Mizzou Hunger Striker Jonathan Butler Reportedly From One-Percent Family Worth Millions

University of Missouri graduate student Jonathan Butler, who is protesting white privilege, apparently is from a privileged background.

Butler’s family supposedly has a net worth of about $20 million.

Butler, who is a member of Concerned Students 1950 on the Columbia, Missouri, campus who are demonstrating against racism at the school, embarked on a headline-making, seven-day hunger strike which in part led to the resignation of president Tim Wolfe.

The 1950 terminology stands for the first year that black students were admitted to Mizzou.

In its list of eight demands in the run-up to Wolfe’s departure, Butler’s group initially sought to compel Wolfe to “acknowledge his white male privilege.” Demand No. 2 was for President Wolfe’s immediate removal from his job.

A related controversy is whether Wolfe’s driver actually hit one of the demonstrators while behind the wheel during a protest.

Butler ended his hunger strike when Wolfe stepped down on Monday amid accusations of insensitivity to incidents of campus racial discrimination.

According to Butler, who is pursuing a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy, college administrators failed to make minority students feel “safe and included on this campus,” ABC News previously reported. Members of the football team also pressured Wolfe by boycotting practices.

Butler told CNN that he has “felt unsafe since the moment I stepped on this campus” as a result of some racial incidents. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Mizzou.

Butler is, however, from a prominent, wealthy Omaha, Nebraska family. His father, Eric Butler, is an executive with the Union Pacific Railroad, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

“[Eric Butler’s] 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted. The publication added that Jonathan Butler declined an interview.

Eric Butler and his wife are also co-pastors of a church in Omaha, and their son evidently drew his inspiration for activism from them. “They used their talents, my mother both in education and my father having a law background, really to do advocacy for the community, and I think as a young child, that’s where it started.”

The family owns two homes, one of which — a lakeside residence — is worth about $1 million, The College Fix claimed. “The revelation has prompted some to argue that Butler and his family are among the privileged elite Butler criticized as part of his protest.”

“Butler participated in the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which erupted after the shooting death of Michael Brown and helped to galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement,” CNN reported.

In other Mizzou developments, the journalism professor who tried to censor a student journalist from covering the Concerned Students 1950 protests has resigned her courtesy appointment at the highly-regarded University of Missouri School of Journalism. Prof. Melissa Click, who is on video calling for “muscle” to remove the photojournalist from the event, still holds her faculty position in the communications department, however. Click apparently has apologized to the campus community for her actions.

Pushing back on hypocrisy allegations given the revelations about Jonathan Butler’s rich kid background, the left-liberal publication Salon offered this defense of the student activist.

“… You can attain the American dream and be treated like garbage. You can be rich and marginalized. More importantly, you can have been granted opportunities in life and still care about those who have not. In fact, you ought to. That’s why Butler’s family background is not evidence of hypocrisy.”

Do you think that the wealth of Jonathan Butler’s family detracts from his effectiveness as an activist for what the list of demands referred to as “marginalized students?” Does the term limousine liberal apply in this instance?

[Photo by Michael B. Thomas / Getty Images]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa231A9YEpw