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Paul Robeson High School opened in Brooklyn, New York, 1984, as a replacement for the closed Alexander Hamilton High School. The school board’s vision for the new Robeson High School focused primarily on decreasing the dropout rate. To ensure this, the board replaced most of the Hamilton teachers with new ones and created a new application process for students. At first, Robeson did see an increase in the graduation rate, earning it recognition in The New York Times. However, in 2004, the graduation rate began to slowly decrease.

The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) has historically struggled with meeting their students’ desire for ethnic studies, despite its liberal reputation. In 1981, the college’s student group Third World and Native American Student Coalition protested the college’s lack of an ethnic studies major with a hunger strike. Since then, the college has offered a number of courses and major options for those interested in ethnic studies.

In 1968, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing in the Southern and Eastern parts of the United States, but it was just beginning to reach Seattle, Washington. Buoyed by a series of speeches given by Stokely Carmichael, a group of black students from the University of Washington founded a Black Student Union (BSU), to advocate for the rights of black students at the university and area high schools.