As a former student, I really don't have much ties to what the modern day Mizzou campus is like, or the region, but I'm sure it isn't much different.
There are tons of racist people in Missouri and a percentage of them are not shy about it. It's not just country-bumpkin racists, you have your liberal privileged racists from the big cities too. Black people getting called the N-word openly on campus, I'm sure has happened before (albeit rarely I'm sure, I never heard it said in a face to face manner) and happened for a long time.
I don't think the protests are just about the poop swastika, they are a combination of past events and also, about the treatment of grad students recently from administration. But something black people have to deal with, is that when they take a stand and make it a strong one, racists from all corners of the world will descend upon them to try and intimidate/humiliate them. When this story finally went national, I think it sort of caught people in a hysteria of fear. I honestly don't think the guy or gal who said KKK was on campus was doing so to spread fear. They probably heard somebody who heard somebody where it got blown out of proportion, and so they wanted to tweet about it. Since we are talking about older children basically, the way they say it is probably not the most effective way. "THE KKK IS LITERALLY OUTSIDE WITH GUNS RIGHT NOW!" or however it was said
The problem is that everyone is taking literally each tweet about an event as real and spiraling the situation out of control.
Overall, there is almost no logical need or fear of anger/violence over the situation at the school. This is a protest over systemic issues, and that's about as far I think as you can go. Everything else that is coming about, is either a context argument or argument over misinterpreted information.
It's not helping when you have school faculty trying to "help" the protestors and making the situation something way bigger and dangerous then it should be. Whoever told them to forcefully eject media/photographers should be fired immediately, they basically had them all commit serious civil rights violations.