Victoria Montgomery
Missouri wide receiver Marquis Johnson jumps for the football against Kansas on Saturday, Sept. 6, 2025, at Faurot Field in Columbia, Mo. The two teams have not gone head to head in football since 2011, when the Tigers won 24-10.
“BURN LAWRENCE AGAIN,” read a poster amid the sea of University of Missouri students at the long-anticipated “Border War” football game between MU and the University of Kansas on Sept. 6.
The poster alluded to the Lawrence Massacre, one event in a series of violent conflicts near the Kansas-Missouri border beginning in the 1850s over Kansas’ status as a free or slave state.
The conflict is commonly understood as Kansans against Missourians, but there were anti-slavery and pro-slavery groups on both sides of the border. The Jayhawkers, from whom KU derives its mascot, were an anti-slavery guerrilla group. MU’s Tigers come from the Union-aligned militia group formed to protect the university’s library from the chaos and violence of the border conflicts.
Last spring, the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy partnered with MU Honors College ASH Scholars to begin research into the history behind the Border War rivalry.
Students led by Kinder Institute director Jay Sexton presented the results of this research at the Missouri Theatre on Sept. 5 in an event titled “A Rivalry with an Invented Past: The Kansas-Missouri Border War.”
“Hopefully that [event] was a fresh way for people to think about it without going over their heads completely, and to think about how we construct historical narratives … in relation to our own interests and presence,” Sexton said.
This construction of historical narratives is how the Border War rivalry thrives. Each team selectively uses historical facts against the other: KU fans point to the Jayhawkers’ anti-slavery beliefs, while MU fans focus on the Jayhawkers’ robbery, destruction and murder.
Sophomore Carolina Rodriguez Rios used the event to shed light on the true history of the Jayhawkers and the Tigers.
“The Tigers and the Jayhawks didn’t actually fight each other, and it wasn’t as black and white as some people would like to think,” Rodriguez Rios said. “It was more about personal vendettas in the end … but we only gave the very basic idea for the rivalry.”
During their event, the Kinder Institute and ASH Scholar researchers argued that the history of Bleeding Kansas isn’t what makes the rivalry so intense. Instead, the intensity of the athletic rivalry is what keeps the history from fading into obscurity.
“[There’s a] World War I memorial in Kansas City, and the border wars don’t really have anything like that,” Rodriguez Rios said. “There’s not one solid memorial for it. And I think the football game serves as that in a way, even if maybe it’s a little bit exaggerated for the rivalry.”
Some students embrace this exaggerated narrative. William Quantrill led the attack on Lawrence, known as the Lawrence Massacre, in which an estimated 160 civilians died. When Sexton mentioned Quantrill’s name in a live interview with Paul Finebaum before the Kansas-Missouri football game, a crowd of MU students cheered.
“The football game has really distorted [history],” Sexton said. “It’s kind of weird that those dudes are cheering for the killings of Quantrill. It’s all good and fun, but it’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Likewise, some Jayhawk fans wholeheartedly embrace John Brown, an abolitionist known for a violent and radical approach to abolishing slavery.
Sexton joked that Quantrill and Brown are “treated as the quarterbacks” in the athletic rivalry.
However, Kansas and Missouri were not always enemies historically – in fact, the Jayhawkers and the Tigers had a history of working together against a common enemy.
“That common enemy would have been the bushwhackers, who were probably the most chaotic group of all,” Rodriguez Rios said. “[The Tigers and the Jayhawkers] were trying to combat that same chaos and death that had been caused in both the Burnt District in Missouri and then the burning of Lawrence in Kansas.”
But in the athletic rivalry, Jayhawks and Tigers have been nothing more than sworn enemies.
Using the violent history of the border wars and Bleeding Kansas, the two schools fueled a fiery and famous competition against one another. Since the first Kansas-Missouri football game in 1891, the Jayhawks and the Tigers have cultivated what Sexton described on Paul Finebaum’s show as “the best college football rivalry in existence.”
The Tigers and Jayhawks hadn’t faced off in a football game since 2011, but after the Tigers’ 42-31 victory on Sept. 6, fans are hungry for another showdown.
Edited by Jae Jepsen | [email protected]
Copy edited by Ava Mohror | [email protected]
Edited by Chase Pray | [email protected]