The San Francisco Bay Area is home to some of the world’s premier, and most forward-thinking, academic institutions. The University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, San Francisco State, and U.C. Santa Cruz have all - thanks to their engaged, politically animated student body and faculty - expanded the boundaries of what was possible for those in the university community to teach, research, and stand for.
These changes, however, did not happen overnight - nor were they easily achieved without any resistance. In fact, in the late 1960s, the academic establishment fought tooth and nail against an aggravated student body to ensure those changes would never come to fruition; thankfully, those students’ scrappy tenacity would eventually win the day.
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Given U.C. Berkeley’s current plan to raze the city’s People’s Park and use the land for more student housing - a wildly unpopular plan that will displace houseless folk, strain Berkeley’s already overburdened faculty and student facilities/resources, and erase a historic symbol of free speech and mutual support - it feels germane to offer a brief history of the 1960s student movement in the Bay. In particular, we’ll focus on Berkeley’s Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of students largely responsible for those seismic shifts to academia’s status quo.
The movement began at S.F. State in 1968 when the university’s Black Student Union united with other student groups representing marginalized communities and demanded that the university end prejudiced admissions procedures and afford Black and Brown students greater autonomy in their academic pursuits given how disturbingly Eurocentric curriculums were at the time (and sadly still often are), completely erasing the histories and thought/theoretical contributions of marginalized groups.
After three months of non-stop picketing, the students of S.F. State finally saw a light at the end of the tunnel when faculty members stepped up and joined the struggle. The like-minded students of Berkeley noticed their neighbors’ progress and, also inspired by the Black Panther Party’s expansion across the United States and the United Farm Workers’ Grape Strike and Boycott, set about taking action of their own.
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U.C. Berkeley’s Afro-American Student Union, in 1968, drafted a proposal to the university demanding that a dedicated Black Studies program be created that would afford Black students greater academic agency and eventually become a proper, independent Black Studies department in which the students and faculty could collaborate in fashioning curricula relevant to the modern conditions faced by Black folk.
The U.C. Regents, in predictable fashion, approved the creation of a Black Studies program but stipulated that it will only ever remain a program (prohibiting the AASU’s desired creation of a full Black Studies department) and, even more gallingly, not appointing any Black students or staff to the program’s implementation committee.
Disillusioned by the university’s flaccid response, the AASU opted to ally themselves with the Native American Student Alliance, the Mexican American Student Confederation, and the Asian-American Political Alliance; the resulting coalition was labeled the Third World Liberation Front.
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Richard Aoki, Manuel Delgado, and Charles Brown of the TWLF
The demands of Berkeley’s TWLF? Not a mere program, but a wholly autonomous Third World College wherein Black students, Native American students, Mexican American students, and Asian-American students would possess full academic self-determination and in which faculty and staff could more meaningfully address questions surrounding ethnic identity, capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. In addition to that central demand, the TWLF advocated for increased minority representation in university administrative positions, academic and financial aid for minority students, and, crucially, no disciplinary action against striking faculty and students. Berkeley’s TWLF strike began.
U.C. Berkeley’s response? Bring the national guard to campus (for the first time in the university’s history) and subject the strikers to savage beatings and tear-gas over the course of nearly 10 weeks.
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Finally, after nearly three months, the academic senate voted to create a formal Department of Ethnic Studies. Though an Ethnic Studies Department was not a Third World College, it was still a major concession and victory for the TWLF after which they decided to conclude the bitter 10-week long strike.
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Berkeley’s TWLF continued to keep the university in check; 30 years later, the TWLF was resurrected to protest budget cuts to the Ethnic Studies Department. After a grueling 8-day hunger strike during which U.C. police arrested 83 peaceful strikers, the university finally capitulated, hiring more Ethnic Studies faculty and establishing the Multicultural Community Center and the Center for Race and Gender, both of which continue to provide vital resources to the student body.
While it is certainly disheartening and frankly infuriating to learn just how violently U.C. Berkeley battled against meaningful progress, the passion and persistence of young people and faculty should inspire and galvanize us today in our struggles to keep our institutions’ in check.
Fortunately, that passion and persistence have not gone anywhere.
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See also: Our Ultimate Guide To A Perfect Day Trip To Berkeley
Photography by: Garth Eliassen/Getty Images
