Pulitzer-winning AP photographer Jack Thornell dies at 86

Former Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell, renowned for his Pulitzer Prize-winning image capturing civil rights activist James Meredith moments after he was shot during a 1966 march in Mississippi, died Thursday at a hospital in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. He was 86.

Thornell's death resulted from complications of kidney disease, according to his son, Jay Thornell. Over four decades with the AP, from 1964 to 2004, Thornell documented a wide range of events, including politicians, natural disasters and crime scenes. Yet his career was deeply shaped by the civil rights struggle in the South, where he captured scenes of both progress and profound violence.

Thornell's breakthrough came early in his tenure. On his first day with the AP's New Orleans bureau, he covered the integration of a school on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. Two years later, in June 1966, the 26-year-old photographer was assigned to Meredith's March Against Fear, a voter registration drive through Mississippi. Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, was walking along U.S. Highway 51 near Hernando when a shotgun blast struck him. Thornell, parked nearby with another...