Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

A giant of post-War documentary photography and film, Brooklyn, NY native Danny Lyon helped define a mode of photojournalism in which the picture-maker is deeply and personally embedded in his subject matter. A self-taught photographer and a graduate of the University of Chicago, Lyon began his photographic career in the early 1960s as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a national group of college students who joined together after the first sit-in by four African American college students at a North Carolina lunch counter. From 1963 to 1964, Lyon traveled the South and Mid-Atlantic regions documenting the Civil Rights Movement.

The photographs were published in The Movement, a documentary book about the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and later in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon’s own memoir of his years working for the SNCC.

“Lyon was the Robert Capa of the Movement. Many of his pictures remain the stock images of the period in “Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” there are not only the famous pictures but Lyon’s text, including many important documents. Much of their outstanding achievement has been forgotten. Perhaps Danny Lyon’s fine book can help to bring their accomplishment into the mainstream history of the 1960s.”