Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) rally at Sproul Plaza, 1969, Third World Strike at University of California, Berkeley collection, 1968-1972, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.
Since 1969, the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley has relied on grassroots efforts to collect, preserve, and amplify research and literature of studies on “race, ethnicity, indigeneity, with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States.” The Ethnic Studies Department offers four different areas of study: Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Chicanx Latinx Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies. This department also oversees the Ethnic Studies Library, which was established in 1997. All the resources offered by the department today come from years of student activism to broaden academic perspectives offered in higher education.
The core of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley draws from the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). This movement emerged in the late 60s as a response to glaring disparities in representation of ethnicities in humanities and social sciences courses offered by higher education. Conversations involving cultural diversity in higher education were catalyzed by the Higher Education Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided financial support for educational programs in universities throughout the country and for students wishing to study. Simultaneously, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 increased cultural diversity in the United States by ending the quota system of immigration that prioritized immigrants from European countries. Thus, the demographics of students in higher education changed dramatically, and the need for adequate representation in academia became more clear.
The TWLF movement began at San Francisco State University (SFSU) with protests by the Black Student Union and other student groups. After connecting with the movement at SFSU, student organizations at UC Berkeley formed their own coalition. The Third World Liberation Front at Berkeley included the Afro-American Studies Union (AASU), the Mexican-American Student Confederation (MASC), the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), and the Native American Student Alliance (NASA).
Troy Duster, an emeritus professor of sociology at UC Berkeley witnessed the beginnings of the TWLF. During his time as a professor, he grappled with tensions between faculty of the Berkeley Department of Sociology and its students. In his oral history, Duster reflects on the reservations of faculty at Berkeley:
Troy Duster. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
The faculty view was, these insurgent militant students wanted to insert politics into the curriculum while the faculty were simply the neutral purveyors of the established wisdom. So the faculty could typically take the quote, “high moral ground,” that there are these books, there are these articles, “We teach, we teach the canon.” And so they were not just insulted by the students saying that, “We know more than you, you should be giving us a different kind of education.” They went further in terms of putting down the students, that “this was mere politics.” So the ingredients for a titanic clash were there. The faculty had it this way, life as usual, “You should come into the classroom, you should be happy to be here, we let you in, sit down. Shut up. Enjoy the show.” And the militant students saying, “No,” categorically in the other direction, “we want a revisitation of the whole idea of what constitutes a legitimate curriculum.”
Duster also noticed new political divides among Berkeley faculty during the TWLF. Some faculty who supported the Free Speech Movement were less receptive to the movement for Ethnic Studies at Berkeley. One major difference, he notes, was closer proximity to conflict than before:
Well, in the middle sixties, most of the faculty was quite liberal. They were saying, “Of course one should be in favor of civil rights in the South.” What happened in the late sixties is therefore important to sociology and to the local scene, both local sociology and national issues. Because suddenly the issue is no longer liberal about the South, liberal about what is happening way over there. One had to be responding to students on campus who wanted transformation locally. And faculty who had been progressives and liberals in the national scene often found themselves becoming quite conservative, and often portrayed as reactionary when it came to the local scene. So I would say sociology—and indeed, it was true I think for a good part of Berkeley and I think all over the country, but you saw it here sharply and dramatically—you saw people who had been pro-FSM and very much in favor of the students shifting their political position when it came to local scenes about protest on campus, when it came to the Vietnam War, and then later on, most especially the transformation of academic life on campus, namely the insurgency with Black studies and women’s studies.
Students organized a democratic system linking various campus groups to guide decision-making for the TWLF. In his oral history, Harvey Dong, one of many organizers and members of AAPA involved in the TWLF, reflects on his perspective of initial member organization. Harvey Dong recalls the internal politics of the TWLF:
Harvey Dong in 1972. Courtesy of Harvey Dong.
Even though there were only six Native Americans on campus, they would still have that equal voting power to decide on strike related politics. So you had African Americans, Asians, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. They all had equally divided 25 percent power on the votes.
The organization used this democratic process to create a list of demands of the University. It sought to establish a “Third World College,” “Third World People in Positions of Power,” and adequate funding to uphold the integrity of the programs. Due to the inadequacy of existing plans by the University to establish a Black Studies Department, the TWLF began the TWLS (Third World Liberation Strike) on January 21, 1969. Dong shares his memory of the strike and witnessing police violence:
The strike was informational in the beginning. So there’d be picketing, chanting in front of Dwinelle Plaza. And then an announcement would be made that the informational part was ending and then there would be a sealing off of the Sather Gate area, which did lead to some tension in terms of people not crossing. Although if you wanted to cross you could just kind of go on the other gates or the other bridges nearby. And then the stationary picket line at Sather Gate would be attacked by plainclothes police. The police would be followed by uniformed police. Okay. The plainclothes would be followed by uniform and then the strike would escalate. The escalation would reach the point where there’d be thousands of students. The police would call for mutual assistance, which would include highway patrol officers. There would be tear gassing.
“Strike 1969” TWLF pamphlet, Third World Strike at University of California, Berkeley collection, 1968-1972, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.
Protesters used a variety of tactics to advocate for ethnic studies: hunger strikes, rallies, class boycotts, and sit-ins. These approaches effectively agitated the university and the state government, ultimately motivating a police crackdown. Cristina Kim, Harvey Dong’s interviewer, remarks:
The TWLS at UC Berkeley was one of the most violently repressed student protests in the history of the United States. Governor Ronald Reagan—who had already forged his political career in opposition to “Berkeley Radicalism”—deployed the California Highway Patrol, the Alameda Police, [the Berkeley Police Department] and the National Guard to quell the uprisings with tear gas and batons.
