Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the SF State Strike

Join California Historical Society for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco State Strike. A discussion will be initiated by leaders and participants of the Strike, as well as an artist who graduated from San Francisco State in Raza Studies and now teaches at State. U. C. Berkeley Professor Waldo E. Martin will moderate the discussion which will touch on what sparked the Strike, how it happened, and the impact it had and continues to have on San Francisco, California, and the country at large.

About our Moderator:

Waldo E. Martin Jr., the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (2005), as well as Brown v. Board of Education: A Short History With Documents (1998) and The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1985). He is a coauthor, with Mia Bay and Deborah Gray White, of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, With Documents (2012), and, with Joshua Bloom, of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013). With Patricia A. Sullivan, he coedited Civil Rights in the United States: An Encyclopedia (2000). Aspects of the modern African American freedom struggle and the history of modern social movements unite his current research and writing interests. He is currently completing A Change is Gonna Come: The Cultural Politics of the Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of Modern America.

About our Speakers:

Benny Stewart, served as Chairman of the Black Students Union at San Francisco State University, 1967 to 1969 summer, the conceptional / early negotiation period of development of the Black Studies Department, the Strike of 120 days, and the early establishment of the School of Ethnic Studies, of which the Black Studies Department was a major part.

He later spent 37-dedicated years working in the fields of community oversight of urban renewal process and community economic development in the San Francisco Western Addition District, (“the Fillmore”) and the Marin City Community in Marin County.

Starting as Deputy Director of Development, later becoming Executive Director, of the Marin City Community Development Corporation in partnership with BRIDGE Housing and the Martin Group he was proud of being on the development team that produced the $100 million award winning Marin City USA Project, that included 340 housing units, with 40% affordability, a 183,000 square foot retail shopping center, and a neighborhood affirmative action plan that provided 50% job hiring for local low income residents and 25% hiring of local minority and women enterprises.

Benny Stewart, retired in 2012, leaving over $3 million in the community’s agency bank account.

Dr. Ramona Tascoe came to San Francisco State University and earned a Triple-major B.A. in Behavior and Social Sciences. Tascoe took part in campus protests to create the Black Studies Department. The protests grew into the historic student strike of 1969, and in the midst of the struggle, Ramona Tascoe became one of the first strikers to be arrested.

Dr. Ramona Tascoe went on to earn her Medical Doctorate degree from the University of California, San Francisco in 1979. She later earned both a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Divinity degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, after which she was dually ordained under American Baptist and Progressive National Baptist Ministry.

Though she’s practiced as an internal medicine specialist in Oakland for decades, Tascoe has also put her unique mix of skills to work on behalf of communities around the world. She’s led medical missions to Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, India and Sri Lanka. And she’s worked extensively with Haiti’s Ministry of Health and the University General Hospital of Haiti, that nation’s largest public hospital.

Roger Alvarado was born in San Francisco in 1943, attended SF State College in the 60’s, and became involved with Student community programs in the mid 60’s. After a year as a volunteer, Roger began working for the Associated Students coordinating various Tutorial Program’s projects. During this period on the campus two significant issues, Black People’s Civil Rights Movement and the War in Vietnam, were directly impacting a large segment of the college. 18 months later, roger worked in the Mission District with youth around the 16th and Shotwell street neighborhood. Returning to S F State in the Summer of 1968, roger joined the Latin American Student Organization, one of several groups within The Third World Liberation Front.

The following May Roger helped organize the Los Siete Defense Committee. Seven young Latinos were accused of killing a policeman and a Defense committee was organized to provide the Mission area educational, nutritional and health services, as well as, information regarding, not only that incident, but also the relationship between the police and the various Mission District Communities. 18 months later, Roger left the Defense Committee and became involved with the La Escuelita Preschool and Kinder project in Oakland. Over the next few years the project was established as a Bilingual school with grades K through 6. Retiring as a carpenter, Roger lives in Oakland.

Penny Nakatsu is a veteran of the 1968-1969 Black Student Union-Third World Liberation Front-Black Student Union (BSU-TWLF) Strike at San Francisco State College. She was a co-founder of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), a student organization promoting progressive political action by persons of Asian ancestry. During the Strike, she was AAPA's primary representative to the TWLF Central Committee. After the strike ended in March 1969, she was one of the students, as well as community members and scholars who developed the ethnic/Third World studies curriculum.

Jesus Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist pursuing an MFA in Social Practice and a Masters in Visual Critical Studies and researches the history of socially engaged Xicanx Art. He is a co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde a collaborative that produces screen prints, political posters and multimedia projects and a member of JustSeeds Artists Cooperative.

Image/Artwork: "Down with the Whiteness," Rupert Garcia, 1969.  Rupert Garcia produced this print in the midst of the longest student strike in US history: the SF State Student Strike.