Bob Fitch, an ordained minister, who became "tired of words and disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the church," ventured South at 24 to join Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a staff photographer. Fitch worked for SCLC until just before King's assassination in 1968. His pictures appeared initially in the northern Afro-American press, which could neither afford nor risk sending their own staff into the South.
     Fitch photographed not only the dramatic moments and the leaders of the civil rights movement, but ordinary people and events as well. A big man, Fitch was not reluctant to bring his cameras aggressively into the center of violent situations, and he learned not only how to survive the confrontations, but to get out with his film intact. "[I learned] that photography is a whole body act," he wrote, "I need all my senses, all my reflexes, all my muscles, all my gray matter functioning very well and in concert."
      After photographing King's funeral, Fitch returned home to California and began to apply lessons learned in the South to the forces of social change rapidly coalescing along the West Coast. By 1970, he was working closely with the United Farm Workers, and for nearly seven years he criss- crossed California's agricultural areas documenting farm workers, their families, their lives, their work, and the organizing struggles. Fitch accompanied Cesar Chavez on an important organizing trip to Canada and the East Coast, and when the confrontation between growers and farmworkers began to turn ugly, he was there with all his well-honed instincts working to capture dramatic images of police violence, Teamster thugs, and UFW funerals.