PENNY NAKATSU

Born in 1949, Penny Nakatsu grew up in San Francisco’s Western Addition redevelopment project of Fillmore and Japantown. In 1967, Nakatsu enrolled at San Francisco State College. The following year, Nakatsu served on the TWLF Central Committee and recruited Asian American students to support the strike. Afterwards, she became an attorney in the East Bay.

INTERVIEW

REVEREND ARNOLD TOWNSEND

Reverend Arnold Townsend grew up in an all-Black community in Oklahoma and in an integrated neighborhood in Los Angeles. He taught summer school as a part of the Black Student Union in South Park, an all-Black town, after admission into San Francisco State University. He came to San Francisco after the army during 1967. Townsend participated in the San Francisco State Strike of 1968 as a student. Afterwards, he went to theology school and became a pastor. Currently, he lives in the Fillmore District of San Francisco. 

INTERVIEW

ROGER ALVARADO

Roger Alvarado was born in San Francisco and settled with his family in Pacifica, graduating from Westmoor High School in Daly City in 1961. Alvarado entered San Francisco State that same year, and worked with the tutorial program in its efforts to support underserved high school communities. Alvarado was a member of the Latin American Student Association and represented the TWLF as a spokesperson.

INTERVIEW

JUDY JUANITA

Judy Juanita is an award-winning poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist and playwright. Her family moved from Oklahoma to California where she grew up in Oakland. She attended SF State from 1966-1971 for her B.A and returned to earn an MFA in 1993. She was an active member of SFSC’s Black Student Union and the Black Panther Party. She served as editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper and wrote for the City College newspaper on the Black Liberation Movements. In 1969, Judy became the youngest faculty member in the newly established Black Studies Department, working with Dr. Nathan Hare and others.

INTERVIEW

MASON WONG

Mason Wong is a first-generation Chinese-American organizer. Born in New York City, he moved to San Francisco at a very young age. After serving in the Marines, he turned down an extension in order to attend SF City College in 1965 and San Francisco State in1968, where he served as president of the ICSA. While in the Marines, he witnessed segregation and discrimination towards other minority groups, which began his understanding for the movement.

INTERVIEW

DR. JACOB PEREA

Dr. Perea was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1941, where he attended elementary, middle school and high school. He went to college at New Mexico State University, doing a double major in Biological Sciences and Music. He joined the Peace Corps, traveling to Nigeria where he taught school for a year, then on to Ghana and Tanzania. Perea taught at SF State for two years (1968-1970). He then worked for seven years as an educator elsewhere, including the Navajo reservation in Arizona. In 1977, he came back to SF State to teach in the College of Education as a professor of Administration and Interdisciplinary studies. In 1985, he co-founded the Step to College Program at to encourage disadvantaged students to attend and remain in college. Perea earned  a master’s in education from SF State and an educational doctorate from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on Latino, African American and American Indian public school graduation rates and access to higher education. 

INTERVIEW

DR. RAYMOND TOMPKINS

Dr. Raymond Tompkins is a historian and scientist, born in San Diego into a navy family and moved to San Francisco during his teens. He participated in the San Francisco State College Student Strikes and afterwards served as the third chair of the Black Student Union and VP of the Associated Student Body where he helped establish the school’s first daycare center. Afterwards, he served as adjunct associate dean of the college and worked towards creating the curriculum for Black Studies. He has since worked with students and scientists on pollution and environmental racism in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

MALCOLM & IRENE COLLIER

Irene Collier was born in Hoiping District, Guangdong Province, China and immigrated to the U.S., where she grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown. Malcolm Collier was born in New Mexico and lived in various states, Canada, Peru, and New Mexico until his family settled in the Bay Area. In the Fall of 1966, the Colliers enrolled at SF State, where they met in a psychology class. They joined the picket lines during the 1969-68 TWLF strike and Irene tutored in ICSA tutorial programs in Chinatown. After the strike, the Colliers were both involved with the Asian American student groups that that set up and ran the Asian American Studies Department starting in the Fall of 1969. Malcolm subsequently taught in the AAS Department for many years and Irene became a community activist, working in both non-profit and public sectors to advance the needs of Asian American children and youth.

INTERVIEW

SUSAN SCHNEIDER

Susan was born in San Francisco in 1948. Her mother died when she was six years old, and her and her brother were raised by my father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe. She was educated in the public school system in San Francisco. She went to City College of San Francisco from 1966 until 1968, majoring in Sociology and Psychology where she tutored young students in the housing projects of the Western Addition and worked with people with disabilities through the YMCA. She then transferred to SFSU in 1968 where she was heavily involved with the strikes. Today, Susan continues her work as a Social Worker and believes in building community. Her experience at San Francisco State “gave [her] the bricks to keep building and to remain committed to social justice, civil rights, and the truth.”

INTERVIEW

ERNIE BRILL

Ernie Brill was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in a family that put a very high value on education. Brill earned a BA and MA in English from San Francisco State College and was earnestly involved in the 1968 historic five-month strike at San Francisco State University against racism there that won the country’s first department of Black Studies and an entire college of Ethnic Studies. He is a writer that publishes fiction and poetry widely in the US and Canada. His pioneering collection about race relations among hospital workers, I Looked Over Jordan And Other Stories, (South End Press, 1980), was optioned by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee for their PBS television series “With Ossie and Ruby” In his twenty-year teaching career, Brill left a legacy of antiracist and global curriculum in English and Creative Classes with new units on the Civil Rights movement, The Harlem Renaissance, Latin American literature, Middle Eastern literature and Vietnamese-American literature. He based much of his teaching on his intense learning in the history-making strike that gave American democracy one of its greatest victories and changed irrevocably the face of “higher” education.

DAN GONZALES

Daniel Phil Gonzales was born in 1948 and lived in the South of Market (then known as “Central City”) of San Francisco. His family moved to the Excelsior/Outer Mission in 1955, but he had continuous familial and social contacts in the Mission, Fillmore, Richmond, and Sunset districts, and lived part-time in rural Colma as well. He attended SF State from 1968-1973 studying International Relations and Political Science. During the strike, he was involved in a lot of community service "go-for"/liaison for PACE/Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor, TWLF organizer for ethnic studies curriculum development group, curriculum co-author for Filipino/Pilipino American Studies. In 1970, he began co-lecturing with Penny Nakatsu and Malcolm Collier in AAS and continued volunteer community service at the I-Hotel, Central City youth programs, PACE youth project at Bernal Heights. Not only this, but he worked in "Ating Tao" (Our People) theater group from 1969-1972. He also clerked at the Central City office of the SF Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation while attending Hastings Law (now UC Law San Francisco, 1974-77) and did first tour on the SFSU Academic Senate, 1978-1981, aka the "GE Wars.” Following all of this, he worked on film/video projects, including “the Fall of the I-0Hotel,” and began recording oral/aural history interviews, was tenured in 1986, and continued more service on University committees and the Academic Senate fully retiring in 2022.

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