![]() Word would come back to members of the Third World Liberation Front and the Black Student Union from the police saying, 'We have bullets with your name on it.' " ![]() Relationships were stressed to the point of crumbling. Historian Ferreira says many people have no idea of the sacrifice these activists made: "People did time. Organizer Varnado spent a year in jail, but is philosophical: "Other people spent more." "And that was really traumatic because I spent my 19th birthday in jail." She still remembers the man's slogan: "Don't perish in jail, call Barrish for bail!" Guzman was charged with three misdemeanors and says she eventually spent 30 days in jail. "My dad had to pick me up with a bail bondsman," she recalls, chuckling. Lisa Rae Gutierrez Guzman was also arrested that same day. "Some people I know were getting hit by bayonets, with their heads bashed in, blood all over the place." Chew (who went on to teach Asian-American studies at SFSU) was arrested that day, and her biggest worry: what her mother would think. "I was at the fringe of this huge, hundreds of people" when, she says, mounted police appeared. Student Laureen Chew was working in the library and remembers coming outside to one of the demonstrations. She took a plea deal and ended up spending her 19th birthday in jail. Lisa Rae Gutierrez Guzman was arrested for striking at SFSU in 1968. Ronald Reagan, who had waged his own battles with students at Berkeley over free speech, and the San Francisco police chief. Hayakawa became famous for climbing atop a sound truck and ripping the wires from loudspeakers the students were using to amplify their demands. He became an American citizen after his family immigrated to the U.S., and in his early adult life he was a Democrat (his first vote was for Adlai Stevenson in 1956).Īfter the strike, he would become a Republican (and eventually, a U.S. Hayakawa had been born in Canada to Japanese parents. Hayakawa, a jaunty, self-assured semantics professor, who would be remembered for his hard-line tactics and his signature headgear: a hand-knit, multicolored tam o'shanter. "This went on day after day," remembers Varnado, " everybody was under attack."Ī few weeks after the strike began, SF State's president, Robert Smith, resigned. ![]() Police were called in to contain the demonstrations and disperse the protesters. ![]() They stayed out of class and, every day, more students joined them. Some 400 students gathered in front of the administration building to demand that Murray be reinstated. 6, 1968, members of the BSU and the Third World Liberation Front poured onto campus. The BSU began a two-pronged effort: to press the school to admit more black students and to persuade parents of black high-schoolers to send their kids to SF State (which is now San Francisco State University). He met a student named Jerry Varnado at a Negro Students' Association meeting, and the two helped assemble various black groups on campus into the very first Black Student Union. One of those organizers, Jimmy Garrett, was older and had worked in the civil rights movement in the South. The groundwork was laid for the strike a couple of years before, when black students organized to press for a black studies department and the admission of more black students. history, at San Francisco State College, which changed everything. Then came the longest student strike in U.S. But 50 years ago, studying the history and culture of any people who were not white and Western was considered radical. Many if not most college students have taken a course or two. Today, ethnic studies is an accepted part of academia. A Black Students Union leader addresses a crowd of demonstrators in December 1968.
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