Spotlight on “Marching West” by Karin L. Stanford & Mark Speltz

Praise for Marching West

“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

[Marching West is] “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: 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….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

“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