Tampa, FL – Over 100 University of South Florida (USF) students and faculty members gathered on the steps of the Martin Luther King Plaza, Nov. 12, linking arms and holding a banner that declared “USF stands with Mizzou.”

Many campuses are holding similar solidarity rallies after several death threats were made against African American students who attend the University of Missouri.

During the campus speak-out, students addressed the racial taunts and threats of racist violence against African American students at the University of Missouri. They praised the student organizing and the Mizzou football team’s refusal to play until President Tim Wolfe resigned. Relating it back to the struggle of African American students at USF, one speaker specifically recalled the USF administration’s refusal to investigate racist harassment inside a sorority several months prior.

Even on short notice, the USF solidarity rally drew support from student leaders and groups, including Blackout Tampa, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Students were united in demanding an end to racist discrimination at universities and spoke about building the African American liberation movement on campus.

“As we at USF show solidarity with the students of Mizzou, we also recognize that the fight against racism isn’t contained to the failure of one administrator, or university, but that the struggle against racist admissions practices and national oppression against African Americans is part of a larger issue of racism in American society,” said Sam Beutler of SDS.

A speaker for Blackout Tampa ended the event by stating they would not stop pressing their demands for justice on campus and an end to racist discrimination at the University of Missouri, USF, and across the country.

#TampaFL #StudentMovement #AfricanAmerican #Antiracism #UniversityOfMissouri #Mizzou

The players announced the strike on Nov. 8, less than a week before taking the field against Brigham Young University. Their stand won the support of their head coach, Gary Pinkel, the University of Missouri's athletic department, and most of the team. Black students make up almost 50% of the team's football players and nearly 70% of the team's scholarship players, according to the faculty-published Columbia Missourian.

The University of Missouri, which is the largest public or private university in the state, is overwhelmingly white. White students make up 79% of all undergraduates, while African Americans, make up just 8% of undergraduates, according to the New York Times.

Since September, Black students, faculty and allies at the University of Missouri have protested the administration's failure to address racism on campus. The students, including student body President Payton Head, began demanding that administration take action after a series of racist incidents. These incidents ranged from repeated racial slurs to deranged racist graffiti to the disruption of a Legion of Black Collegians meeting by a drunken white student last month.

Since then, Wolfe and the university administration faced mass protests and rallies organized by Concerned Student 1950, an activist group formed in response to these incidents.

One student in particular, Jonathan Butler, launched a hunger strike on Nov. 2 demanding President Wolfe's resignation. Butler, like many Black student activists in Missouri, was a veteran of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the racist police murder of Michael Brown in 2014. After Wolfe's resignation, Butler ended his hunger strike.

With strike threat, University of Missouri football players leveraged their labor and won

Athletics, particularly football, are big business for schools like the University of Missouri. In 2012, the university joined the highly competitive Southeastern Conference (SEC), which also includes top nationally ranked teams like the University of Florida Gators and the University of Alabama Crimson Tide.

Beyond its success on the field, however, the SEC is the highest earning conference in NCAA athletics. During the 2013-2014 school year, the SEC generated over $455 million in revenue, with an estimated $347 million coming from televised games, particularly football. Over the same period, the University of Missouri took in over $76 million in revenue from its athletics program.

To drum up interest in games and make more revenue, university athletic programs will sometimes hold matchups in different cities or stadiums, like the annual Florida-Georgia grudge-match played every year at Everbank Field, which is the Jacksonville Jaguars' NFL stadium in Jacksonville, Florida. These stadiums are not just venues. They are big businesses themselves, often owned by giant corporations or extremely wealthy individuals. As such, stadiums will contract with the schools to insure that the games are played and generate profit for the owners.

Of course, all of these profits and revenues are only possible because of the talent and labor of the student athletes themselves. While some student athletes receive scholarships from their schools, most receive absolutely no financial compensation for their labor as competitors. Even though their work generates literally billions of dollars in revenue and profits for universities and corporations across the U.S., student athletes seldom share in any of that wealth.

When the players at the University of Missouri announced that they would not play Saturday's game unless President Wolfe resigned, they threatened to strike.

