The Lyndhurst Series on the South
1 total work
In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon, a twenty-year-old University of Chicago history student, packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitch-hiked south. Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights. In Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon tells the compelling story of how a handful of dedicated young people, both black and white, forged one of the most successful grassroots organizations in American history. In addition to his own photographs, Lyon includes here a selection of historic SNCC documents such as press releases, telephone logs, letters, and minutes of meetings. This combination of pictures, contemporary eyewitness reports, and text creates both a work of art and an authentic work of history. As SNCC's staff photographer, Danny Lyon was present at some of the most violent and dramatic moments of civil rights history: Black Monday in Danville, Virginia; the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; the March on Washington in 1963; the violent winters of 1963 and 1964 in Atlanta; and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. But Lyon's photographs are more than just a record of marches, jailings, and protests. They take us inside the movement - to the meetings, organizing work, and voter registration drives that were the less visible but no less important side of the struggle. By the time Danny Lyon left SNCC andthe South in 1964, there was an emerging focus on black consciousness in the organization. The movement was changing course and pointing North. Many people have since forgotten the idealistic and truly multiracial character of the movement's early years. Lyon's pictures, taken d