During the 50th Anniversary of the 1969 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) student strike at UC Berkeley, a campus collective was formed named the TWLF Research Initiative. Among other things, this initiative recorded oral histories of student strikers from the 1969 and 1999 TWLF student strikes at UC Berkeley. This page features selected previews of those interviews with student strikers. Full interviews will be posted on Calisphere (links forthcoming).
In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) coalition was formed between the Black Student Union and other student groups at San Francisco State University (then known as San Francisco State College). The coalition led a five-month campus strike to demand a radical shifts away from admissions practices that mostly excluded students of color. They also advocated for comprehensive reform of the curriculum, which was regarded as irrelevant to the lives of students of color.
In 1969, a multiracial coalition of UC Berkeley students came together and organized the TWLF at UC Berkeley in solidarity with the San Francisco State College TWLF strike. TWLF at UC Berkeley created a list of demands, including demanding that the University acknowledge the histories of communities of color as vital scholarship through the creation of a Third World College dedicated to the underemphasized histories of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanx, and Latinx groups, and Native Americans. Three-month-long protests followed, resulting in the establishment of the Department of Ethnic Studies, but not a Third World College that the strikers had demanded.
Source: https://crg.berkeley.edu/third-world-liberation-front-research-initiative-twlf
In 1999, under the banner of the ‘third world Liberation Front’ (stylized as ‘twLF’), UC Berkeley students protested a series of cuts to the Department of Ethnic Studies by holding rallies, sit-ins, building occupations, and a hunger strike. Their activism resulted in a five point Agreement in Support of Ethnic Studies, including the creation of the Multicultural Community Center, the Center for Race and Gender, and more faculty hires in the Department of Ethnic Studies. A Third College at UC Berkeley is still an unmet but not forgotten demand.
Source: https://crg.berkeley.edu/third-world-liberation-front-research-initiative-twlf
