Empowering Our Community Together

Chris Martin is a civil rights attorney and community organizer from South Central Los Angeles, dedicated to advancing justice, equity, and opportunity for the 9th District. As a practicing lawyer, Martin has built his career successfully representing victims of discrimination, police misconduct, and systemic inequality, fighting to ensure that every Angeleno has access to fairness under the law.

 

Guided by his lived experience growing up in the very neighborhood he serves and still lives in, Martin, a proud Dorsey High graduate, has become a voice for reform within the legal system and a champion for community-based solutions to poverty, housing insecurity, and public safety. His work reflects his belief that true justice is achieved not only through policy, but through empowerment and progress at the neighborhood level.

 

After earning his Juris Doctorate from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Martin was inducted into the law school’s Pro Bono Society for providing over 150 hours of free legal services to indigent clients who could not afford representation. 

 

Martin gained particular prominence in his work in the Movement for Black Lives in 2020, where he helped organize a network of over 700 attorneys responding to 900 protest-arrest cases following the killing of George Floyd. In that role he negotiated with the Los Angeles City Attorney and District Attorney to have charges dropped against the majority of those arrested.

 

Martin also represented parents in Children's Court. In 2020, after seeing injustices black and brown families faced in Children's Court, he also co-founded the Reimagine Child Safety Coalition, which organises families attempting to stay together or reunify after involvement with the foster-care system. His work spans housing justice, police-accountability litigation, child-welfare advocacy and community empowerment efforts.

 

Now stepping into civic leadership, Martin continues his lifelong mission: to bring resources, representation, and respect to South Central Los Angeles, so that residents don’t have to move to find a better life.