The march was meant to be a solitary act of defiance, a 220-mile walk from Memphis to Jackson to challenge the pervasive fear that kept Black Mississippians from registering to vote. James Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi four years prior, set out on a highway just inside the state line. He carried an ivory-headed cane. The first day was hot, quiet. Then, on a stretch of road near Hernando, a man stepped from the trees. James Aubrey Norvell, a white hardware clerk, shouted, "I only want James Meredith!" He fired three times. The second shotgun blast struck Meredith in the back, neck, and leg, dropping him into a ditch.
What happened next was not a heroic tableau, but a scattered, desperate scene. People ran for cover. A local Black man, David Cox, wrestled the shotgun from Norvell. An Associated Press photographer, Jack R. Thornell, who had been following the march, did not capture the moment of the shot. Instead, he framed the aftermath: Meredith prone on the hot asphalt, writhing in pain, his sunglasses and cane several feet away. A state trooper stands nearby, hand on hip, looking not at the wounded man but warily up the road. The image is stark, devoid of overt drama, yet saturated with the specific terror of that place and moment. It is a document of an attack on one man's body that was, in truth, an attack on an idea. Meredith would survive. The march, taken up by major civil rights leaders, would swell into thousands. But Thornell's photograph, the last to win a Pulitzer for photography before the category was retired, froze the precise, ugly cost of the journey.