From UCLA
Richard M. Nixon was president and the Vietnam War raged still. The Watts riots were fresh in the memory, the ink was still drying on the Civil Rights Act and the epic struggle for equality was fully joined still, by blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Asians, women and gays, too. Landlords then still balked at renting apartments in Westwood to minorities; area merchants, defying their custom, refused to give recognition or gifts to the Bruin homecoming queen because she was black. Race-related violence was all-too much a part of the campus, with African Americans involved in a deadly internecine shooting and Asian Americans finding the National Guard rushing a protest rally of theirs in which many arrests followed. All of that contemporary history is racing to the fore as the four Bruin ethnic studies programs -- on African Americans, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans -- mark the 40th anniversaries of their founding. This month, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies takes its bows as part of Black History Month.
Bruin magazine looks back at four decades of ethnic studies in Westwood
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