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.

This exhibition was sponsored by Multicultural Program & Services, Division of Student Affairs, College of Architecture & The Arts, College of Business, College of Law, Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, University Graduate School and the African and African Diaspora Studies.