America's anthem protests hit home in a small Iowa college where both black and white students took a knee

STORM LAKE, Ia. — Unexpected as it might be, this small Iowa college town finds itself thoroughly embroiled in the controversial silent protests that have fueled our loud national argument.

You know the protests I’m talking about: Football players, other athletes and now even marching bands are protesting during the national anthem at sports events to demonstrate against persistent racial injustice.

The shooting of unarmed black men by police officers tends to be one of the most commonly cited motivators.

Buena Vista University’s public conversation Monday about all this — with both black athletes and white police officers represented — gave me hope. But serious questions remain.

The protests began last year with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

It escalated last month when President Donald Trump, during a speech in Alabama, lambasted kneeling NFL players, urging team owners to “get that son of a bitch off the field right now.”

Trump knocked kneeling NFL players again Monday, the same day as BVU’s more thoughtful approach.

Meanwhile, representatives for NFL owners (overwhelmingly white) and players (70 percent African-American) meet this week in New York to debate the controversy among themselves.

That conversation in New York is connected to the conversation in Storm Lake and football fields across Iowa. 

On Sept. 29, Clear Creek-Amana’s Darius Moore, an African-American receiver, knelt at a game.

That triggered a racist post on Snapchat that by the following week had surfaced and spread online. 

On Sept. 30, BVU football players and cheerleaders knelt at the start of their homecoming game, which sparked furor locally and among the school’s distant alumni. 

On Friday, 13 members of the Ames High School marching band walked off the field during the anthem. Even more refused to play their instruments.

Sometimes I feel like I hear the wry chuckle of history.

It wasn’t lost on me that Trump’s initial anthem broadside in Alabama took place in a state that saw landmark civil rights protests such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, or the Montgomery bus boycott.

And let’s not forget that it was an Iowan, President Herbert Hoover, who with a stroke of his pen in 1931 enshrined "The Star-Spangled Banner" as our national anthem.

Sentiment for such a move had been growing since at least the first game of the 1918 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, when the raw emotions of World War I led to a stirring anthem sing-along immortalized in newspaper accounts. 

Kneeling during the anthem in some ways is the gentlest of protests: No raised voices, no real disruption.

Yet arguably it strikes at the most vulnerable symbolic moment of public ceremony in our everyday lives. 

Because, let’s face it, statistically these days we see more of each other at sporting events than we do in church or other more solemn services.

The anthem, meant to be the stirring soundtrack to a moment of blissful unity just before we resume hating each other's guts as rival fans, now seems to be splitting us into more profoundly divided cultural tribes all over again.

Many see the national anthem as an absolute litmus test on how much respect you have for the military, particularly fallen soldiers.  

So, enter BVU and the likes of Alyssa Parker.

The BVU sophomore and cheerleader from Des Moines knelt at homecoming. She’s also founder and president of the college’s new Black Student Union. 

“I think that in the anger and misunderstanding,” Parker wrote recently in an editorial published in the student newspaper, the Tack, “the message and purpose are getting lost. People are focusing on the form of the protest, and not what we are actually protesting about."

Monday evening's forum was billed as a "civil exchange of perspectives" intended to address the substance of the issues.

The panel included Parker and two other students, one faculty member and the local police chief. The audience of more than 100 in Anderson Auditorium submitted questions on note cards.

A concert by the Brazilian 2wins capped the night. 

Storm Lake is no stranger to conversations on race, considering that Latinos and other minorities now make up more than half of the town's population of 10,700.

I sat in the same auditorium two years ago when I collaborated with BVU and others to stage an immigration forum.

BVU, by contrast, remains overwhelmingly white, but recent years have seen an uptick in black students. Intense competition for Iowa's high school graduates has led private colleges to recruit more aggressively out of state. 

The 36 black students here may represent only 5 percent of the 766 full-time students on campus, but that gave Parker critical mass to establish the Black Student Union. (The club currently has 40 members and is open to all students.)

Parker and Davonte Johnson, a 6-foot-1 junior from Iowa City on the football team, outlined how their protest is connected to their emerging social consciousness as young African-Americans — not a case of bandwagon-jumping or a knock against the military. 

“That’s literally the last thing we want to do,” Johnson said. 

He also pointed out that it was an Army veteran (and fellow NFL player) who persuaded Kaepernick to kneel, rather than sit on the sidelines, mimicking the respectful kneeling gesture at the grave of a fallen soldier.

But everybody’s so angry over this issue that we've forgotten all nuance, right?

Parker mentioned how her white uncle in the Air Force disagrees with many of her views but also fought for her right to protest.

The police officer on the panel was Mark Prosser, Storm Lake's police chief who has spent 28 years protecting his community. 

"I think society’s challenge now is nobody’s meeting in the middle,” he said. 

Prosser has not been shy about putting his own shoulder to efforts to improve Storm Lake's response to its shifting demographics, or to consistently get in the middle of tough public conversations. 

While defending the integrity of his profession Monday, he also was a sympathetic foil for the students on the panel.

He let himself be fully vulnerable when talking about growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he was exposed to rampant use of the N-word, and grew up to regret having used it himself.

Merrin Guice, an associate professor of vocal music who's also African-American, made many salient points, including this one: “I don’t think that protest has ever been popular."

That brings up the tricky next steps for BVU as the college tries to be more proactive on this issue.

There has been a heartening reaction from many faculty, coaches and administrators across Iowa who have found themselves entangled in anthem protests.

But the outcry from alumni and donors arguably rings louder in the ears of private liberal arts college administrators than your average public high school superintendent. 

BVU’s new president, Joshua Merchant, made the magnanimous gesture to invite Parker and other protesters to dinner at his house as the campus agonized over the issue.

He has since released a statement proposing what he called a compromise: Athletes and cheerleaders may kneel just before the anthem, but he will join them to lock arms and stand in unity during the anthem.

Parker and her fellow students are unsure what they will do at Saturday's home game, potentially facing discipline as football players and cheerleaders if they continue to kneel during the anthem.

"We personally feel like a protest isn’t when a person gives you a time slot," Parker said when I caught up with her later. "A protest is meant to be at a time … that brings attention to it."

The nation certainly has been watching. And more importantly, BVU has been talking. 

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).