Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Jack Thornell, who captured James Meredith shooting in 1966 dies at 86

Jack Thornell photographer dies at 86 after four decades documenting the Civil Rights Movement

Jack Thornell, the former Associated Press photographer whose image of a wounded James Meredith on a Mississippi highway became one of the defining photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, died Thursday at a hospital in Metairie, Louisiana. He was 86. PBS NewsHour reported that his son, Jay Thornell, confirmed the cause of death as complications from kidney disease.

Thornell spent four decades with the AP, from 1964 to 2004, covering everything from natural disasters to political figures. But the civil rights struggle defined his career early. On his very first day working for the AP’s New Orleans bureau, he covered the integration of a Mississippi Gulf Coast school.

His most consequential photograph came in June 1966. Thornell, then 26, was assigned to cover Meredith’s “March Against Fear,” a solo walk through Mississippi to encourage Black residents to register and vote. Meredith had already made history four years earlier by integrating the University of Mississippi. On the second day of the march, a gunman opened fire on him along U.S. Highway 51 near Hernando. Thornell was parked roadside when the shots rang out. In the chaos, he captured an image of Meredith on the ground, arms extended, head turned toward his attacker. Thornell initially feared he had missed the shot. Meredith survived the shooting, and the gunman, Aubrey James Norvell, was apprehended and pleaded guilty, ultimately receiving a five-year sentence, though he only served 18 months.

Thornell won the Pulitzer Prize for the photo in 1967.

Over his career, Thornell also photographed the burned station wagon belonging to civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi, after Ku Klux Klansmen killed them in 1964. He covered the Selma-to-Montgomery march, photographed Martin Luther King Jr. multiple times, and was present when King’s family viewed his body at Spelman College’s Sisters Chapel in Atlanta following the 1968 assassination.

His son described him as someone who rarely paused to appreciate what he was witnessing and recording. “Through his pictures, he was serving the world and exposing things that were going on in places that other parts of the world and country didn’t know about during the Civil Rights era,” Jay Thornell said.