week.

“I feel uncomfortable with the attention,” Butler said. “I’m not used to it, and I didn’t do it for the attention. I really just wanted the message to get out.”

For days, students have ringed around him both physically and emotionally — shielding him from strangers and unwelcome journalists — seeking to protect him even as he was threatening to starve himself to force the university’s system president to resign.

In the end, Butler won, though he credits the victory to his fellow activists. As the rest of the university woke up Tuesday still figuring out what had happened, he was sitting alone.

Butler — who is studying educational leadership and policy analysis — is part of a group of black students who toppled the university’s top administrators, system president Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, who announced their resignations Monday after an autumn of protests.

For activists, it was about years of racist remarks hurled at black students by people at campus parties and on the streets, and about white administrators’ awkwardness — or silence — in response to protesters’ calls to make a majority-white campus more welcoming to students of color.

The fuse was lit by last year’s protests in Ferguson, Mo., after a white police officer shot an unarmed black 18-year-old. Butler was among the students from Mizzou who made the two-hour drive to the St. Louis suburb to join in.

Butler, an Omaha, Neb., native, said Ferguson was the first time he’d seen black collective action on a mass scale. For a month, he shuttled the 100 miles from campus to Ferguson.

“It was monumental in terms of how it influenced me,” Butler said, calling what came next “the post-Ferguson effect.”

Butler began organizing with other students and eventually became one of the 11 students who surrounded Wolfe’s car at the university’s homecoming parade in October. Wolfe didn’t talk to the students as police arrived to force them away.

As Wolfe seemed to stumble when confronted by the students’ demands for some kind of decisive response to racial discomfort on campus, he only became a bigger target. Wolfe stopped tweeting. Activists saw him as uncommunicative and confronted him outside a fundraiser in Kansas City.

Butler decided more drastic action was required.

“We did our due diligence,” Butler said. “We wrote letters. We sent emails. We sent tweets. We’ve been to diversity forums. We’ve attended different organizations. We’ve done rallies. We’ve done all the other things, trying to get our voices heard in other formats. … We’ve been doing these things for the past year, year and a half — no response.”

So on Nov. 2, Butler announced he was going on a hunger strike until Wolfe quit.

“It’s not just racism. It’s not just sexism. There’s so many things happening on campus that have to be corrected. We have leadership that’s not competent enough to even empathize with students,” Butler said Tuesday.

Butler didn’t tell his friends about the hunger strike until the night before, on Nov. 1. The next morning, he prayed with his friends, and his last meal was half a waffle.

Butler said antagonists had stopped by and taunted him by waving candy bars at him and other activists. He said protesters were disturbed by recurring verbal attacks on campus and by journalists who were intruding on intense debates happening privately inside the tent area.

“We were having some difficult dialogues there, talking about race,” Butler said. “That’s a very sensitive space to be in and be vulnerable in. It was necessary to keep that space very healthy, a very open space for dialogue, versus it being a space where people are going to cover a story, exoticize people who are going through pain and struggle.”

After Wolfe resigned, protesters formed a human shield around the campsite, where celebrations were happening, and chanted for media to stay away, even shoving some photographers who refused to move.

“For me it’s about respect and understanding, that there are other ways to cover this story,” Butler said, noting that journalists should have reported more on the hostile campus climate. “You saying in that moment, ‘That was the only way to cover the story,’ that wasn’t you doing your due diligence.”

Butler added, “Why didn’t (journalists) get more coverage of the human shield, get B-roll of that?”

On Tuesday, students allowed reporters back into the camp.

Butler plans to graduate in May and still wants to focus on pushing the university system’s board of curators to give “shared governance” to students, teachers and staff at the system’s universities — allowing them to have more input into big hiring and operational decisions.

“Right now I don’t seek a national spotlight,” Butler said when asked if he wanted to expand his reach nationally. “It’s not something I’m desiring at all because I want to stay close to my community, I want to stay close to my people. Right now, my community and my people are students here at the university.”

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 8:46 PM with the headline "MU hunger striker reflects on the long road to progress."