AP photographer Jack Thornell’s iconic images of civil rights and beyond
Apr 24, 2026, 3:26 PM | Updated: 3:30 pm
FILE - James Meredith looks at Aubrey James Norvell, background left partially hidden behind foliage, after being shot on a road near Hernando, Miss., June 6, 1966. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell, File)
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
(AP Photo/Jack Thornell, File)
Former Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a shotgun-felled James Meredith looking back toward his would-be assassin on a Mississippi highway in 1966 became an enduring image of the Civil Rights Movement.
Thornell died Thursday at a hospital in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie from complications from kidney disease. He was 86.
He worked for the AP from 1964 to 2004 and had a variety of assignments over the years, photographing politicians, natural disasters and crime scenes. But the struggle for racial justice punctuated Thornell’s wire service career from the beginning, and he covered the integration of a Mississippi Gulf Coast school on his first day of work for the New Orleans bureau.
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This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.
