Former Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a shotgun-felled James Meredith looking back toward his would-be assassin on a Mississippi highway in 1966 became an enduring image of the Civil Rights Movement, has died. He was 86.

Thornell died Thursday at a hospital in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie from complications from kidney disease, his son, Jay Thornell said Friday.

He worked for the AP from 1964 to 2004 and had a variety of assignments over the years, photographing politicians, natural disasters, crime scenes. But the struggle for racial justice punctuated Thornell’s wire service career from the beginning.…