Emory King Week 2025

By his early 20s, photojournalist Danny Lyon had created some of the most iconic photographs of the civil rights movement while serving as staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Both Julian Bond, who helped establish SNCC, and Congressman John Lewis, who served as SNCC’s chairman, credit Lyon’s images with giving the movement essential momentum. SNCC was the only civil rights organization comprised completely of young people. It was inclusive, regardless of race or gender. Non-conformist and non-hierarchical, SNCC planned, organized, and mobilized quickly, and their non-violent sit-ins, demonstrations, and Freedom Rides offered an urgency that spurred the civil rights movement forward.   

A young John Lewis appears in the top photograph, in conversation behind central figure Judy Richardson, another prominent member of SNCC. The photograph was taken at the Toddle House, a whites-only restaurant in Atlanta, during an SNCC sit-in protesting the segregation of lunch counters. Richardson recalls these demonstrations taking a specific course: demonstrators were denied service, the police were called to arrest them, they went limp and were taken into custody. 

The bottom photograph shows Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy exiting the Albany, Georgia courthouse after having been found guilty of marching without a permit. The march was held following a Freedom Ride, organized by SNCC, in December of 1961. Meant to test court orders that had recently desegregated public interstate transit, a mix of Black and white riders in Atlanta boarded a passenger train bound for Albany and sat together in the “whites only” train car. Although they were soon jailed as “troublemakers,” their arrival invigorated the Albany Movement, which would eventually have the financial and administrative backing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.