You Know Who Else Took Part in Hunger Strikes?
More about Mizzou
Jonathan Butler and Mizzou
ETA: See this link as well, from the Guardian.
The Campus Race Protests...
The comments over there are also very much
worth reading. This one, one of my favorites, is from the first link:
This whole thread reminds me of something . . .
Oh, yes (emphasis added):
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
MLK Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Let us note in passing that until the 1960s Mizzou had a quaint little Homecoming tradition.From a recent KC Star column:
[Jim Nunnelly] received an academic scholarship and was a student on campus [at MU] from 1960 after graduating with honors from segregated, all-black Douglass High School. He graduated from MU with a bachelor of arts in English and worked in the dean’s office of the medical school in 1969, which helped direct the longtime Kansas Citian into health care.But Nunnelly explained that when he was a student, “Dixie” was regularly played at MU football games with the lyrics “I wish I was in the land of cotton. Old times there are not forgotten.” But he also recalled seeing a homecoming parade — mostly driven by fraternities and sororities — on a Saturday morning in which whites on horseback dressed in Confederate uniforms marched through town with some people in blackface ahead of them dressed as slaves.“The slaves represented whoever the opposition was” for the homecoming game, he said.
