Arts and Culture

New Book on the Historic SF State Strike: ‘Black Student Leaders Analyze the Movement They Led’

Published

5 years ago

January 30, 2020

Before 1968, California colleges were pretty much all white. A courageous group of young Black people decided that this was unacceptable, and they were going to change it. They organized, created programs, dialogued with administrators and made demands. When none of this worked, they decided they weren’t going to protest the situation. They were going to stop it. The college was going to serve Black people as well as others or it wasn’t going to function.

And so, the San Francisco State Strike began! It stopped the college from operating. In the end, it won Black Studies and Ethnic Studies, reformed financial aid, and provided the admission of thousands of students of color.

This remarkable story is told in a new book by BSU leader Bernard Stringer and activist professor Kitty Kelly Epstein.

“Changing Academia Forever: Black Student Leaders Analyze the Movement They Led” includes interviews with major participants – Danny Glover who became a renowned actor and director; Jimmy Garrett who became a professor; Jerry Varnardo who became an attorney, Terry Collins who helped to found KPOO radio; Benny Stewart, who was the chair of the BSU – and others.

They tell their life stores; explain the demands; reflect on their strategies and describe the police repression.

The book answers some questions that contemporary historians have raised. Why did the longest and most successful strike occur at a little-known California college? How was it possible to win most of the 15 demands made by the BSU and other Third World students on a campus where only 4 percent of the students were Black. How were so many white students engaged in a campaign which had Black empowerment at its core? How were the strong alliances with Latino, Asian and indigenous organizations created? How did the faculty react? What is the significance for the modern-day movement?

Among the book’s intriguing conclusions is the idea that many of today’s movements could use more of the disciplined approach adopted by the BSU leaders. They studied the revolutions of the period and adopted a centralized leadership which engaged in hours of debate concluding with unified action at the end of the debate.

Although the movement involved thousands of students, it was not fundamentally a middle-class movement.

The people who led the strike were working-class people, many of them migrants from the Jim Crow South, and they lived in the communities that came out to support them. The book quotes one college administrator as saying “We couldn’t find a single Black community leader who would say anything against the strikers.”

Another persistent theme arising from conversations with the strike’s leaders was the centrality of “serving the community.” They wanted a Black Studies department because they could study and theorize how to change life for Black people in America and then immediately go into the community to carry out what they had learned. Author Bernard Stringer points out that the strike could not have been won without the white students and faculty and the Third World Liberation Front.

Danny Glover says of the book, “’Changing Academia Forever’ explains how we in the Black Student Union were able to fundamentally change universities in America. This is the kind of organizing we need now to save humanity and the planet.”

The book is available from the publisher, Myers Education Press (www.myersedpress.com) and from Amazon (www.amazon.com)

Gay Plair Cobb

Posts by Gay Plair Cobb

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Activism

New Oakland Moving Forward

This week, several socially enterprising members of this group visited Oakland to explore ways to collaborate with local stakeholders at Youth Empowerment Partnership, the Port of Oakland, Private Industry Council, Oakland, Mayor-elect Barbara Lee, the Oakland Ballers ownership group, and the oversight thought leaders in the Alameda County Probation Department.

Published

2 weeks ago

May 18, 2025

Oakland Post

iStock.

By Post Staff

Since the African American Sports and Entertainment Group purchased the City of Oakland’s share of the Alameda County Coliseum Complex, we have been documenting the positive outcomes that are starting to occur here in Oakland.

Some of the articles in the past have touched on actor Blair Underwood’s mission to breathe new energy into the social fabric of Oakland. He has joined the past efforts of Steph and Ayesha Curry, Mistah Fab, Green Day, Too Short, and the Oakland Ballers.

This week, several socially enterprising members of this group visited Oakland to explore ways to collaborate with local stakeholders at Youth Empowerment Partnership, the Port of Oakland, Private Industry Council, Oakland, Mayor-Elect Barbara Lee, the Oakland Ballers ownership group, and the oversight thought leaders in the Alameda County Probation Department.

