Jefferson City's NAACP branch is promoting a toll-free hotline- 844-NAACPHELP (or 844-622-2743) - for people to report their experiences with discrimination and harassment.
Following the reports of discrimination and harassment at the University of Missouri - both before and after this week's resignations of UM system President Tim Wolfe and Columbia Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin - the civil rights organization said in a news release that people should call that number "if you or someone you know has been or becomes the target of harassment and discrimination or retaliation or reprisal related to the events at MU."
Rod Chapel, a Jefferson City attorney and the chapter's president, told the News Tribune: "Some folks don't feel safe.
"If they've received threats personally - whether that's violence or being told they wouldn't or can't do things they ought to be able to do, such as participate in a class or enter into a public place - then those are the kinds of things that we should be able to assist with."
Chapel said people in immediate, "real physical danger" should call 911 - not the hotline.
"Once they're safe, we'd love to hear from them and see what we could do to help," he said.
While race-based discrimination and harassment have been around a long time, Chapel said the Jefferson City NAACP chapter decided to create the hotline because of the many different stories of problems that have been reported as part of the MU situation.
The most common version of the news story has involved complaints of racial slurs being shouted at some African American students, a swastika created with human feces in a dormitory bathroom, and graduate student Joseph Butler's hunger strike after allegations Wolfe didn't pay attention to students' and others' complaints about those incidents.
But there also have been reports some of those incidents were exaggerated - or didn't occur at all.
And some have complained no one should have paid attention to Butler's hunger strike against oppression, because he comes from a wealthy Omaha, Nebraska, family.
Chapel told the News Tribune that, in a civil rights context, those criticisms shouldn't matter.
"In terms of Mr. Butler and his family circumstance, you don't have to be poor to get discriminated against - particularly for race," Chapel explained. "You don't have to be uneducated. You don't have to be any other particular classification.
"All discrimination is - particularly if you look at race, sex or other kinds of discrimination that have been outlawed in Missouri - all you have to be is a member of that group" to be on the receiving end of discriminatory acts.
Chapel said the hotline is intended to give people an outlet to express their concerns to a third party, and those complaints will be looked into.
As for people whose stories aren't true - whether in the MU situation or somewhere else - Chapel noted, "The people who don't tell the truth generally get found out."
The national NAACP's history of investigating complaints goes back to 1909, he said, "when they were hanging people" just for the color of their skin.
Chapel acknowledged many people think verbal insults should be ignored and don't need to be reported to anyone.
But, he said, the hotline will take calls about verbal harassment.
"Words have meaning," he said. "If we marginalize and use words in offensive ways against certain groups of people ... those verbal taunts have a way of escalating into physical action."
For example, lynchings, he said.
"This is a feeling that you cannot be who you are, that you are not safe in your person and that something bad may happen to you," Chapel explained. "And a lot of that is borne based on the history that, when somebody called you a particular name or a particular series of names over time, that that could have a very bad effect on your life and, often, led to violence - even as it still does, today."
So, while some people don't believe that kind of violence, or threat of violence, still exists in 21st century America, Chapel said, other cultures know verbal harassment and discrimination still happen regularly - in many places around the country.
"If you made fun of somebody for wearing high-water pants, for example, that might be rude (or) inappropriate," he said, "but it is not something that is based on a historical significance that is independent of that person and their pants.
"When we use words like the N-word or any of its cousins - or we subjugate a group of people based on their skin color or other identifiable characteristics - there's a history there that says when we use those words, we're calling back that history."