The Third World Liberation Front and the Origins of Ethnic Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the U.S., the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in 68 U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.  

The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge. Martha Biondi masterfully combines impressive research with a wealth of interviews from participants to tell the story of how students turned the slogan ?black power? into a social movement. Vividly demonstrating the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university culture, Biondi illustrates how victories in establishing Black Studies ultimately produced important intellectual innovations that have had a lasting impact on academic research and university curricula over the past 40 years. This book makes a major contribution to the current debate on Ethnic Studies, access to higher education, and opportunity for all.

In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of "Asian American" to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad. As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice. Asian American opposition to the war in Vietnam, unlike that of the broader antiwar movement, was predicated on understanding it as a racial, specifically anti-Asian genocide. Throughout he argues that cultural critiques of racism and imperialism, the twin "chains of Babylon" of the title, informed the construction of a multiethnic Asian American identity committed to interracial and transnational solidarity.

This is a story about God, a red native God, native to the Americas and yet the very same God worshipped throughout the world with different names. Macias takes the reader through a virginal journey into Chicano philosophy, employing the spirit world and his native ancestors as he makes his way wearing serpentine glasses through his belief system, abandoning Catholicism in the process as he embraces "La Esencia de las Cosas," the Mexica worldview taught to him by Andres Segura Granados, the conchero maestro and capitan-general de la danza. The author begins with his birth in the 1940's as he explores factors that led to his involvement in the beginning stages of the 1960's Chicano Movement in southern and northern California, both in politics as well as the Chicano artist community. Mexican history is re-visited from a Mexica/Maya native perspective, as Macias lays the foundation for the native worldview which came to recognize the One God, Ometeotl, Hunab K'u. In the process, his personal life story becomes intertwined with native belief to create one serpentine tale, honoring the spiritual essence of the Americas, the Feathered Serpent.

An overview : the strike at SF State / by Steve Toomajian -- "Gangsters in our midst" / by S.I. Hayakawa -- Hayakawa as seen by a striker / by Carol Corville -- The strike leaders : interviews by Carolyn Skaug. Bill Middleton, BSU. Hari Dillon, TWLF. John Levin, SDS -- Educational crisis / by Robert Smith -- Black studies / by Carolyn Skaug -- Nathan Hare : power of being Black / by Carolyn Skaug -- Fight for a college : photos / by Lou de la Torre -- The silent middle / by John Gonzales -- Why strike SF State? / by John Davidson -- Jim Vaszko and the starting shot / by Steve Toomajian -- Power people / by John Leighty -- On getting busted -- / by Bruce Campbell -- Police on campus / by Steve Hara -- Police off campus / by Bruce Campbell -- They love him / by Tony Rogers -- History lessons for the radicals / by Elliot Carlson -- Learning on the picket line : Strike! Teach! / by Tony Rogers -- Revolt comes to sports / by Joe DeLoach -- The press / by Harvey Yorke.

Building on the intellectual and political momentum that established the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, this Reader inaugurates a radical response to the appropriations of liberal multiculturalism while building on the possibilities enlivened by the historical work of Ethnic Studies. It does not attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of Critical Ethnic Studies; rather, it offers a space to promote open dialogue, discussion, and debate regarding the field's expansive, politically complex, and intellectually rich concerns. Covering a wide range of topics, from multiculturalism, the neoliberal university, and the exploitation of bodies to empire, the militarized security state, and decolonialism, these twenty-five essays call attention to the urgency of articulating a Critical Ethnic Studies for the twenty-first century.     

A landmark work, The Darker Nations chronicles the rise and fall of the Third World. Vijay Prashad reconstructs the fascinating history of the Third World, recalling the now-forgotten Brussels conclave of the League Against Imperialism - an international effort that brought Albert Einstein together with Jawaharlal Nehru, Madame Sun Yat-Sen and hundreds of other far-flung revolutionaries. Also includes a striking new analysis of the 1955 conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where 29 African and Asian countries launched the Third World Project.

The black power movement helped redefine African Americans' identity and establish a new racial consciousness in the 1960s. As an influential political force, this movement in turn spawned the academic discipline known as Black Studies. Today there are more than a hundred Black Studies degree programs in the United States, many of them located in America's elite research institutions. In From Black Power to Black Studies, Fabio Rojas explores how this radical social movement evolved into a recognized academic discipline. Rojas traces the evolution of Black Studies over more than three decades, beginning with its origins in black nationalist politics. His account includes the 1968 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College, the Ford Foundation's attempts to shape the field, and a description of Black Studies programs at various American universities. His statistical analyses of protest data illuminate how violent and nonviolent protests influenced the establishment of Black Studies programs. Integrating personal interviews and newly discovered archival material, Rojas documents how social activism can bring about organizational change. Shedding light on the black power movement, Black Studies programs, and American higher education, this historical analysis reveals how radical politics are assimilated into the university system.

