Lauren Brown, host and producer of St. Louis Public Radio’s We Live Here podcast, received a 2021 RTDNA National Murrow Award for her role as host and a producer of the audio documentary, “Black at Mizzou: Confronting Race on Campus.”
Dear President Choi,
We are an anonymous collective of students that have watched the administration of this university ignore our voices for over 100 years. This extends far past your time as UM System president, but we are calling upon you to bring an end to it now. MU moves to address problems at a glacial pace, if at all. It is time that student voices are not just heard, but are put at the forefront of every decision affecting our well-being.
On March 5, 2021, we placed signs on campus landmarks. Before classes started that morning, the signs had already been taken down and were never publicly addressed.
MU student arrested by MU police for drunk misconduct and other allegations. (MU)
University of Missouri (MU) police arrested 19-year-old Cal Gerhardt early Thursday morning after he allegedly both harassed fellow students and used a racial slur. Police reportedly found and intoxicated Gerhardt yelling outside the door of two students in a campus residence hall.
According to a statement released by Bill Stackman, vice chancellor for Student Affairs, police charged Gerhardt with first degree harassment and tampering with a witness.
Sara Diedrich, MU Police Department’s public safety information specialist, said police responded to a call at 2:50 a.m. that Gerhardt was banging and scratching on a student’s door in a resident hall while yelling a racial slur. Police investigated the incident and escorted Gerhardt back to his residence, where he was issued a trespassing warning and summons for being visibly intoxicated as a minor, second-degree property damage and fourth-degree as
Itâs really twisted to read the lead in a story that focuses on a white actor who has been portraying Thomas Jefferson for more than three decades in the current political moment. The lack of creativity and inability to read the meta-narrative of anti-Blackness amid the frequent interruptions of Black death is a stunning act of tone-deafness.
How is it that in 2020, journalists are still centering a historical narrative about Thomas Jefferson, alongside his extortion and exploitation of Black bodies for profit portrayed predominantly through the lens of white men â and an actor no less? What the hell? Why not interview historians such as Annette Gordon Reed, Nell Painter, Henry Louis Gates Jr. or prominent Black academic researchers to complement Professor Graves instead of two white men?