About the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center

Mission Statement

The mission of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center is to collect, preserve, and disseminate the visual history of the region with an emphasis on ethnic minority communities and photographers. The Bradley Center also promotes research, serves as a center for the exchange of ideas about our visual history, and contributes to the region’s educational efforts through our exhibitions, programs, and digital archives.

History

The Bradley Center was established in 1991 in the CSUN Department of Journalism by Dr. Kent Kirkton as the Center for Photojournalism and Visual History. It has grown substantially since then, with a broadened mission and greater archival scope. In 2012, the Center began to partner with CSUN’s University Library, which has provided support for processing, digitization, preservation, and dissemination efforts for the Center’s collections. In 2015, the Center (then the Institute for Arts & Media) joined forces with the Tom & Ethel Bradley Foundation to continue our vision of preserving the visual history of ethnic communities in our service area and beyond, and at that time, took on its current name. In summer 2016, Dr. José Luis Benavides became the Center’s director. Starting in 2018, the Bradley Center has operated under the University Library.

Collections

The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center's archives contain more than one million images by Los Angeles-based freelance and independent photographers from the 1930s to the present. The core of the Center’s archive is a large collection of photographs by African-American photographers, including pioneer Los Angeles-based photographers like Harry Adams, Vera Jackson, Jack Davis, Charles Williams, and Bob Douglas, plus photographers of the next generation like Maxie Floyd, Guy Crowder, Roland Charles, Calvin Hicks, James Jeffrey, and Donald Bernard.  In addition, the Center’s photographic repository includes the work of several photojournalists, such as Julián Cardona and Richard Cross, who did original work outside the Los Angeles area but whose photographs document the history of the border and Mexican and Central American people who migrated to the United States to escape violence, many of whom settled in Los Angeles. The collections also include the work of photographers John Kouns and Emmon Clarke, who documented the farmworker movement of the 1960s in California and the Southwest. In addition, John Kouns photographed the Freedom and Peace Movements in the South, San Francisco, and Berkeley.

The extensiveness of the Center’s collection and its illumination of significant regional, national, and international themes—including racial segregation and discrimination, African-American and Latino cultural contributions, the Civil Rights movement, unionization, and U.S. relations with its neighbors—have made it an essential and increasingly accessed local, regional, national, and international resource. The African American section of the collection contains rich documentation of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders, as well as local churches, politicians, musicians, singers, entertainers, athletes, and social organizations. Coverage of Dr. King is very well represented in the collection as are other such luminaries as Mayors Tom Bradley and Sam Yorty, Rev. H. H. Brookins of 1st AME, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Earl Warren, Louis Armstrong, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Muhammad Ali, Errol Garner, Dinah Washington, James Baldwin, Roy Wilkins, Nat King Cole, Joe Campanella, numerous jazz greats, and many, many others of national repute. The coverage of political campaigns and voter registration efforts is extensive. Included are thousands of images of daily life and public occasions such as Civil Rights marches and protests, celebrations, and parades. There is significant coverage of churches and church events in Los Angeles that is broad and unmatched in any other collections in the region.

Oral histories, manuscripts, and other ephemeral materials support the photographic collections. Additionally, the archives contain more than one hundred oral histories of African American photographers, Civil Rights leaders and organizers, individuals involved with the history of Los Angeles, Journalism, the group Mexicans in Exile in El Paso, Casa Amiga in Ciudad Juárez, and the United Farm Workers (UFW). Audio and video comprise the collection along with the personal papers of many individuals and organizations. Other collections include the archives of journalist Michael Emery and the collection of the San Fernando Valley newspaper, Sri Lankan Express, and the photographic collection of its founders, Hassina and Deeptha Leelarathna. Additionally, the Bradley Center's Border Studies Collection examines the issues surrounding the border between the United States and Mexico.