For nearly two months, students and faculty at Missouri protested the way the school’s president had failed to act after a series of racial incidents on the campus in Columbia, the state’s capital.
Ever since Sept. 12, when Payton Head, president of the Missouri Student Association, went on Facebook to describe a campus incident during which anti-black slurs were hurled at him, university president Tim Wolfe has been under pressure.
More incidents followed as faculty threatened a walkout and another student began a hunger strike, saying he wouldn’t stop until Wolfe stepped down. But it wasn’t until 32 members of Missouri’s football team said they wouldn’t play until Wolfe was gone that something happened.