On Tuesday March 10th, the “Activism Right There (A.R.T.) Festival” was held at 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 a variety of 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 a department at UC Berkeley.

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

Art in Activism l Activism Right There, March 10, 2009 ~ UC Berkeley