In the 1980s, multiculturalism seemed a danger to the nation. Books filled the shelves warning that its rise on university campuses signaled no less than the closing of the American mind. Two decades later, it was fodder for satire. Cartoons like “The Boondocks” and “South Park” depicted multiculturalist teachers as if they were clueless white hippies.
But before all of that, back in the early 1970s, it was a genuine counterculture led by a small avant-garde of artists and writers.
For a long time, they didn’t even have a name for what they were doing. There were lively scenes going on in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—all cities that had critical masses of young people of color, universities where programs like Afro-American studies or ethnic studies were taking root, and community centers that served as hubs for artistic and activist expression.
The San Francisco Bay Area was the real beating heart of what would become the multiculturalism movement. It was there in 1968 that students at San Francisco State College launched a campus-wide strike that lasted five months, the longest in U.S. history, as they demanded the creation of a Black Studies and a School of Ethnic Studies. Soon student strikes had broken out at the College of San Mateo and the University of California at Berkeley, and universities such as Stanford, Michigan, Syracuse, and Harvard began adding such courses
