Mizzou athletes march for equality

Missouri athletics director Jim Sterk was there, amid the black-clad throng marching from the Columns on the Francis Quadrangle to Memorial Stadium, but you would have had to work to find him. Same for football coach Eli Drinkwitz and basketball coach Cuonzo Martin. The faces of Missouri’s two revenue sports became faces in the crowd Wednesday evening.

Instead, it was six Missouri student-athletes, the cabinet members for the newly-formed Black Student-Athlete Association, who organized a march through campus for racial justice. It was four members of the track and field team, a soccer player and a football player, all between 20 and 22 years old, who led the group down Tiger Avenue and spoke to a crowd that sprawled across about 16 sections of Faurot Field bleachers.

The athletes’ goals were simple. This wasn’t a protest or a political statement, but a show of unity against racial inequality, both at the hands of law enforcement and in America as a whole. It was meant to inspire participants to listen and to spark a dialogue about how to seek reform.

The large and diverse crowd left the BSAA cabinet feeling like the event had been a success.

“For us, it’s just keep talking, keep having this conversation,” said track and field senior Atina Kamasi. “It’s not a moment, it’s a movement. And for us, it’s just let’s keep talking about it, and as an organization, we’ll do everything to keep that conversation going.”

Over the past four months, sports teams and players have spoken out about social justice issues at an unprecedented rate, Missouri included. But until Wednesday, most of the action within the Tiger athletics department had come from the football team. Sophomore Martez Manuel organized a team-wide march from the Columns to the Boone County Courthouse in June, after George Floyd died while in the custody of a Minneapolis police officer. After the march, 62 players registered to vote. Then, Friday, the team didn’t take the field for its previously scheduled practice, instead meeting to discuss the recent shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer. The team released a statement pledging further action to seek change, and in a Zoom interview Saturday, Drinkwitz hinted at plans that involved the entire athletics department.

Word of the march began to trickle out the next day, both through fliers posted at the Missouri Athletics Training Center and on Twitter. By about 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, participants had flooded the south half of the quad, between the Columns and Jesse Hall. BSAA president Cason Suggs, a junior track runner, and the rest of the cabinet members used a megaphone to organize the group and call for social distancing, though actually enforcing six-foot separation proved difficult. At 6, the group started its march, passing Jesse Hall and turning south toward the athletics facilities.

Most participants wore black clothing, all wore masks. Quite a few held signs: “Black Lives Matter,” “Stop Killing Us,” “No, I Won’t Shut Up and Dribble.” Drinkwitz brandished a sign that read “Preach and Teach Anti-Racism.” Chants rang out, among them “no justice, no peace.” Non-athletes and non-students joined the demonstration in significant numbers; Missouri has about 530 total student-athletes, and the number of marchers likely eclipsed that.

Upon reaching Memorial Stadium, participants sat in the lower bowl on the East side, organizers continuing to call for social distancing. Suggs, Kamasi, junior Olivia Evans (track and field), senior Arielle Mack (track and field), junior Keiarra Slack (soccer) and senior Kobie Whiteside (football) addressed them from the turf, first calling for five minutes of silence, during which they knelt.

Suggs, the younger brother of former Missouri basketball player Ronnie Suggs, spoke first. He recalled watching the news the day Black teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida in 2012. He discussed the dichotomy of how society views Black athletes on the field and off it, and detailed why the death of Floyd and shooting Blake spurred him to action.

“When I take my (track) spikes off and when I go into the street, I’m nervous,” said Suggs. “Sometimes I’m paranoid. And I’m doing anything I can to not look suspicious, because I’ve been traumatized, because too many times I’ve had people call the police on me for walking in a neighborhood that I guess they figured I didn’t belong in.”

Slack spoke next and delivered a call to action. Saying she is “exhausted” by the recurring videos of Black people enduring violence at the hands of police officers, she asked participants to condemn it. She called it not a political, but a human rights issue.

“Who are we, as an outspoken generation of powerful young people, to stand by and let injustice continue to rain through our communities?” Slack said. “Who are you to sit back and act as if these injustices are irrelevant because you yourself are not black? The world is in a trembling era, guys, and is really in a shift of motion. 2020 is truly the year of movement. I stand before you tonight because I want better for myself, my family, my peers and my people. I want a better society for the people way after us.”

While the organizers did directly address the treatment of people of color by police officers and Suggs brought up Blake by name, there was no anti-police rhetoric, nor demands made. Slack said Wednesday was more about starting a conversation, about pushing people to recognize the inequality with which different races have been treated at the hands of law enforcement. And while at least a couple among the sea of signs mentioned President Donald Trump, the organizers made a conscious effort to avoid bringing up either political party.

“We have our different skin tones, we have our different parts of us and our identities, but we are people,” Slack said. “It’s not about one side or the other and what you side with, it’s about who you are as a person, and that’s why we believe this is the standard. It’s a human rights issue, nothing else.”

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The lack of demands registered as one of several stark differences between Wednesday’s march and the Concerned Student 1950 movement that swept up the football team in 2015. The situations aren’t exactly analogous — that movement began when a student, Jonathan Butler, embarked on a hunger strike to protest allegations of racist behavior on campus, and Missouri doesn’t currently stand to lose the hefty sum that would have been jeopardized had the team followed through on its threat to boycott a game against BYU — but Wednesday, the marchers sought reform on a societal level, not specifically at Missouri.

Suggs said the BSAA cabinet did not reach out to CS-1950 prior to planning the march. He also praised the athletics department administration for its support.

“As you could even see with the people with us in the march and in the stands, our coaches have been behind us throughout the whole operation, and we’ve been having even and steady communication, and they knew where we were and they understood that there’s a need for this,” Suggs said. “And they said if there’s a need, go for it.”

The diversity of both the marchers and the leadership stood out, as well. The crowd looked to be roughly split between white and non-white. Several of the organizers pointed to the conversations that have occurred in locker rooms between athletes of different backgrounds as the type of discourse needed at a societal level.

Kumasi represented proof of a non-Black person able to empathize after hearing the emotions of her teammates. The BSAA treasurer grew up in Serbia, moving to the United States in 2017. Suggs said she was one of the first people to push for a march after Blake’s shooting.

“You might wonder, why? Why fight for a country you’re not from?” Kumasi said. “I’ve been here four years. This country means a lot to me. When I wake up in the morning and I see those things on the TV and see friends standing by my side, and my peers and my friends, why wouldn’t I want to stand by their side? They’re hurting, I can see that in their eyes.”

That fit into the unofficial slogan of the evening, articulated by Evans after Suggs and Slack spoke. Before dismissing the marchers, she called for unity, repeatedly saying that people are “better together.”

Suggs hopes the student-athletes proved that Wednesday. There’s more work to be done, he stressed. But amid a society that feels more sharply divided than ever, the gathering showed that a group of people with diverse upbringings, ethnicities and opinions can come together to confront the issue of racial inequality and begin to converse about how to combat it.

“That was a step forward,” Suggs said. “Sometimes movements like these don’t go as smoothly as this one. Sometimes people aren’t all on the same page like this. They don’t see it as a human rights issue. And to have this movement, not only is it a good representation of Mizzou and what we stand for and as athletes, but I hope the biggest thing that people take away is that what we did here, the people that we brought together, different groups from different places in the world, you can do it at home.

“You don’t have to have a march, you just have to have a conversation.”