A memoir written by a participant in the 1968 San Francisco State College Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) Strike to establish the College of Ethnic Studies. The book discusses the reasons for strike and the background social, political and cultural changes taking place at the time. The strike's impact today is embodied in the College of Ethnic Studies and the efforts of every student, staff, faculty or community member associated with the college to ensure that the program continues and remains relevant today.

Newsclippings detailing the events of the grape boycott and Third World strike at UC Berkeley.

Content: Emergence of Ethnic Studies movement in 1960s -- TWLF protests and demands -- Establishment of the interim Department of Ethnic Studies -- Internal & external conflicts: 1st external review report -- Ethnic Studies in crisis I: dismantling of Ethnic Studies -- Re-conceptualizing Comparative ES mission and curriculum -- Development of Ethnic Studies faculty: 2nd external review -- Ethnic Studies and American Culture -- Institutional location of Ethnic Studies debated: 3rd external review -- Ethnic Studies downgraded, consolidated & transferred into L&S -- Ethnic Studies at the crossroad -- Ethnic Studies in crisis II: TWLF protest & hunger strike of 1999 -- The Brentano Report: 4th external review -- Wither Ethnic Studies? Consolidation & down-sizing of Ethnic Studies: 5th external review.

PEN OAKLAND The Josephine Miles Award 2010 For excellence in literature is hereby presented to Manuel Ruben Delgado for his book The Last Chicano (AuthorHouse) "The Last Chicano "is a true story of alienation, family heroes, social defiance, radical politics and fate, told through real life experiences, from San Bernardino s Mexican barrio to the campus of the University of California Berkeley, ending with the discovery of family ties to the Mexican Revolution. The story begins with the colorful history of San Bernardino, CA in the 1940s, as the Delgado family struggles to achieve the American Dream: the story of Delgado s uncles, Zoot Suit wearing Pachucos and professional boxers, who were his first heroes; of life as a Vato Loco, narrowly avoiding state prison at the age of 17; of a life threatening disability that affords him the opportunity to attend the University of California, Berkeley. The author joins the Mexican American Student Confederation and becomes a leader of the Third World Liberation Front strike for Ethnic Studies, the longest, most violent student strike in California history. But the passions of the 1960s subside and, disillusioned, he moves to Los Angeles, where he lives a life of dissolution. Twelve years later he returns to academia as a Chicano polemicist, this time in Teacher Education and Political Science. The story ends with a trip to Zacatecas, Mexico where Delgado discovers that his father s family played key roles in implementing the new socialist Constitution of 1917, serving as Mayors, Governors, labor leaders and State Senators.

It's the mid-1960s, and everyone is fighting back. Black Americans are fighting for civil rights, the counterculture is trying to subvert the Vietnam War, and women are fighting for their liberation. Indians were fighting, too, though it's a fight too few have documented, and even fewer remember. At the time, newspapers and television broadcasts were filled with images of Indian activists staging dramatic events such as the seizure of Alcatraz in 1969, the storming of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building on the eve of Nixon's re-election in 1972, and the American Indian Movement (AIM)-supported seizure of Wounded Knee by the Oglala Sioux in 1973. Like a Hurricane puts these events into historical context and provides one of the first narrative accounts of that momentous period. Unlike most other books written about American Indians, this book does not seek to persuade readers that government policies were cruel and misguided. Nor is it told from the perspective of outsiders looking in. Written by two American Indians, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane is a gripping account of how for a brief, but brilliant season Indians strategized to change the course and tone of American Indian-U.S. government interaction. Unwaveringly honest, it analyzes not only the period's successes but also its failures. Smith and Warrior have gathered together the stories of both the leaders and foot soldiers of AIM, conservative tribal leaders, top White House aides, and the ordinary citizens caught up in the maelstrom of activity that would shape a new generation of political thought. Here are insider accounts of how local groups coalesced to form a national movement for change. Here, too, is a clear-eyed assessment of the period's key leaders: the fancy dance revolutionary Clyde Warrior, the enigmatic Hank Adams, and AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means. The result is a human story of drama, sacrifice, triumph, and tragedy that gives a ground-level view of events that forever changed the lives of Americans, particularly American Indians.

The long walk at San Francisco State. A listing of the strike demands ; The master plan for higher education in the state of California ; The tactical squad -- Notes on jury selection in the Huey P. Newton trial -- No one can be all things to all people -- Seeing the sights in San Francisco.

Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Interest. With accounts from San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, MOUNTAIN ROVERS highlights how students changed the course of history through the origin stories of Asian American studies at those campuses and the narratives of nine remarkable students. For each of these Asian Americans, their ethnic heritages and racialized experiences, their family backgrounds, their education, and the social movements of their day intersected so that they became agents of change. Specifically, they organized and mobilized fellow students and community members to establish and further Asian American Studies (AAS) on their campuses. AAS has since grown not only to offer a relevant curriculum for and about these students, but also to help develop and empower their communities.

In 1969, LaNada War Jack is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Nation, She helped found Native American Students United and the Third World Liberation Front ( TWLF ) at UC Berkeley from which emerged Native American Studies and Ethnic Studies. After the TWLF strike, she was a leading member of the occupation of Alcatraz to demand Indian treaty rights. She continues to be active in the movement today for justice and equality.

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

This anthology includes essays, photographs, and reflections from individuals who participated in or were inspired by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) student strike in 1969 that led to the establishment of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Multiracial solidarity was established through the coming together of African American, Asian American, Chicano and Native American students to form the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) along with support from white student allies. This anthology fills a historical void. In social movement histories, we hear about the historical importance of struggles such as the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and the People's Park conflict in 1969 but very little about the TWLF. If the participants do not retell their history, it will be inaccurately retold. Or worse, it becomes omitted and erased from the narrative of general social movement history. This anthology is also the story of what future generations did to continue the struggle, including the establishment of new twLF coalitions in 1999 and afterwards. The strike reshaped academia then and its legacy has ramifications on how we look at history and societal transformation today. In many ways, the TWLF and the solidarity that emerged has provided future generations to draw on past lessons to make change in the present.

In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus. In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines--departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies--were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power. Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This is the story Jodi Melamed tells in Represent and Destroy, portraying the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference. Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference--to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race--Melamed focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. She examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country's global ascendancy. She shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality. Yet Represent and Destroy also recovers an anticapitalist "race radical" tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States--a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.

An iconic figure of the Asian American movement, Richard Aoki (1938-2009) was also, as the most prominent non-Black member of the Black Panther Party, a key architect of Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1960s and '70s. His life story exposes the personal side of political activism as it illuminates the history of ethnic nationalism and radical internationalism in America. A reflection of this interconnection, Samurai among Panthers weaves together two narratives: Aoki's dramatic first-person chronicle and an interpretive history by a leading scholar of the Asian American movement, Diane C. Fujino. Aoki's candid account of himself takes us from his early years in Japanese American internment camps to his political education on the streets of Oakland, to his emergence in the Black Panther Party. As his story unfolds, we see how his parents' separation inside the camps and his father's illegal activities shaped the development of Aoki's politics. Fujino situates his life within the context of twentieth-century history--World War II, the Cold War, and the protests of the 1960s. She demonstrates how activism is both an accidental and an intentional endeavor and how a militant activist practice can also promote participatory democracy and social service. The result of these parallel voices and analysis in Samurai among Panthers is a complex--and sometimes contradictory--portrait of a singularly extraordinary activist and an expansion and deepening of our understanding of the history he lived.

Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls "U.S. Third World Leftists," activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the "long 1960s." Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms. Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis's writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers' 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.

An archive collection of Asian American material focused on the Third World Liberation student strikes at San Francisco State College and University of California Berkeley campuses, the International Hotel tenants fight against eviction, and the establishment of the Asian Community Center in SF Chinatown-Manilatown.

A collection of essays spans the tumultuous decade from 1968, the year of the San Francisco State University strike, to 1978 and the twin traumas of the Jonestown massacre and the assassinations of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. This volume provides a broad look at the diverse ways these ten years shook the city of San Francisco and shaped the world we live in today. From community gardening to environmental justice, gay rights and other identity-based social movements, anti-gentrification efforts, neighborhood arts programs, and more, many of the initiatives whose origins are described here have taken root and spread far beyond San Francisco.

In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College demanded the creation of a Third World studies program to counter the existing curricula that ignored issues of power--notably, imperialism and oppression. The administration responded by institutionalizing an ethnic studies program; Third World studies was over before it began. Detailing the field's genesis and premature death, Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectual history of ethnic studies and Third World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying some of their core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories. In so doing, he establishes the contours of a unified field of study--Third World studies--that pursues a decolonial politics by examining the human condition broadly, especially in regard to oppression, and critically analyzing the locations and articulations of power as manifested in the social formation. Okihiro's framing of Third World studies moves away from ethnic studies' liberalism and its U.S.-centrism to emphasize the need for complex thinking and political action in the drive for self-determination.