Community members gathered in Huntington Park on Sunday March 17th, 2024, to celebrate Ron Wilkins’s new book, “Crook’s Lens: A Photographic Journal Through the Black Liberation Struggle.”

Wilkins, a noted long-time organizer, started off the event saying, “The book is a reflection of my life and my evolution.” Indeed, within the first few pages, Wilkins narrates his childhood years growing up in Slauson Village, where he and his friends, Bird and Kumasi, developed hobbies for stamp and coin collecting, which led to conversations about “international situations, history, social conditions, and so on.”

Wilkins says his experiences of poverty and life in Slauson Village helped to plant the “seeds of consciousness.” After the Watts Rebellion, Wilkins joined the Community Alert Patrol (CAP), “the first civilian volunteer patrol in the U.S. to ‘police the police.”

Following his experience with CAP, Wilkins spent his life in the liberation movement that would become the subject of the book. He said of his time as an organizer:

“I met so many great people, iconic people in the movement, most of whom have joined our ancestors, but they put in enormously important work. I felt it my responsibility because I had a camera with me during my time in the movement and captured our energies. I feel it was my responsibility to put a book together with their images and talk about them, to salute them, to praise them, so that others coming along, many of you in this room, can get to know them and appreciate them.”

The book features numerous narratives by Wilkins alongside his images of historic figures in the liberation struggle, including James Forman, Sam Petty, Nina Simone, Yuri Kochiyama, Yasir Arafat, Muammar Khadafy, Mohammed Farah Aidid, and many more. The book is available for purchase from Ron Wilkins.

The event was streamed online by the People’s Education Program, and hosted by Midnight Books, Black Autonomy LA, and ArtSpace HP.