In LA, Eight Moments That Powered the Civil Rights Movement

Many historic events from the civil rights movement happened in the American South—we’re all familiar with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat, for example. But the movement was composed of many other acts of resistance, empowerment, and joy—and several happened right here in Los Angeles. Marching West: The Los Angeles Civil Rights Movement in Photographs, a new book by Getty Publications, paints this picture with moving photographs and narratives.

Co-author Karin L. Stanford grew up as a member of the city’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church, an activist ministry and community. Later, as an adult and professor at California State University, Northridge, she struggled to find literature on civil rights in LA. “It was important to me for my students to see themselves and the city as part of the civil rights movement,” she says.

The search led her to Marching West’s co-author Mark Speltz, who created a photo book on the movement outside the South in North of Dixie. “What Marching West immediately rebuts is this idea that LA only appears in the traditional civil rights story when Watts [Uprising in 1965] occurred and King appears; but the movement here was building a foundation in churches, labor organizations, and neighborhoods long before that,” says Speltz.

If you’d like to deepen your understanding of civil rights in LA, here is a peek at some of these indelible moments and stories.

The California Eagle newspaper

The California Eagle, which was arguably LA’s most prominent Black newspaper, made the Black experience visible. Founded in 1879 by John James Neimore (it was then called The Owl), the publication was particularly celebrated for the four decades when Charlotta Bass directed the coverage.

“Charlotta Bass, owner and editor of the California Eagle, was unafraid,” says Speltz. “She took on the Ku Klux Klan and the Hollywood industry. She took on realtors and countless topics and villains during her time. That newspaper published things that the Los Angeles Times would not, like people who had been beaten by police or pointing to bullet holes in the windows of their own houses.”

The newspaper offered alternative ways of viewing events to what was routinely being presented in white newspapers, employed Black journalists and photographers, and inspired countless others to expand coverage of Black lives in LA, including New Age Dispatch, The Liberator, and the Los Angeles Sentinel.

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company

Brothers Noble and George Johnson founded what is believed to be the first Black-owned film production company in 1916 in Omaha, Nebraska, then moved it to LA. Its genesis owes to the D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation, which was considered Hollywood’s first epic but was also highly controversial for its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist imagery.

“Lincoln Motion Picture Company was a unique approach by an all-Black company to create and produce dignified films with complex characters,” says Speltz.

The company’s films were shown throughout the country, expanding the Black network and influence and establishing a footing in Hollywood.

“Don’t Spend Where You Can’t Work” campaign

During the Great Depression, Los Angeles Sentinel founder Leon Washington challenged employment discrimination by leading the “Don’t Spend Where You Can’t Work” campaign in LA. His research, photography, and reporting were a rallying cry for readers to boycott businesses that courted Black patronage but wouldn’t hire Black workers.

“Washington was using the newspaper as a megaphone—photographs of people with pickets outside a business, with narrative context, turned a neighborhood boycott into an easy to understand concept,” says Speltz.

“Vote with your dollar” style campaigns like these created new jobs for Black workers. The effective approach also spawned countless other boycotts and picketing efforts, like the “No Job, No Bud” (Anheuser Busch boycott) of 1957, centered on hiring discrimination at the company’s Van Nuys brewery.

Mendez v. Westminster

Before there was Brown v. Board of Education, there was 1947’s Mendez v. Westminster, which unfolded just outside of LA in Orange County but had a relevant ripple effect: the ruling ended the segregation of Mexican American students in California schools.

The catalyzing event was Westminster’s local public school preventing Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez’s children from attending, instead advising them to attend a “Mexican school.” Civil rights attorney David Marcus and a multiracial legal team won the case, while the US District Court deemed school separation based on national origin unconstitutional.

“Thurgood Marshall’s brief in support of this case laid the basis for his argument for Brown v. Board of Education,” says Stanford.

Besides laying the groundwork for desegregation in other schools, the case also highlighted the involvement of other racial groups who, through volunteering, supporting the lawyers, and helping fund the campaigns, “were just as bold and audacious when it came to fighting discrimination,” according to Stanford.

Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom

On May 17, 1957, LA. ministers Maurice Dawkins, J. Raymond Henderson, and Arthur Atlas Peters joined 25,000 protesters, including Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr. in Washington, DC for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. The aim was to urge the federal government to enforce Brown v. Board of Education and it was here that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “Give Us the Ballot” speech.

The Hollywood–American South connection was critical during this time. “Not everyone knows that one of the reasons King kept coming to LA was that this was where he could effectively and efficiently fundraise, and where he received major visibility for the movement,” says Stanford. “Roughly two years after Emmett Till and Rosa Parks, LA was leading the planning for the Prayer Pilgrimage, (one of the biggest civil rights marches ever at that time) because there was already a network tying Southern leaders to LA activists.”

The event also established Martin Luther King Jr. as the leader of the civil rights movement. These effects set the stage for later demonstrations in Washington, DC, like the 1963 March on Washington.

CORE’s Woolworth/Kress boycotts

The pacifist, student-led organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was established in Chicago in 1942, and an LA chapter launched after World War II ended. The group organized pickets and boycotts, helped lead several landmark legal suits to victory, and sent aid to the South east.

“CORE organized young people—it was in the forefront of the student movement for at least a decade—and LA college students picketed 17 Woolworth and Kress stores in a single day to pressure these national chains to allow seats and service for Black people at their lunch counters,” says Stanford.

Besides leading to drops in business and forcing stores to desegregate, these boycotts also gained the support of the LA Jewish community and notably counted Jewish students among their members.

Mosque No. 27 and Malcolm X’s photographic counter-attack

Malcolm X established Mosque No. 27 in 1957 in South Central LA. It was LA’s first mosque and center of the Black Muslim community in the city. But in 1962, it became the site of a major case of police brutality and a watershed event for racial justice when unarmed mosque member Ronald Stokes was killed in a Los Angeles Police Department raid and other members brutalized. Los Angeles Herald Examiner photographer Howard Ballew’s harrowing image of the aftermath ran on the front page of the major daily’s Saturday Pictorial and on the cover of Muhammad Speaks, a newspaper that Malcolm X founded. A few days later, Malcolm X arrived for a press conference with autopsy photos, presenting yet another perspective.

“That image outside the mosque tells its own story,” says Stanford. “They were under attack by the police—and they used photography as visual evidence to show exactly what happened that evening, as they experienced it.”

Police brutality happened in LA for decades but it didn’t receive a lot of attention outside of the Black press. These photos and newspapers exposed the mounting issue and different viewpoint to a wider audience.

The United Civil Rights Committee Birmingham-style campaign

The United Civil Rights Committee (UCRC) was formed in 1963. This multiracial coalition of 76 organizations, including the NAACP and ACLU, confronted police brutality, employer discrimination, fair housing, and school desegregation, using non-violent tactics like marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes, study-ins, and even a sing-in. The campaign lasted 18 months.

“What defined the LA movement during that era was its cross-cultural character—African American, Mexican American, Jewish, Asian American communities all showing up for each other in campaigns that looked a lot like Birmingham, but were very much about Los Angeles,” says Stanford.

While hundreds of activists were arrested and many beaten, one positive result was that mounting pressure propelled the California legislature to pass the Rumford Fair Housing Act in September of 1963. This act prohibited racial and religious discrimination when buying or renting property in California.

“There were some great victories and really important legislation passed as a result of the LA movement. Stanford and I are grateful for the access to massive photography collections. We just knew the template for the whole story was this book,” says Speltz.