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Posted on: February 2, 2018 at 14:29:21 CT

When the University of Missouri’s football team vowed to stay off the field until administrators met the demands of student protesters, defensive end Charles Harris grasped the national implications earlier than most. Wearing a shirt with the anti-police-brutality slogan “I can’t breathe,” he told reporters in 2015, “Let this be a testament to all other athletes across the country that you do have power.”

Mr. Harris, who now plays for the Miami Dolphins, heeded his own call. Last September he locked arms with other players in a show of support for four teammates who knelt during the national anthem.

But public records obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act suggest that the Mizzou protests, like the riots in Ferguson a year earlier, might have been inspired in part by a false narrative. Graduate student Jonathan Butler had started a hunger strike, claiming the administration had failed to address racist acts on campus, including incidents in which Mr. Butler, who is black, was himself the purported victim. Football players were “very concerned about his life,” Coach Gary Pinkel said at the time.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2016, Mr. Butler delivered a keynote address at Kansas City’s Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, in which he described two instances in which he claimed he had been personally targeted at Mizzou because of his race.

“Being on campus, I’ve seen the N-word spray-painted on my door,” Mr. Butler said. “I’ve experienced white students who have jumped me during the President Obama’s election night. . . . I was jumped by three white students on campus.” Mr. Butler said such behavior “allowed to be going on, on campus—let me make that very clear, was allowed to be going on, on campus.”
Jonathan Butler addresses a crowd after the announcement that University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe would resign, Nov. 9, 2015, at the university in Columbia, Mo.
Jonathan Butler addresses a crowd after the announcement that University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe would resign, Nov. 9, 2015, at the university in Columbia, Mo. Photo: Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

But an exhaustive review of law-enforcement records showed no sign of the incidents Mr. Butler described.

Vandalism on campus is reported to university police, both a residence-life staffer and a university police spokesman told me. Neither the university police department nor the Columbia, Mo., city police received any report of an incident where Mr. Butler’s door, residence or property was vandalized. Furthermore, neither police department has any record of Mr. Butler being jumped, assaulted, attacked or otherwise physically harmed by students as he described at any time between January 2008 and May 2016, when he departed the university.

To make sure I wasn’t missing anything, I reviewed all incident reports from both the campus and city police mentioning any physical assault or harm caused to any individual on, directly before or directly after Election Day in 2008 and 2012. I also worked with authorities at both departments to double-check all such reports possibly matching the incident Mr. Butler described in which victim names had been redacted. Finally, although it would be unusual for an incident involving a student to be reported only to the BooneCo unty Sheriff, the department also performed a search under Mr. Butler’s name.

There was no record of the racist assault or vandalism Mr. Butler described. It’s possible that the incidents happened and he didn’t report them—but in that case there is no basis for his claim that the university “allowed” the incidents to occur.

Meanwhile, internal Mizzou emails raise questions about whether Mr. Butler’s hunger strike was genuine.

On Nov. 3, 2015, the day Mr. Butler claimed to launch his hunger strike, the university president’s chief of staff, Zora Mulligan, sent an email to several administrators. “I heard through the grapevine that [Mr. Butler] has agreed to take one meal a day,” she wrote. “True?” Ms. Mulligan later told me she was never able to determine for sure whether Mr. Butler was eating during his hunger strike.

Administrators also received reports of food going into the tent where Mr. Butler camped out on the quad alongside other student protesters, as well as rumors that he was eating. They struggled to substantiate them.

A source who had direct contact with Mr. Butler throughout the hunger strike told me: “He was wearing sweatshirts, so very loose-fitting. He had water there, had a hoarse voice, but wasn’t noticeably weak or falling down or dizzy. During the week, I didn’t think he was on a hunger strike. People who were in meetings with him and saw him during the week weren’t sure he was actually on a hunger strike.”

Maxwell Little, a member of the protest group Concerned Student 1950, dismissed questions about whether Mr. Butler had been dishonest about the hunger strike. “He’s a good guy,” Mr. Little told me. “He proved that through physical demonstration and putting his body and his reputation on the line to improve the university community. What more do you want?”

The Mizzou protests drew to an end only after the resignation of the chancellor and president. Mr. Butler’s hunger strike won him national prominence and a Ford Freedom Award. But his credibility matters because his actions have had repercussions far beyond Columbia. The athletes who have drawn inspiration from Mizzou would be justified in questioning whether the famed protests were built on lies. Mr. Butler could answer that question, but he did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Ms. Melchior is a Journal editorial page writer.