When the photographer Bob Fitch was asked to take a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. lying in an open casket on April 9, 1968, he paused. Recalling the moment for an interviewer years later, Fitch choked up with emotion: “It was a tough decision to take that photo. It felt like blasphemy to put a camera in his face. But then I thought, ‘The world needs to see this horrible truth.’”

Fitch, a preacher’s son who became an ordained minister himself, was influenced during his teenage years by the socially conscious milieu of 1950s Berkeley. Over his career — beginning with a job taking pictures for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King’s organization — he captured some of the most searing images of America’s 20th-century protest movements, many of them in California. Yet Fitch resisted the label of photojournalist, viewing his work as an act of service for causes he believed in.

It was that calling that, before his death from Parkinson’s disease in 2016, led him to give his entire archive of more than 200,000 images to Stanford University to be freely used by the public. See eight favorites below, and explore several curated galleries at the Stanford archive.

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