Marching West

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 andwrites about civil rights-era photography, vernacular architecture, andWisconsin culture and history. His articles and reviews have appeared in ThePublic Historian and The Journal of American History, and hisbook North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South waspublished by Getty Publications in 2016.

Marching West will change the way you see the civil rightsmovement and the City of Angels. This is not just a coffee table book buta stunning reexamination in text and photo of the longstanding Black freedomstruggle in Los Angeles and the ways that reckoning with it change how we tellthe story of the U.S. civil rights movement more broadly.- Jeanne Theoharis, author of King of the North: Martin LutherKing Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South"Spectacular! If a picture is worth a thousand words, thisbook, larded with intriguing, enlightening and riveting images, ispriceless-and tantamount to a billion words. It recounts an upliftingstory of how bigotry was defeated-a timeless lesson still relevanttoday. It belongs in every library and every household, particularly inthe Southland".- Gerald Horne, author, Fire this Time: The Watts Uprisingand the 1960s; Host KPFK-FM/Los Angeles.Marching West: The Los Angeles Civil Rights Movement inPhotographs gathers the visual language of resistance, where photographsbecome both witness and instrument, revealing a Los Angeles civil rightsmovement too often left outside the national frame. Through these images, weencounter a community shaping its own visibility, asserting dignity, andtransforming the camera into a site of memory, power, and possibility. In theseframes, history is not distant but lived-an unfolding archive of struggle,resilience, and collective vision. The book reminds us that photography doesnot simply document change; it participates in it, making visible the enduringpresence of lives devoted to collective freedom.- Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black: A Reframing andprofessor of Photography and Imaging, New York UniversityMarching West repositions Los Angeles as central to the American civilrights narrative, tracing pivotal visits by Martin Luther King Jr. alongsidethe city’s own sustained struggles for justice. A must-read compilation ofstriking photographs and historical vignettes, it examines battles againstrestrictive covenants, police brutality, and segregation, offering a morecomplete account of Black freedom movements in a city too often overlooked inthe broader story.— Darnell Hunt, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, andProfessor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA