new orleans — Former Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of James Meredith looking down on his would-be killer on a Mississippi highway in 1966, has died. He was 86 years old.
Thornell died Thursday at a hospital in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie due to complications from kidney disease, his son, Jay Thornell, said Friday.
He worked for the AP from 1964 to 2004 and had a variety of assignments over the years, such as photographing politicians, natural disasters and crime scenes. But the fight for racial justice has permeated Thornell’s newswire career from the beginning. He covered the Mississippi Gulf Coast school merger on his first day on the job in the AP New Orleans bureau.
In June 1966, Thornell, then 26 years old, was assigned to cover the civil rights march led by Meredith, who had already made history by integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962 and was then organizing a “March Against Fear” across the state to encourage black residents to register and vote.
Meredith was driving on U.S. Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi, and Thornell and a rival photographer were in a car parked on the side of the road, when the sound of the first gun going off sent them scrambling.
One of Thornnell’s resulting images remains a sobering photographic reminder of the violent resistance to desegregation. It shows a wounded Meredith grimacing in pain as he drags himself to the edge of the road. Besides that Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, Thornnell didn’t initially realize he’d taken it: Meredith on the ground at the edge of the freeway with his arms outstretched and his hands on the pavement — it’s unclear whether he was still falling or pushing himself up after the fall. His head is turned and he appears to be looking at his would-be killer, who appears on the far left side of the image among the roadside foliage.
Meredith is hospitalized and recovers. Aubrey James Norvell, who was arrested at the scene of the shooting, pleaded guilty and served 18 months of a five-year prison sentence.
Until he developed the film and took a closer look at the negatives, Thornell thought he might be fired. He feared that his rivals would have a photo of the gunman and he did not. Instead of being fired, Thornnell won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize.
In 1964, Thornell photographed a burned-out station wagon in Neshoba County, Mississippi, that had belonged to civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, whose bodies were found buried in an earthen dam weeks after they were kidnapped by Ku Klux Klansmen and murdered. Thornell was hastily taking a photo of the local sheriff who had been arrested by federal agents on conspiracy charges in connection with their deaths. Thornell got the bullet while retreating when one of the sheriff’s supporters threatened him with a knife.
Thornell recorded the violence that led to school integration in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1966. One of his photographs showed a black man covering his ears as he walked away from a cherry bomb thrown by angry white people.
Thornell photographed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. several times, including during the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama in 1965, and demonstrations in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, a week before King was assassinated there.
Thornell returned to his base in New Orleans before King’s assassination, but was later sent to Atlanta, where he photographed the King family as they viewed the body in the Sisters’ Chapel at Spelman College.
He was late for that mission. He said in a 2018 interview that he scrambled around another photographer, climbed onto a bench, and climbed toward the casket by standing on top of one bench after another to get into position for the photo.
“I was shaken when I left there,” Thornell said in the interview, conducted at his home in Kenner, Louisiana. “My eyes were on the floor because I knew everyone was looking at me because of my vile behavior.” “But I didn’t leave without the picture.”
Years later, in 1977, King’s killer, James Earl Ray, escaped from a prison in Tennessee. Thornell was on hand when a muddy and exhausted Ray was caught again.
Thornell was born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi. His career as a photographer may not have happened had it not been for a military mess when he was serving in the Army in the late 1950s, according to a 1967 account in AP World Corporate magazine.
“The U.S. Army decided to make him a radio repairman. But at Fort Monmouth, his name got mixed up with that of a camera bug who wanted to go to photography school. So Thornnell, who didn’t know an aperture from back focus, took a short course in taking pictures while Thornnell learned to repair radios.”
After leaving the Army, Thornell got a job at the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News before being hired to work for the Associated Press in New Orleans.
Set during a turbulent time in the South, Thornnell recalled the fear he sometimes felt, amid the violence and threats. But there was a greater fear of physical harm.
“My biggest fear was coming back without the photo,” he said. “The things that were going on there, you kind of dealt with it and tried to portray what was going on, because that was your bread and butter, that was your career. Your success depended on how successful you were that day. Because tomorrow there was always another newspaper coming out.”
Thornell is survived by his son, Jay, his daughter, Candy Gross, and his granddaughter. —- Amy reported from Atlanta.