Third World Liberation Front

THIRD WORLD LIBERATION FRONT. On February 29, 1968, the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) was a coalition of revolutionary nationalist student groups at San Francisco State College—including the Philippine-American Collegiate Endeavor, the Latin American Student Organization, the Mexican-American Student Confederation, the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action , the Asian American Political Alliance , and the Native American Student Organization . Declaring that they were “fusing themselves with the masses of Third World people…to create…a new humanity,” and to “control our own destinies,” the TWLF worked alongside the school’s Black Students Union (BSU) to push for the creation of a department of Black studies, the admission of hundreds of Third World students, the hiring of Third World instructors, and the removal of Air Force ROTC from campus.

On November 6—with the university lagging after agreeing in principle to the formation of a Black studies department—the BSU and the TWLF went on strike, refusing to return to classes until fifteen demands were met. The BSU and the TWLF made clear that their goal was not just increased representation. Indeed, they saw the existing university system as an institution that reproduced existing structures of power and profit through alienating Black and Third World people from their own histories. They understood themselves as a part of a social revolution intended to remake higher education through the creation of programs led by—and for—Third World people.

Facing off against the police and against San Francisco State’s combative and conservative president, S.I. Hayakawa, and supported by local unions, neighborhood organizations, the college chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Black Panther Party, the striking students held out until March 20, 1969. Though many of the TWLF’s more radical demands went unmet, the strike settlement included the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies—including departments of Black Studies, Asian American Studies and Native American Studies—and a commitment on the part of the college to increase the admission of non-white students.

The Third World Liberation Strike was a signal event in the development of Black studies, Asian American studies, Chicana/o Studies, Native American studies, and ethnic studies departments across the United States. By the end of the 1970s, these and related programs had been established in hundreds of American universities. However, while these departments gained a relatively stable footing, the original relationship between Third World Studies and revolutionary politics weakened. Though the institutionalization of ethnic studies programs did not represent a fulfillment of the revolutionary vision of the early Third World Studies movement, the model helped to create a space for other fields defined—at least in part—by their connection to the politics of subaltern communities outside the university, by their efforts at understanding and critiquing the ways that traditional disciplines serve to reproduce and reinforce existing structures of power and exploitation.

Bates, Karen Grigsby and Shereen Marisol Meraji. The Student Strike That Changed Higher Ed Forever. Code Switch. National Public Radio. March 21, 2019. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/03/21/704930088/the-student-strike-that-
changed-higher-ed-forever

Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Ferreira, Jason Michael. “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of Third World Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968-1974,” PhD Diss., U.C. Berkeley, 2003.

Gary Y. Okihiro.Third World Studies; Theorizing Liberation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.

Rojas, Fabio. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.