Marching West: The Los Angeles Civil Rights Movement in Photographs

This volume presents the first visual history of the people and organizations that led the fight for change during the civil rights era in Los Angeles.

During a 1963 speech to a crowd of nearly forty thousand at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the question of how Angelenos could contribute to the civil rights movement: “The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free, because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”

Marching West illuminates the dynamic history of civil rights activism in Los Angeles and explores how the medium of photography both witnessed and advanced the fight for Black equality. Over one hundred images, some of which have never been previously published, reveal connections between the local and national movements and document the actions of Western coalitions, religious leaders, Hollywood stars, and concerned citizens. Drawn from the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), the Getty Research Institute, and other Southern California collections―including prints by Harry Adams, Howard Bingham, Charles Brittin, Joe Flowers, Vera Jackson, and Charles Williams―this unprecedented volume presents less familiar but essential stories about American progress toward social justice.

Karin L. Stanford is a professor of political science in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and the special projects director of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at CSUN.

Mark Speltz is an author and public historian who researches and writes about civil rights–era photography, vernacular architecture, and Wisconsin culture and history. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Public Historian and The Journal of American History, and his book North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South was published by Getty Publications in 2016.