Thornell, a veteran AP photographer whose Pulitzer Prize-winning images helped define the visual record of the civil rights era, died Thursday at a hospital in Metairie, Louisiana, his son Jay Thornell said. He was 86. Jay Thornell said the cause was complications from kidney disease.
Thornell joined the Associated Press in 1964 and remained with the wire service until 2004, working a range of assignments that included political events, natural disasters and crime scenes. But the civil rights movement, the AP obituary said, marked the arc of his career from early on, beginning with his coverage of school integration on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during his first day with the AP New Orleans bureau.
In June 1966, Thornell was 26 when he was assigned to cover a civil rights march led by James Meredith, whose earlier actions included integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962. Meredith was leading a “March Against Fear” through Mississippi to encourage Black residents to register and vote. While Meredith walked along U.S. Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi, Thornell and a rival photographer were in a car parked roadside when they heard the first shotgun blast.
The shooting sent photographers scrambling, and one of Thornell’s resulting images showed Meredith wounded and grimacing as he dragged himself to the edge of the road. The Pulitzer-winning photo, which Thornell did not initially realize he had taken, showed Meredith on the ground at the highway’s edge with his arms extended and hands on the pavement, with his head turned toward the would-be assassin, who was visible in the extreme left of the picture in a weedy ditch.
Meredith was hospitalized and recovered after the attack, according to the AP report. Aubrey James Norvell, who was apprehended at the scene, pleaded guilty and served 18 months of a five-year prison sentence, the story said.
Jay Thornell remembered his father as a loving dad who could be “regimented” and “stubborn,” and said the stress of covering the movement sometimes distracted Jack Thornell from appreciating his own achievements at the time. Jay Thornell said that “through his pictures,” his father was serving the world and exposing events others did not know about during the civil rights era.
Before and beyond the Meredith photographs, the AP story described Thornell documenting violence and resistance in the years leading to school integration, including covering the 1964 burning of a station wagon in Neshoba County belonging to civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam weeks after Ku Klux Klan members abducted and killed them. The AP report also said Thornell photographed the local sheriff being arrested by federal agents on conspiracy charges, and that he captured the moment after a supporter of the sheriff threatened him with a knife.
Thornell photographed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. multiple times, including during the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965, and he later photographed demonstrations in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, the week before King was assassinated there. The AP account said Thornell had returned to New Orleans before King was assassinated, but was later dispatched to Atlanta to photograph King’s family viewing the body at Spelman College’s Sisters Chapel; Thornell said in a 2018 interview that he arrived late and climbed onto a pew to reach position for the picture.
The AP report also included Thornell’s own reflections on his work: in a 2018 interview, Thornell described the “greatest fear” as not returning with the photograph, saying that recording events was “your bread and butter” and that daily success mattered because “tomorrow there’s always another newspaper coming out.” The account said that in later years his family remembered a calmer period in which he could review his achievements without the same deadline pressure, including autographing photos sent to him by others. Thornell is survived by his son Jay Thornell, his daughter Candy Gros, and a granddaughter. The AP report was written by Kevin Mcgill, with Amy reporting from Atlanta.