students at UC Berkeley commemorates 40 years of third world Liberation Front (twLF)

On Tuesday March 10, “Activism Right There (art) Festival” set off Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley. The Festival, part of a week of events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the third world Liberation Front (twLF) strikes, featured conscious and radical performances.

In 1969, the third world Liberation Front (twLF) was formed by students of color at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and UC Berkeley to demand that classrooms teach about the struggles of third world peoples through the formation of a Third World College. Out of this movement came Ethnic Studies as a college (at SFSU) and as department at UC Berkeley.

The artists at the festival, 40love, BRWN BFLO, Los Rakas, Bambu, Invincible, Zion I, and K-Salaam, used their mediums of expression to bridge their own histories to resistance movements. The artists emphasized the need to struggle against oppression and made connections between the oppression of people of color in the Americas and the Palestinians. The Oscar Grant murder was a repeated point among the performers who called on the audience to resist state oppression.