NEW ORLEANS — Jack Thornell, an AP photographer whose image of the 1966 shooting of civil rights activist James Meredith won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize, died on April 24, 2026, at age 86. Thornell died at a hospital in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, from complications of kidney disease, his son Jay Thornell said.

Thornell worked as a photographer for the AP from 1964 to 2004. Born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he attended a short photography course during his service in the U.S. Army in the late 1950s at Fort Monmouth due to a mistaken identity mix-up. After leaving the Army, he worked for the Jackson Daily News before joining the AP in New Orleans, where on his first day he covered the integration of a Mississippi Gulf Coast school.

In June 1966, at age 26, Thornell was assigned to cover James Meredith's March Against Fear, the civil rights march undertaken by the man who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. Meredith was walking on U.S. Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi, when he was shot. Thornell and a rival photographer were in a car parked roadside when the first shotgun blast was fired. He captured a photograph showing Meredith grimacing in pain as he dragged himself to the edge of the highway, an image that earned him the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

Thornell covered many of the defining moments of the civil rights era. In 1964, he photographed the burned-out station wagon belonging to civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi. He later photographed the arrest of a local sheriff by federal agents on conspiracy charges related to the deaths of the three men, while a supporter of the sheriff threatened him with a knife. In 1966, he photographed violence during the integration of schools in Grenada, Mississippi, including a scene of a Black man covering his ears as a cherry bomb was thrown.

Thornell photographed Martin Luther King Jr. during the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama in 1965 and during demonstrations by striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. After King's assassination, he photographed King's family viewing his body at Spelman College's Sisters Chapel in Atlanta. In a 2018 interview, Thornell said he dashed around another photographer and climbed atop a pew to photograph the casket.

"I was shaken when I left there. I had my eyes on the floor because I knew everyone was looking at me for my despicable behavior. But I didn't leave without the picture," Thornell said in the 2018 interview. "The greatest fear for me was coming back without the photograph."

In 1977, James Earl Ray escaped from a Tennessee prison and was recaptured. Thornell was present to photograph the recapture.