A throng of students—many of them minorities—are gathered in the quad, covering the entire area from Malcolm X Plaza to the business building. They chant, “Power to the people!” and wave signs bearing that same phrase. Chaos abounds as police are called in to restrain the angry crowd after it decides to march on the administration building.

This was the scene that met the eye 40 years ago, when the SF State strike of 1968 shook the campus and changed its face forever, making headlines all around the world and generating a new awareness of diversity.

“The strike was one of the defining moments of American education,” SF State President Robert Corrigan said. “It allowed the community to come together, and around the country doors began to open up [for students of color].”

The strike, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of students of color, began on Nov. 6, 1968 after then-President Robert Smith suspended teaching assistant and graduate student George Mason Murray, who was a member of the Black Panthers.

A chronology created by the campus library said that the strike ended on March 20, 1969, when an agreement was signed between the BSU, TWLF and a committee created by the school to address the issues concerning inequality and lack of diversity that triggered the strike.

“The issue of access for students of color was the main driving force behind the strike,” said dean of Social Justice Initiatives Jacob Perea, who was a graduate student during the strike.

Many current faculty and alumni said that before the strike, the campus was not at all diverse.

“I was a student here in 1968,” said associate dean of Ethnic Studies Laureen Chew, whose involvement in the strike led her to be arrested and jailed for about three weeks. “I saw predominantly white faces on campus. As a Chinese-American, I was very much a minority.”

Asian American studies professor Dan Gonzalez, who came to SF State as a freshman in the middle of the strike, said that the school at the time was a “white campus.”

“There were very few people of color,” Gonzalez said. He mentioned an informal 1969 census that reflected only 75 Filipino students, which he said was a “poor show” given the considerable growth of the Filipino population in areas surrounding the school.

Both Chew and Gonzalez added that there was very little curriculum for teaching about other cultures.
“The only form of ethnic studies classes were presentations by different organizations,” Gonzalez said.

As part of the strike, students boycotted classes and picketed in and around campus, even bringing in high school students from different parts of the city to see the strike, Perea said.

Perea himself was one of the members of the TWLF who joined groups that took over different buildings in the city to use them as meeting places and venues for after-school programs that educated students of color.

Even the faculty got involved. About 350 faculty members picketed in January 1969, when the campus re-opened after being closed for over a month by acting President S.I. Hayakawa.

“The strike split departments in half,” Corrigan said. “The place turned on itself and became the most challenging institution in America.”

Nearly 2,000 people were arrested and nearly two dozen faculty members were fired during the course of the strike, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

The need for more diverse education led to the establishment of the first College of Ethnic Studies in 1969 and to the school increasing its recruitment and admission of minority students and faculty.

“The face of the campus changed,” Chew said.

The Office of Budget Planning and Enrollment released an ethnicity report at the end of fall 2007. It showed that out of a total student (graduate and undergraduate) population of 30,125, 36.8 percent were white (a 5 percent decrease in the previous 10 years), non-Latino, 22.7 percent were Asian, 17 percent were Mexican American or Latino, and 6.5 percent were African American.

“We had an extraordinary shift in the demographics of faculty and students,” Corrigan said. “We made every effort to diversify the campus.”

Within a decade of the strike, more than 400 other universities had begun their own ethnic studies programs, according to the Education Resource Information Center.

Forty years later, the College of Ethnic Studies has increased the number of its departments to 12 different programs from its original four, Chew said. Among these are American Indian studies, Raza studies, and most recently, the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaporas Initiative.