The players' strike threat worked because it effectively shut down the university's revenue stream from its football program. A substantial number of players refusing to play and withholding their labor meant that the university could not have fielded a team in Arrowhead Stadium on Nov. 14. The immediate consequence of breaking the university's contract for the game would have been a $1 million fine. Additionally, the strike threat also leveraged other long-term interests for the university, like the team's recruiting potential and its chance at playing in a coveted Bowl game at the end of the year.

Facing these consequences and a growing movement of students and faculty, both President Wolfe and the university chancellor announced their resignations a day later. Simultaneously, the university's Board Of Curators conceded to many of the movement's demands, including required diversity training for all students and faculty.

Emboldened by this victory, student activists at the University of Missouri vowed to continue the struggle against racism in higher education.

Lessons for the labor movement

While these electrifying events at the University of Missouri hold plenty of lessons for student activists, union militants and labor organizers should also learn from the victory.

Most of the gains made by workers out of the Great Depression – raises, pensions, union contracts, health insurance, etc. – came from militant collective action in the form of the strike. For a strike to be effective though, the workers must shut down production and directly hurt the profits of management. Unfortunately, most unions in the U.S. today have abandoned the militant, production-halting strike in favor of collaborating with management or pursuing legal battles through arbitration. Even when unions go on strike in 2015, their tactics usually involve setting up picket lines without shutting down production or challenging the economic operation of the employer.

As unions abandoned the strike weapon into the 1980s and beyond, employers increasingly gained the upper hand and rolled back hard-fought gains like raises and pensions. Labor scholar Joe Burns describes this in his book, Reviving the Strike (2011), in which he writes, “The abandonment of the strike has led to the erosion of the wage, retirement, and health care gains of the post war period...With the decline of the strike, employers have been able to aggressively attack work rules and the quality of work life.”

Although the organizing and activism of countless students at the University of Missouri made this victory possible, we cannot overstate the effect of the football team's strike threat on the outcome of this campus struggle against racism. These players put themselves, their careers as college athletes, and for many, their scholarships on the line to make a stand against the university administration's tolerance of racism on campus. They threatened to withhold their labor from the upcoming game, forcing the university to consider the large economic cost from ignoring the demands of Black students for change. Supporters flocked to their courageous example, and many of those in power, like the university’s Board of Curators, opted to back the movement's demands out of fear of reprisal. And they won, at least their immediate demand.

Much like a union winning a strike or a contract battle at the workplace, the students at the University of Missouri will continue to face many of the same issues as before. President Wolfe and the chancellor's resignation, along with the small reforms announced by the Board of Curators, will not by itself end racism on campus.

However, the Missouri Tigers' football team's example demonstrated the large impact that student athletes can have in the struggle against oppression on campus, and it serves as a powerful reminder that there is power in a production-halting strike.

#ColumbiaMO #StudentMovement #PeoplesStruggles #Racism #BlackStudentMovement #Antiracism #UniversityOfMissouri

National SDS Celebrates the Victory of University of Missouri Students and Football Players Against Racism, As President Tim Wolfe Resigns

National Students for a Democratic Society stands in solidarity with the African-American students, faculty, football players, and other members of the University of Missouri campus community, who have been protesting against the administration's inaction towards a series of racist slurs and hate crimes.

Just today, the University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe has stepped down from his post, in response to student protests and the football team's strike against administration's inaction towards racist hate speech.

In early October, several black students had slurs flung at them by racists on campus, and they called on administration to take action. Administration did nothing. A swastika was drawn in feces in one of the dorm bathrooms, and again, students called for administration to act. Again, administration did nothing to combat the anti-Black hate speech. Students have since been holding protests and walkouts to oust the University of Missouri president for his inaction.

This week, the University of Missouri football team's members of at least 30 players went on strike, announcing that they would play no games until university President Tim Wolfe resigned from his post. Yesterday, the U of Missouri faculty also joined the call for student walkouts, in solidarity with the football team's strike.

Students for a Democratic Society views the resignation of President Tim Wolfe as the hard-won success of the football players' strike, the student demonstrations, and the faculty's solidarity. We also demand that administrators not only address hate speech, but also that campus administrations increase their enrollment and retention of African-American students and end discriminatory admissions practices.

We see that the fight against anti-Black racism in Missouri lives on, particularly after the Ferguson uprising, and we view these bold, brave actions as an example for students all over the country.

#UnitedStates #StudentMovement #SDS #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #StudentsForADemocraticSocietySDS #Racism #Antiracism #UniversityOfMissouri