The Library's Garden Level (Lower Level) is currently closed due to storm flooding. More about garden-level closure. (Posted on: 03/08/2024 03:24pm)
In 1921, William Mills Wrigley, Jr., the Wrigley Company founder of chewing gum and candy fame, became majority owner of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs. That same year, a time when Major League Baseball had no teams west of St. Louis, Wrigley purchased the Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels, then a minor-league team. In 1925...
If it were not for the photographic collection at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, evidence of Los Angeles’s support for the modern civil rights movement in the South may have quietly slipped into the past. The African American photographic collection in the Bradley Center documents this era in the works of three photographers: Charles Williams, Harry Adams, and Guy Crowder...
In 1887, after Reconstruction, a black man named Robert Creecy purchased a parcel of Canebrake Plantation land in Louisiana from Florestan Waggenspauch. Creecy sold half the parcel to another buyer, while retaining ownership of the remaining land. In 1898, Creecy's son-in-law, a 25-year-old black man with indigenous ancestry named Robert Celestin, purchased the half parcel of land back...
The Southern California Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020 Collection consists of newly processed digital photographs documenting the protests and other gatherings related to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Hassina and Deeptha Leelarathna Photographic Collection is an invaluable historical archive that offers a glimpse into the lives of two Sri Lankan immigrants who made significant contributions to the Sri Lankan community in the United States.
The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center contains over 100 images of the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky on January 17, 1942. His life changed forever when he told Louisville police officer and boxing coach Joe Martin that he was going to “whup” whoever stole his bicycle
The Richard Cross digital collection at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center provides a perfect example of the link between photography and archaeology. Richard Cross's photographs demonstrate his extraordinary ability to document groups of people who have often been marginalized and ignored...
Several black female politicians appear in the Guy Crowder Collection whose careers were marked by many firsts. Two of those women, Yvonne Braithwaite Burke and Maxine Waters, have represented vast areas of Los Angeles during their long careers in public service, and many images of them are available online in the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center Digital Collections....
By the turn of the twentieth century the Central Avenue District was on its way to becoming the center of African American life in Los Angeles. It was a slow process that took several decades to complete. Several factors contributed to that development. The Central Avenue District was constructed by surrounding white neighborhoods that barred minorities from living in them.
In 1930 W. D. Fard formed the Black religious and social movement known as the Nation of Islam (NOI) in Detroit, Michigan. When Fard mysteriously disappeared in 1934 his disciple, Elijah Muhammad, assumed control until his death in 1975. During the mid 1950s NOI national spokesman Malcolm X was instrumental in establishing Mosque No. 27 in Los Angeles, California...
