Mark Remembers the 1968 San Francisco Strike and Its Lasting Lessons
Fifty-seven years after students walked out of classrooms in the fog-rolled Mission District, the memory of that winter still shapes how Mark DeSaulnier thinks about civic duty. The 1968 San Francisco State College strike, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, became the longest student strike in American history. For a young Mark DeSaulnier, who later represented the East Bay in the California State Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, those weeks of picket lines and teach-ins were not distant history but a formative chapter.
This reflection draws on archival campaign notes from Mark DeSaulnier's congressional run, where he often returned to the lessons of 1968 when discussing education, civil rights, and the responsibilities of elected office. Visitors to the archived campaign website can trace how a single semester of disruption in San Francisco informed decades of policy work, and how the values tested on that campus carried through to legislation drafted much later.
Context: The Late 1960s on the West Coast
By the autumn of 1968, campuses across California pulsed with a feeling that the established order had run out of answers. The war in Vietnam filled the evening news, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were still raw wounds, and students in places as far apart as Berkeley and San Diego were demanding curricula that reflected the lives of working-class and non-white communities. In San Francisco, that frustration crystallised into a list of five demands that students believed the college could no longer ignore.
The mood was not unique to the United States. In Australia, university students in Melbourne and Sydney were beginning to organise their own protests, eventually staging the moratorium marches of 1970 against the Vietnam War. The political vocabulary of the period crossed oceans quickly, and a sit-in in San Francisco would have been tracked closely by student papers at the University of Sydney and Monash University. Even the Australian union movement, soon to flex its muscle during the 1969 Pilbara walkout, was watching similar workplace disputes overseas.
Inside the Strike at San Francisco State
The strike began on 6 November 1968, when roughly 400 students occupied the administration building. Within days the numbers swelled into the thousands. Lecturers sympathetic to the cause walked out alongside students, and a parallel faculty strike turned a campus protest into a genuine labour dispute. The college president, Robert Smith, called in police to clear the building, and the resulting confrontation became one of the defining images of the era, broadcast on the evening news and debated in living rooms from Concord to Canberra.
The five demands were bold for their time. Students wanted a School of Ethnic Studies, open admissions for underrepresented applicants, more faculty of colour, support services for low-income students, and an end to suspensions of striking pupils. Many of these ideas had no obvious precedent in Australian higher education, where the Whitlam-era reforms were still years away, though campus organisers at the University of Queensland and La Trobe were beginning to ask similar questions about access and representation.
| Aspect | 1968 San Francisco State Strike | Modern Movements Compared |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Roughly five months, the longest in US history | Climate strikes and racial justice actions often last days or weeks |
| Core Demand | Ethnic studies, open admissions, more diverse faculty | Curriculum reform, Indigenous recognition, accessible campuses |
| Government Response | Police called, mass arrests, eventual negotiated settlement | Negotiations, sometimes legislation, occasional heavy policing |
| Lasting Legacy | First College of Ethnic Studies in the US | University of Melbourne's Indigenous studies programs, Uluru Statement |
Mark's Recollections of Those Weeks
Mark has often spoken about his time as a student in that turbulent semester. He remembers the cold morning meetings outside the student union, the long shifts handing out flyers, and the awkward conversations with professors who quietly sympathised but worried about their tenure. The atmosphere, he has said, felt less like a protest than a sustained experiment in self-government, with committees forming overnight to handle everything from food donations to legal observers.
He also remembers how the strike divided families. Some of his peers returned home to towns as conservative as Ballarat's outer suburbs in spirit, where any hint of radical activity was treated as a personal embarrassment. Others found their parents quietly proud, relieved that someone their age was finally standing up. The same tension plays out in modern Australian debates over school strikes for climate and the raw emotion around Anzac Day commemorations, where older generations weigh tradition against the urgency of new causes. Parents writing to elected officials today often carry the same hopes that drove those 1968 students, and Mark has received heartfelt messages such as a mother's letter about school safety that echo the original spirit of the protests.
Lessons That Echo Across Decades
The demands that students drafted in long, smoke-filled meetings did not vanish. The School of Ethnic Studies that opened at San Francisco State in 1969 became the model for similar programs across North America and inspired academic reforms from Adelaide to Auckland. Mark has pointed out that effective change rarely comes from a single dramatic gesture; it comes from sustained pressure, careful listening, and an insistence on measurable outcomes.
That ethic carried forward into his political career. When asked about the rise of hate speech and extremist organising in modern America, his response has been grounded in the same conviction he developed as a young striker: that silence is a form of complicity. Readers can see this philosophy in his archived statement Mark DeSaulnier Condemns Hate Speech and White Supremacist Groups, which reads like a direct descendant of the rallies he helped organise in 1968.
How This Shapes His Work Today
For someone who lived through those months, the work of Congress is in many ways a continuation of the same conversations. Mark has consistently tied his approach to constituent services back to the lessons of the strike: that listening must come first, that policy without follow-through is theatre, and that coalitions matter more than slogans. The campaign archive itself is part of that ethic, preserving how an elected representative engaged with the public over years of service, from town halls in Concord to phone calls with retirees on the Mornington Peninsula and beyond.
Visitors browsing the archived campaign website today will find a long-running record of his priorities, alongside the privacy and terms notice that explains how the site operates. That page clarifies how older blog posts, photos, and endorsement lists are kept accessible to historians while protecting donor information, and why a long-defunct campaign domain continues to be maintained for the curious reader.
The lessons of 1968 are not relics. They live in the way a former student negotiates a compromise on a school funding bill, in the way a congressional office fields a worried parent's call, and in the way an archived website keeps a memory alive for the next generation of Australians, Americans, and everyone in between who believes that the present can always be improved.