While Ethnic Studies has grown as an academic discipline, it has always maintained its connection to community collaborations and ensuring that scholarship and education are useful to communities affected by historical violence, settler-colonialism, and systems of exploitation.

The TWLF was a multi-ethnic coalition of students that were awoken to the fact that they were being taught in ways that were dominating and irrelevant to themselves (Maeda, 2012), and included a coalition of the Black Student Union (BSU), Latin American Student Organization (LASO), Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action (ICSA), Mexican American Student Confederation, Philippine (now Pilipino) American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE), La Raza, Native American Students Union, and Asian American Political Alliance. These movements built on intergenerational traditions of protest and advocacy that informed the emergent groups that formed, established, and nurtured Ethnic Studies (Delgado, 2016). Penny Nakatsu was one of the strike’s leaders, and her speeches emphasized the importance of connecting student oppression with U.S. Imperialism and Militarism that creates adverse conditions throughout Third World countries. Nesbit Crutchfield was also a prominent leader in the organization and the first striker to be arrested. He spent over a year in jail.

Their case made it to the California Supreme Court in 1885, which affirmed that public schools must be open to all children. California legislators and federal policy moved quickly to affirm segregation, which would remain the law of the land for nearly another 70 years. The San Francisco School Board created a separate Chinese primary school in Chinatown. However, the racial status quo was not without challenge. In the 1947 case Mendez v. Westminster, Sylvia Mendez, and her family brought a federal case against the Westminster School District of Orange County, California, to challenge the exclusion of Mexican American students from white schools. While Mexican Americans were considered legally white, they were excluded on the basis of Spanish-speaking children. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed in their decision that equality in education means opening schools to all children, in defiance of the presiding “separate but equal” doctrine.