The Birth of Ethnic Studies
Steven Catalano, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Prior to 1968, Americans of color had never enjoyed the benefit of receiving publiclyfunded formal education relevant to their specific U.S. histories and heritages, whether in
public school at the elementary or secondary levels, or in post-secondary institutions.
Until
that time, taxpayer-funded landmarks and textbooks exposed Americans of color
predominantly to white Euro-centric views of U.S. history, rendering invisible both the proud
histories of their respective people’s contributions to American society and their resistance to
systematic race-based U.S. Government oppression.
This all changed that year, when the revolutionary Black Panther Party, against great
resistance, successfully pushed for the creation of America’s first Afro-American Studies
classes at Merritt College in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Oakland, California. This
development occurred within the larger context of radical political and social changes already
taking place throughout the United States in the 1960’s, such as the Civil Rights Movement,
the anti-war movement, the student “Free Speech Movement,” the youth “counterculture”
(hippie) movement, and now an emerging “Black Power” movement.
College students of color in neighboring Berkeley and San Francisco, inspired by the
creation of Afro-American Studies in Oakland, decided themselves to push for the creation of
similarly race-relevant classes at their campuses. These efforts, too, met with great
resistance.
The longest student strike in United States history lasted five months, from November
1968 to March 1969, when students at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State
University) successfully fought for the creation of Ethnic Studies classes. The strike was led
by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of the Black Student Union, Latin
American Students Organization, Asian American Political Alliance, Pilipino American
The Birth of Ethnic Studies
Steven Catalano, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Collegiate Endeavor, Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, and the Native American
Students Union. These students demanded equal access to public higher education, more
senior faculty of color, and a new curriculum that would expand to embrace the cultural
heritages and histories of Americans of color. Their strike resulted in the creation of an
Ethnic Studies College, as well as in the increase of recruitment for students of color.
Among the first faculty in this college were students and TWLF organizers Dan Begonia and
Dan Gonzales, who continued to teach from that time into the 21st century.
A similar strike was triggered in January 1969 by the TWLF at the University of
California at Berkeley, which became the second-longest student strike in U.S. history,
second only to that of SF State. The TWLF of Berkeley included Native American students,
the Mexican American Student Confederation, Asian American Political Alliance, and
African American Student Union. The Berkeley strike grew to an even greater level than the
San Francisco strike because U.C. Berkeley faculty joined the protest and because California
Governor Ronald Reagan called in local and county law enforcement, as well as the
California National Guard, in an effort to shut down the strike. Five days after the faculty
union joined TWLF, the Department of Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley was born.
The earliest Ethnic Studies courses addressed the repressed histories, heritages and
identities of Americans of color such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Latin
Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. Eventually Ethnic Studies came to
embrace issues of gender, class, and sexuality, as well as issues of broader geopolitical or
philosophical scope such as transnationalism and postmodernist/ poststructuralist critiques.
Today there are hundreds of Ethnic Studies departments in colleges and universities across
The Birth of Ethnic Studies
Steven Catalano, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
the United States, addressing the vital needs of young Americans of color for a sense of
social, economic and political belonging in U.S. society.