FishbowlLA

Guy Crowder, photographer of Black Los Angeles, dies at 72 — and the LA-press history he documented

By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, November 2011

In late October 2011, photojournalist Guy Crowder died of pneumonia at 72, days after suffering a stroke. Crowder had photographed Black Los Angeles across decades starting in the early 1960s; despite his work, the LA Times, the Herald Examiner, the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, AP, and UPI had all refused to hire him because of his race. He worked instead for the LA Sentinel, the Wave newspapers, and Johnson Publications’ Jet and Ebony — building a career that placed him at the heart of LA’s most consequential mid-century-and-after moments. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Matthew Fleischer, drew heavily on the LA Wave’s obit.

Then

Crowder’s positioning across decades was extraordinary. He had been at the center of the action during the Watts Riots; standing beside Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel moments before Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968; at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968; ringside through the evolution of Muhammad Ali’s career; on the sidelines at the Coliseum; and documenting countless other moments of LA-region cultural-and-political history.

The structural exclusion from the mainstream LA press of his era — the refusal of the LA Times, Herald Examiner, Santa Monica Evening Outlook, AP, and UPI to hire him because of his race — was both a documented racial injustice and the proximate cause of his unique career positioning. By working for the Black press (the Sentinel, the Wave papers, Jet, and Ebony), Crowder ended up with photographic access to LA’s Black community that the mainstream papers structurally did not have.

The LA Sentinel and the Wave newspapers had been LA’s anchor Black-press publications across the post-WWII period. Johnson Publications — the Chicago-based parent of Jet and Ebony — had been the major national Black-press publishing operation across the same period. Crowder’s work across these outlets had built up a substantial archive of post-1960 Black Los Angeles photographic history.

The original FishbowlLA framing — by Matthew Fleischer — was respectful and substantive. The piece foregrounded both the structural exclusion that had defined the early-career conditions and the substantive archive that Crowder’s career had nonetheless produced.

Now

Guy Crowder’s photographic archive has been substantially preserved and recognized in the years since his death. The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University Northridge holds substantial Crowder collections; his work has been part of multiple subsequent exhibitions at the California African American Museum and other LA-region institutions. The 2017 Black Los Angeles 1962-1990: Photographs by Guy Crowder exhibition was one of the more substantial public displays of his work.

The LA Times’s racial-equity reckoning across the post-2020 period included an explicit institutional apology in September 2020 for the paper’s historical racism, including the kind of hiring discrimination that had structurally excluded photographers like Crowder. The paper’s senior editorial leadership has continued to engage with the institutional history.

The LA Sentinel, the Wave newspapers, and the broader Black-press infrastructure in Los Angeles have continued operating across the years. Johnson Publications sold off Jet and Ebony in 2016 and 2019 respectively; the broader Black-press publishing landscape has been substantially reorganized across the post-2010 digital-transition cycle.

Crowder’s positioning at the RFK assassination has continued to be one of the most-cited photographic vantage points on that event — multiple subsequent documentaries and books have drawn on the photographs he and his colleagues at the Black press took that night. The 2011 piece reads now as a documented obit of one of LA-photojournalism’s substantive 20th-century practitioners — and a small documented acknowledgment of the structural exclusions that had defined the conditions of his work.

Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.

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