Bay Area Revolutionary Union

The Bay Area Revolutionary Union was formed in 1968. It was formed by a group in Richmond, California who had been working with working class youth and community college students, who had wanted to form a Marxist-Leninist organization and had connected with a group at Stanford as well as others. One of the groups campaigns was striking students at San Francisco State University supporting striking Richmond Standard Oil workers in early 1969. This campaign received a lot of publicity from the press. The Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) pubished the Red Papers which described the groups philosophy. In 1970, the Stanford-based group broke off because they thought BARU was too union oriented and not militant enough, they went on to form Venceremos. The Bay Area Revolutionary Union had formed chapters outside of the Bay Area, after the Venceremos split they moved the Union headquarters to Chicago and changed the name of the nation-wide organization to the Revolutionary Union.