There is no name and number on the roster for Jonathan Butler. No height and weight either, though his weight would become an issue and a major part of this storyline.

No, Jonathan Butler isn’t on the Missouri football team, but he certainly was the main player in a drama that unfolded on the Mizzou campus in November and sent ripples – tsunami-like ripples – across every college campus in America.

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Butler was a witness to one racial incident after another on the Columbia campus. The Omaha, Neb., native had been on the Mizzou campus since 2008, first as an undergrad and now as a graduate student. He had heard the N-word used too much. He had seen peaceful protesters pepper-sprayed. He had seen a Mizzou student draw a swastika with his own feces in a dormitory. He had seen white students spread cotton balls at the Black Culture Center.

He had, quite frankly, seen enough. And something had to change.

“I felt unsafe since the moment I stepped on this campus,” he told CNN in November. “My first semester here, I had someone write the N-word on my wall. I’ve been, physically, in altercations with white gentleman on campus.”

Butler’s activism took him to Mizzou administrators. He wanted to discuss the racial divide on campus, and the inadequacies that came with it.

They wouldn’t listen.

Butler’s group peacefully but intensely disrupted the homecoming parade, stopping the car carrying Missouri school system president Tim Wolfe, demanding that they be heard, asking him if he cared at all about black students.

Again, no one listened. Wolfe ignored them.

So Butler, after consulting with his doctor and his priest, updated his will and started a hunger strike right in the middle of campus. He vowed not to eat until change came, that things were done differently at Mizzou, a school he loved, and that Wolfe would be removed from office.

One day after another passed, and still no one listened. It wasn’t until Mizzou sophomore wide receiver J’Mon Moore stopped by the campus and talked to Butler and other protesters. He went back and talked to his roommates and then other Missouri players. Before long, the decision was made to support Butler and his cause.

It wasn’t just a few black players, it was all of them. Plus all of their white teammates. An even their head coach, Gary Pinkel, who had been a Missouri employee for 15 years. Gary Pinkel is white.

They all stood behind Butler together. The players announced that they would not practice or play until Wolfe was gone, that they were starting a boycott of their own. They stood arm in arm with Butler, who hadn’t eaten for six days now and his body was starting to fail.

“They were literally holding me up,” Butler told the Associated Press. Several players tweeted out a picture of 30 of them with Butler on a Saturday night and the reaction was swift and viral.

The next day the governor of Missouri demanded action and an investigation. The day after that, on a Monday morning, Wolfe resigned.

Butler’s actions – with a huge assist from the high-profile football team – had succeeded.

This protest by the football team was an extremely rare event. Players, all on scholarship, live a vastly different life from the every day students. Many even admitted after talking to Butler that they had no idea all these events had been occurring on campus.

“A lot of times, we’re not a part of normal campus life,” Mizzou defensive back Anthony Sherrils told the Associated Press. “When it comes down to black, white, whatever the nationality is — we’re all together as one.”

After Wolfe’s resignation, Butler was hospitalized, where over the course of several days he was treated with IVs and slowly regained his strength. His boycott was over. Later that day, Mizzou players Moore, Simon and Harris read a statement on The Quad to tell the student body that their boycott was ending, too.

“It’s not about us. We just wanted to use our platform to take a stance for a fellow concerned student on an issue, especially being as though a black man’s life was on the line,” Simon said. “Through this experience, we’ve really begun to bridge that gap between student and athlete … by connecting with the community and realizing the bigger picture.”

The players returned to the practice field and played out their season, but not without more drama and heartache. Later in the week, Pinkel, their beloved coach who had been diagnosed with lymphoma, announced he was retiring at the end of the season.

“That shows how strong of a man Coach Pinkel is,” Simon said. “To carry that weight all season, to have that boycott happen and for him to drop the (retirement bomb) … that’s not easy to do.”

None of it was easy. The players’ protest wasn’t done willy-nilly. There was serious discussion about what to do, and how to do it.

But in the end, they all knew they had to do something as a team, players and coaches alike, blacks and whites alike. This issue was bigger than all of them.

“Guys were very, very emotional,” Pinkel said. “They were very concerned about (Butler’s) life. And at that time they were discussing with me what they wanted to do.”

It was a historic decision … and reaction.

“The past few days have been certainly extraordinary circumstances for many reasons – for many reasons – but primarily because a young man’s life, Jonathan Butler, his life was at stake,” Missouri Athletic Director Mack Rhoades said after the boycotts ended.

“They’ve never seen a person dying in front of them,” he said about student-athletes. “And for many of these young men, that was real. And I think as they slept on it, and we met that next day, that Sunday, we had discussion, and it wasn’t about any one person resigning. It was about what can we do to make sure that Jonathan Butler eats.”

After a team meeting Sunday, Pinkel posted a photo on his Twitter account of players and coaches, accompanied by the message: “The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950”

Pinkel said he asked them Saturday about their plans. They asked the same of him. They wanted his support as well, and they got it.

“Is this the right thing to do? Should they wait? There were tears in their eyes, and crying,” Pinkel said of his players. “They asked me if I would support them and I said I would. I didn’t look at consequences. That wasn’t about it at the time. It was about supporting my players when they needed me.

“I did the right thing and I would do it again.”

Progress in this area is coming. It will probably come slow, but now people are watching. It took courage for Jonathan Butler to do what he did, and it took courage for the entire Mizzou football program to stand beside him.

Let’s hope things get better, not just at Mizzou but on every college campus.