“‘It’s Little Dixie,’ Little told me. When he was driving down from Chicago with his father and uncle to start his master’s program, he said his uncle told him: ‘Stay away from white women down there.’ Little figured this was mostly a joke, but he knew there was some seriousness behind his uncle’s words. ‘I knew the history of Little Dixie and the University of Missouri being this hotbed of racist events,’ he said. He mentioned Lloyd Gaines and Lucile Bluford as well as Jon Burge, the former Chicago police chief, who attended Mizzou for one semester before returning to Chicago, where he was later accused of torturing hundreds of brown and black people in the ’70s and ’80s. (Though Burge was fired from the force in 1993, he was never prosecuted for the alleged crimes because of the statute of limitations.)

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