Sixteen-year-old Dorinda Palmer leads marchers to City Hall in Greenwood, Mississippi.            (All photographs by Bob Fitch. Copyright Stanford University Libraries.)

Bob Fitch was a graduate student when he read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time as a class assignment. At the time, he was attending a Protestant seminary student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. Once he started Baldwin’s book, he couldn’t tear himself away, and he spent the night reading the volume that has changed minds and lives. It certainly changed his.

MLK shepherds students on march in Grenada, Miss., 1966

The next day Fitch, who currently has a photography exhibit spotlighting the Civil Rights era at the Stanford University Libraries, bought a second-hand professional camera and began photographing the civil rights movement.

He volunteered as a photographer for The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta from 1965 to 1968. In the South he worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, documenting civil rights activities and serving as a wire service—“from camera click to stamp lick”— for the African American press, which could not risk sending their own correspondents into the field. Along the way, he deepened his commitment to social justice activism and his appreciation of the people who make up movements for change. After a year-and-a-half he was invited to accompany King Jr. to Jamaica, where he was working on a book.

Boycott supporter in Mississippi, 1966

He continued to photograph for the next fifty years, documenting the work of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, the Vietnam War draft resistance movement, and Ron Dellums’s first congressional campaign, among many other social justice–related subjects. Most recently, Fitch photographed Luis Alejo’s 2010 campaign for California State Assembly.

But one moment, in particular, he remembers: at an informal staff meeting held in Martin Luther King’s bedroom, he saw The Fire Next Time among the leader’s rumpled bedsheets. King told the young photographer that the book had inspired his own 1967 book, which would be his last, Where Do We Go From Here – Chaos or Community?

Iconic Fitch photographs from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s are displayed in Movements for Change: The Bob Fitch Photography Archive at Stanford Libraries; the Green Library exhibit continues through March 18.

All photographs by Bob Fitch. Copyright Stanford University Libraries.

SCLC organizers link hands and sing “We Shall Overcome” in Eutaw, Alabama, 1965.