These visits represent a healthy exchange of ideas and plans to resuscitate Oakland’s image. All parties felt that the potential to impact Oakland is right in front of us. Most recently, on the back side of these visits, the Oakland Ballers and Blair Underwood committed to a 10-year lease agreement to support community programs and a community build-out.

So, upward and onward with the movement of New Oakland.

Oakland Post

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Arts and Culture

BOOK REVIEW: Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy

When Bridgett M. Davis was in college, her sister Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

Published

1 month ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Love Rita Book Cover. Courtesy of Harper.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Bridgett M. Davis, c.2025, Harper, $29.99, 367 Pages

Take care.

Do it because you want to stay well, upright, and away from illness. Eat right, swallow your vitamins and hydrate, keep good habits and hygiene, and cross your fingers. Take care as much as you can because, as in the new book, “Love, Rita” by Bridgett M. Davis, your well-being is sometimes out of your hands.

It was a family story told often: when Davis was born, her sister, Rita, then four years old, stormed up to her crying newborn sibling and said, ‘Shut your … mouth!’

Rita, says Davis, didn’t want a little sister then. She already had two big sisters and a neighbor who was somewhat of a “sister,” and this baby was an irritation. As Davis grew, the feeling was mutual, although she always knew that Rita loved her.

Over the years, the sisters tried many times not to fight — on their own and at the urging of their mother — and though division was ever present, it eased when Rita went to college. Davis was still in high school then, and she admired her big sister.

She eagerly devoured frequent letters sent to her in the mail, signed, “Love, Rita.”

When Davis was in college herself, Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

First, they lost their father. Drugs then invaded the family and addiction stole two siblings. A sister and a young nephew were murdered in a domestic violence incident. Their mother was devastated; Rita’s lupus was an “added weight of her sorrow.”

After their mother died of colon cancer, Rita’s lupus took a turn for the worse.

“Did she even stand a chance?” Davis wrote in her journal.

“It just didn’t seem possible that she, someone so full of life, could die.”

Let’s start here: once you get past the prologue in “Love, Rita,” you may lose interest. Maybe.

Most of the stories that author Bridgett M. Davis shares are mildly interesting, nothing rare, mostly commonplace tales of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with a sibling. There are a lot of these kinds of stories, and they tend to generally melt together. After about fifty pages of them, you might start to think about putting the book aside.

But don’t. Not quite yet.

In between those everyday tales, Davis occasionally writes about being an ailing Black woman in America, the incorrect assumptions made by doctors, the history of medical treatment for Black people (women in particular), attitudes, and mythologies. Those passages are now and then, interspersed, but worth scanning for.

This book is perhaps best for anyone with the patience for a slow-paced memoir, or anyone who loves a Black woman who’s ill or might be ill someday. If that’s you and you can read between the lines, then “Love, Rita” is a book to take in carefully.

Oakland Post

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Activism

Faces Around the Bay: Author Karen Lewis Took the ‘Detour to Straight Street’

“My life has been a roller-coaster with an unlimited ride wristband! I was raised in Berkeley during the time of Ron Dellums, the Black Panthers, and People’s Park. I was a Hippie kid, my Auntie cut off all our hair so we could wear the natural styles like her and Angela Davis.

Published

1 month ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Karen Lewis. Courtesy photo.

By Barbara Fluhrer

I met Karen Lewis on a park bench in Berkeley. She wrote her story on the spot.

I got married young, then ended up getting divorced, raising two boys into men. After my divorce, I had a stroke that left me blind and paralyzed. I was homeless, lost in a fog with blurred vision.

Jesus healed me! I now have two beautiful grandkids. At 61, this age and this stage, I am finally free indeed. Our Lord Jesus Christ saved my soul. I now know how to be still. I lay at his feet. I surrender and just rest. My life and every step on my path have already been ordered. So, I have learned in this life…it’s nice to be nice. No stressing, just blessings. Pray for the best and deal with the rest.

Nobody is perfect, so forgive quickly and love easily!”

Lewis’ book “Detour to Straight Street” is available on Amazon.