The Third World Strike: How Ethnic Studies Was Invented

Three miles west of this campus, in the winter of nineteen sixty-eight and into nineteen sixty-nine, the Black Panther Party was running political education programs in Oakland's flatlands, teaching community members about their rights, their history, and the structure of the system around them. On this campus, students were drawing the same conclusions through a different route.

In January of nineteen sixty-nine, students at the University of California Berkeley, organized as the Third World Liberation Front, went on strike. Their demand was specific: a Third World College within the university, with departments offering courses in Chicano history, Black history, Asian American history, and Native American history. These courses did not exist. The university's curriculum, as the strikers articulated it, taught the history of the people who had built the institution while leaving out the histories of everyone else whose labor and land had made it possible.

The California History journal, the Online Archive of California, and KQED San Francisco all document the strike. It lasted about ten weeks. There were confrontations with police. There were arrests. The university eventually agreed to establish a Department of Ethnic Studies. It is, according to the California History journal, the oldest such department in the United States.

The courses that now exist, at nearly every college and university in the country, in the history of communities that were not taught as history before nineteen sixty-nine, trace back to that strike, that campus, those four months. The specific courses, the departments, the academic field of ethnic studies as it exists today, came out of a Berkeley campus walkout in the winter and spring of nineteen sixty-nine.

Three miles east, the Panthers were teaching the same material in a different building. The university caught up.