Tension and fear continue to roil the University of Missouri

reporting from COLUMBIA, Mo. —  On the desolate Arts & Sciences mall, 18-year-old freshman Kyra Guerrero sat alone Wednesday, sipping a cup of coffee.

The University of Missouri’s normally bustling sidewalks were eerily empty. The black activists’ tent city on a nearby quad was gone, removed overnight.

Many students refused to come to campus Wednesday, kept away by death threats made against black students a night earlier. But Guerrero — staging her own kind of protest — refused to stay home.

It angered her “that someone was going to stop me from attending Spanish!” said Guerrero, who is multiracial. “I like Spanish.”

Two days after a turbulent semester of racial protests culminated with stunning resignation announcements from the University of Missouri system president and the campus chancellor, raw emotions, fear and racial tension continued to fracture the campus.

On Monday, student protests gave way to celebration after the resignations. But the mood swiftly turned to resentment when activists and journalists scuffled at a protest.

By Tuesday night, the mood turned fearful when a series of threats made on the anonymous social media platform Yik Yak sent the campus into a spiral of uncertainty and distrust.

“It’s been very fragile,” Guerrero said.

Black students sheltered with friends off campus. One of the more chilling threats had warned: “I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see.”

On Wednesday morning, a white 19-year-old Missouri University of Science & Technology student, Hunter Park, was arrested at his campus almost 100 miles away in Rolla on suspicion of posting several of the death threats. He was being held without bond.

A second white student, Northwest Missouri State University freshman Connor B. Stottlemyre, 19, was arrested in his dorm in Maryville, Mo. -- more than 200 miles from Columbia -- according to the Kansas City Star. A university spokesman told the newspaper that Stottlemyre’s threat, also on Yik Yak, read, in part, “I’m gonna shoot any black people tomorrow, so be ready.”

Earl Dunn, a 22-year-old senior studying finance, sat in the university’s empty student center and contemplated Park’s arrest.

“I really want to know — does he have any ill will toward black people? Or was he just talking in anger?” Dunn said. “I guess he felt safe talking anonymously on Yik Yak, but in this day and age, is anything really anonymous?”

But the fear had already taken hold on campus, and other incidents stirred alarm.

One black student said on Twitter that she’d been intimidated by men in a truck. Others reported that a white man was shouting and cursing in an angry, unhinged speech in the speaker’s circle by the library.

Students — including student body president Payton Head — posted several “confirmed” reports that the Ku Klux Klan was on campus, which turned out to be false, according to the campus police department.

Since the resignations of system President Tim Wolfe and university Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, black activists have increasingly withdrawn from the public square. The tent city erected by the Concerned Student 1950 movement was gone Wednesday — although about 100 demonstrators marched from the black culture center to the student center.

But powerful messages continued to be shared on Twitter, where activists used the #BlackOnCampus hashtag to describe their own experiences.

Jonathan Butler, who recently ended a seven-day hunger strike seeking Wolfe’s removal, wrote Wednesday that he had been told that “talking about race and racism is being ‘oversensitive.’”

In opposing comments on Yik Yak, others aired their own frustrations.

“Wolfe resigned! Racism is dead!! No one will ever do anything offensive at Mizzou ever again!!!!” one user wrote sarcastically, drawing 277 “upvotes” of approval.

“It [ticks] me off how the media is reporting on this like Loftin and Wolfe were huge racists and all of the students wanted them gone,” another user wrote, gaining 170 upvotes. “False.”

“The fact that Yik Yak has been so crazy popular over the last couple days just goes to show that these protests have created an environment where people are afraid to voice their opinions publicly,” one local user wrote Tuesday night, accumulating 50 replies in two hours.

The fallout continued for two staff members who were recorded trying to physically remove student journalists from the activists’ tent encampment. University Greek Life Director Janna Basler was placed on administrative leave Wednesday, and communications professor Melissa Click resigned from a role in the journalism school.

Another faculty member, nutrition and exercise professor Dale E. Brigham, wrote to his students Tuesday night saying he would not let the death threats deter him from holding class and giving an exam.

“If you don’t feel safe coming to class, don’t come to class,” Brigham wrote in an email to his students. “I will be there, and there will be an exam administered in our class.... If you give in to bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them.”

But a message intended to be inspirational was angrily posted to Twitter by a student. There, users concerned about the threats accused Brigham of being indifferent to the dangers posed to black students.

On Wednesday, Brigham apologized, announcing that he canceled the test — and was also stepping aside.

“It’s a small town; very few people are used to that sort of attention,” said one of his students, Ben Cairns, 25, who said that although Brigham’s email may have been poorly written, he meant well.

Dunn, the finance student — who has never taken one of Brigham’s classes but says the professor’s reputation is sterling — said he didn’t know whether there were many safe forums on campus to talk about race.

Online, “you can’t tell a person’s tone, if they’re arguing with you,” Dunn said. “These conversations have to be held [in person], and a lot of people are scared, and they don’t understand, and they say ignorant things, and that’s when conflicts start to arise.”

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