Students Upset @ Cotton Balls Dumped Outside Black Culture Center

The students want to know, “What does this mean? Is this some kind of racial act against us, against the minorities on campus, or is it something more?

COLUMBIA, MO (KTVI-FOX2now.com) – There is outrage on the Mizzou campus in Columbia after someone put down cotton balls outside the Black Culture Center. The incident comes as the University prepares to wrap up black history month this weekend. People are using words like despicable and inexcusable to describe the cotton balls that were found Friday morning outside the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center. Now, students are speaking out and the administration is promising to find out those responsible. “You have to see the face of evil in a way,” said Mizzou student Bryan Like about the cotton balls and what he believes they represent. Like is the president of the Mizzou student chapter of the NAACP.

“It was just flat out racism. Everybody knows that picking cotton was exactly how slaves, that was their labor. That was their main way of laboring back in the day. That’s what they were made to do was to pick the cotton,” said Like.

Rikki Byrd, a freshman from St. Louis, took pictures of the scene and sent them to FOX 2. She was stunned when she first saw the cotton balls.

Byrd told us, “It was kind of unbelievable, we shook our heads. It wasnt that kind of afraid feeling though. It was just like are you serious; its still here and its still this bad.”

Senior Derrick Christian says he saw two people from the building about one thirty or two in the morning. “It was just two guys dressed in predominantly black and they were running at like a very fast pace to where it looked suspicious. But like I said at one thirty in the morning you’re thinking college students they’re just messing around or whatever and then I walked past and I saw like white dots around the ground but I thought it was just litter; I thought it was Styrofoam, explained Christian.”

Doctor Roger Worthington, the Chief Diversity Officer at Mizzou, stopped short of calling it a hate crime. But he vowed to get to the bottom of what took place. “The university is very saddened and disheartened and outraged by what’s happened here today. This is an incident that we view very seriously and will work very hard to come to a just resolution,” said Worthington.

Christian says he believes the people he saw running from the building were white.

Police, however, have not confirmed that. Investigators tell us at this point they have no suspects. A town hall meeting with students and administrators is set to take place Monday evening on the Mizzou campus to talk about what happened.

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