Yusef Omowale

Yusef Omowale is a staff member at the Southern California Library (SCL). SCL is a library and archive located in South Los Angeles that documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression. Founded over 50 years ago, the Library holds extensive collections of histories of community resistance in Los Angeles and beyond.

Over the past 10 years, Yusef has participated within long-standing traditions of collective memory work to document the impacts of policing, incarceration, displacement, and poverty. This archival labor has included political education workshops, campaign support, and offering spaces of healing and material support to ease some of the day-to-day sufferings of late capitalism.

As the 2019 UCLA Activist-in-Residence at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Omowale extended his work on building an archival practice that can document displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles in collaboration with UCLA graduate students. The SCL and the Institute have since partnered to develop and provide digital curatorial paid internships for UCLA graduate students.