At Mizzou’s 1968 post-season football banquet, a virtually anonymous black linebacker named Ed Taylor—a member of the scout team who never got into a game—was briefly the center of attention. He sang songs, teased several teammates and delivered a personal judgement on the state of civil rights in the school’s athletic department.

This was amid an especially tense time in the national struggle for federal protection against institutional segregation, on an overwhelmingly white campus in what had been a slave state. That season, some white students still were waving Confederate flags while the marching band played “Dixie” during games, resulting in a protest that formed the Legion of Black Collegians to afford students of color a campus voice.

Taylor, during that 1968 football soiree, said, “There isn’t a problem here.” He called head coach Dan Devine “a genius in things like hiring Prentice Gautt” to be the first black football assistant in the Big Eight Conference.

I was a senior in Journalism School, football beat reporter for J-School’s Columbia Missourian. Taylor’s brief public remarks, and his thoughtful answers in a later interview, made a nice story. I barely knew the fellow, just as I barely knew Gautt, though he lived in my off-campus apartment complex and we always exchanged pleasantries as we came and went.

Taylor was a biology major who wanted to be a teacher “because I want to do something about the Negro problem,” he said. “I want to get through to as many people as I can before their parents ruin them.”

Gautt, after breaking the color barrier on the University of Oklahoma’s football team and playing seven years in the NFL, in ’68 was studying for his doctorate in psychology, even as he worked on the football staff.

At the time, might Mizzou’s football team, far more diverse than the rest of the university, have existed in a protective bubble against the kind of racial tension that Taylor said he experienced at his Cahokia, ill., high school? Might white students such as myself have been functioning in a bubble of naivete, mostly oblivious to how marginalized the minority students felt?

I recall going with friends to catch a Dick Gregory appearance on campus, expecting a first-rate comedian’s act and instead getting a taste of Gregory’s other vocation—civil-rights activism. Some fairly heavy things to think about.

I was aware of Journalism School colleague Sylvia Carter’s expose, published in our independent student newspaper, The Maneater, of racism in the Columbia community. She had showed up at city real estate agencies about rental inquiries with a black friend, to whom she pretended to be engaged, whereupon she was informed, posthaste, that there no longer were any vacancies. Anywhere.

But now, it somehow is more depressing to be confronted almost a half-century later with news of ongoing racial incidents at Mizzou; of tone-deaf university leadership; of how it took a boycott threat by the football team—its leverage based on the kind of money the school stood to lose without more games—to generate the kind of attention that forced administrative action.

As a graduate of the Journalism School that proclaims itself the world’s oldest and consistently is rated among the best in the country, I find it almost as dispiriting to learn of a communications professor who called for “some muscle” to eject journalists covering last week’s public protests. Students taking up a chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Journalists have got to go!” just needed an education regarding free speech and the First Amendment. But the last person who should require a journalism lesson was someone supposedly providing such an education: Melissa Click, described as holding a “courtesy appointment” in J-School, which is separate from the communications department.

In marked contrast to Click, there has been some real journalism going on at Mizzou for months, long before the football team’s involvement triggered national coverage. Both the student-staffed Missourian and all-student Maneater have been well ahead of the curve in chronicling complaints about the university’s top management that went beyond racial issues and included significant disgruntlement among the faculty.

Click since has apologized and resigned the J-School appointment. And the Missouri Board of Curators, in the wake of resignations-under-pressure of both the university’s four-campus president and the chancellor of Mizzou’s flagship Columbia campus, has appointed as interim president a black man, Michael Middleton, former law professor, civil rights attorney and deputy chancellor of the school. At least that move sounds like a far better Missouri Compromise than the original.

It turns out that Middleton was an undergraduate at Mizzou when I was. Too bad I didn’t know him. I might have learned some things sooner.