In contrast to the Free Speech Movement, Winthrop D. Jordan, a professor emeritus of slavery and race relations in the United States, also describes the TWLS as more violent in his oral history. He emphasizes the university’s employment of troops, civic, and military forces to suppress the strike. Jordan was a professor of history at Berkeley from 1963 to 1982, and modified his course schedule to accommodate students participating in the TWLS. During his preparations to teach the antebellum period of US history (generally considered 1812 to 1861), he recalls his discussion with students before the strike began:
[My preparations] began at the same time that the Third World Strike began, so I was confronted with what was I going to do? Start this course, and being in some ways a conservative, what I ended up doing was I taught it on campus and also off campus. I taught it in two sessions. I told the group when I met them, I said, “The Third World Strike is coming next week and we’ve got a decision, and some of you aren’t going to be able to come on campus and I recognize that. I feel that I have to teach the course. If it’s scheduled it’s my university obligation, I have to teach it on campus. But does anybody have a large living room where we can do it off campus?” I said, “I’m going to teach it back-to-back, two sections, and people can come to whichever they like, they get equal chance of getting an A or an F in the course.”
As a workaround, one student offered a large living room in a fraternity house on Piedmont Avenue for the course. Jordan recalls the reaction of students to the unlikely off-campus location:
Winthrop D. Jordan. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library
I was a little surprised when I got there. There was one great big, perfect room to meet in, their room on the first floor near the front door. I gave lectures there. When students came to the first one, I remember they’d look at the number, at their notepad, on the number on it, and then look at the house. They’d come in with very surprised looks on their faces, mostly Black undergraduates. That’s where I held it all semester, and then I held it on campus as scheduled, so I taught it back to back.
After months of negotiations between student activists, the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California), and Chancellor Roger Heyns, the chancellor announced the establishment of an Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley on March 4th, 1969. This announcement came on the same day the ASUC voted 550 to 4 in support of an Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley with adequate funding for its longevity. The demand for a Third World College did not see administrative support from the university, but the chancellor stated the department would “immediately offer four year programs leading to a B.A. degree in history, culture, and contemporary experience of ethnic minority groups, especially Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.” The strike officially came to an end.
After the establishment of the Ethnic Studies Department, Deena González accepted her offer to UC Berkeley for the history graduate program in 1974. Her lived experience as a Chicana and previous involvement in student activism during her undergraduate career at New Mexico State University informed her research focus on Chicana studies. During her studies as a PhD student, González recalls seeing farmworkers speak at Sproul Plaza about racial justice. She draws comparison between Dolores Huerta’s speech at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in the late sixties and the speeches of the farmworkers:
Deena González. Courtesy of Deena González.
I remember going to Sproul Plaza one day feeling a little bit lonely, feeling tired. The farmworkers were speaking. I [remembered I had heard] Dolores Huerta speak at UNM maybe in ’69, ’70 and so I went to hear her, and I thought, this sounds really familiar. And what she did was she began talking about the work of people who labor in the fields and whose lives are marked by insensitivity of others and so on. I think she had said this in Albuquerque, too, about what is wrong about standing up for people who bring food to the table, so you can eat, and that kind of thing; powerful, powerful messages. I remember thinking to myself, wow—growing up in New Mexico as I did and even in the movement of the sixties and understanding the power differentials and class and racial privilege, I’ve never thought about it in the context of a kind of academic field of study. And who had spoken before her and who spoke after her were people who were talking about Chicano studies, and they were saying as a requirement of the university, Ethnic studies as a requirement began even then, and of course didn’t come to fruition till I think, what, the late eighties that finally something got put on the books. It made an impression, it made a really deep impression, and again it was one of these I needed to know more [of], I don’t know enough, and how am I going to get there.
The recurring message of racial justice between Dolores Huerta at University of New Mexico and the farmworkers at Sproul Plaza inspired González to look further into ethnic studies. Later in her academic career, González witnessed changing attitudes in the Department of History. In her view, respect for Ethnic Studies improved notably from 1974 to 1983:
I think there was more of a [reconciliation] these were legitimate fields of study. You couldn’t do US history if you didn’t know African American studies–that’s just impossible and not good. And, I think people are coming around to thinking that if you don’t know Latino and Latina history in the US or Chicano and Chicana studies in the Southwest, you’re certainly not going to be able to do a very credible job of being a faculty member who is conveying to students the freshest, most cutting-edge scholarship.
Outside of SFSU and UC Berkeley, the Bay Area felt the repercussions of the TWLF. On November 20th, 1969, Native American activists, including Dr. LaNada War Jack (a student activist in the TWLF with NASA), occupied Alcatraz to protest in support of indigenous land sovereignty and rights. Occupiers sought to reclaim land for indigenous peoples after centuries of dispossession due to colonialism. Activists who participated in the TWLS at Berkeley also played a significant role in the International Hotel Strike in 1977, namely Emil de Guzman and Harvey Dong. This strike intended to prevent eviction of Filipino and Chinese people living in the residential hotel as part of an ongoing gentrification process in old Manilatown of San Francisco.
Today, the legacy of student activists lives on in the university through the Ethnic Studies Department, the Ethnic Studies Library, the Multicultural Community Center, the Center for Race and Gender, and many other organizations. Ethnic studies at Berkeley directly stems from the tireless efforts of student activists advocating for equality and representation.
TWLF, UC Berkeley (131_24). Courtesy of Stephen Shames
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Sophia Faaland is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley studying history. They work at the Oral History Center in the Bancroft Library as a Student Editor and contribute to research for the Istanpolis project within the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. Previously, they worked as a research apprentice and field student at the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology.
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