Educational research, policy, advocacy organizations, and higher education policy scholars, have noted the significance of race-conscious admissions in the dismantling of the structural and material racial and class barriers that reflect the historical role of colleges and universities. In this essay, the author enacts a different reading of the issue of higher education policy as it relates to race-conscious admissions by recasting the issue toward the historical scene of black student protest at San Francisco State College during the Black and Third World Liberation Strike in 1968 to 1969. The argument is that this moment in the history of higher education illuminates a central aspect that higher education research and policymakers often understate--the significance of Black student protest as the revolutionary activity that catalyzed the discourse of affirmative action policies in higher education, and that recasting higher educational policy in the context of the anti-colonial politics of struggle that informed Black student protest reveals the limits of race-conscious admissions in the struggle for educational freedom.