Available June 2026

Karin L. Stanford with Mark Speltz

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.

“Marching West repositions Los Angeles as central to the American civil rights narrative, tracing pivotal visits by Martin Luther King Jr. alongside the city’s own sustained struggles for justice. A must-read compilation of striking photographs and historical vignettes, it examines battles against restrictive covenants, police brutality, and segregation, offering a more complete account of Black freedom movements in a city too often overlooked in the broader story.”
—Darnell Hunt, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA

“Marching West: The Los Angeles Civil Rights Movement in Photographs gathers the visual language of resistance, where photographs become both witness and instrument, revealing a Los Angeles civil rights movement too often left outside the national frame. Through these images, we encounter a community shaping its own visibility, asserting dignity, and transforming the camera into a site of memory, power, and possibility. In these frames, history is not distant but lived—an unfolding archive of struggle, resilience, and collective vision. The book reminds us that photography does not simply document change; it participates in it, making visible the enduring presence of lives devoted to collective freedom.”
—Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black: A Reframing and professor of Photography and Imaging, New York University

“Spectacular! If a picture is worth a thousand words, this book, larded with intriguing, enlightening and riveting images, is priceless—and tantamount to a billion words. It recounts an uplifting story of how bigotry was defeated—a timeless lesson still relevant today. It belongs in every library and every household, particularly in the Southland.”
—Gerald Horne, author, Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s; Host KPFK-FM/Los Angeles

“Marching West will change the way you see the civil rights movement and the City of Angels. This is not just a coffee table book but a stunning reexamination in text and photo of the longstanding Black freedom struggle in Los Angeles and the ways that reckoning with it change how we tell the story of the U.S. civil rights movement more broadly.”
—Jeanne Theoharis, author of King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South

192 pages
8 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches
4 color and 116 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-989-9
hardcover

Getty Publications
Imprint: Getty Publications

2026