A Toddle House in Atlanta has the distinction of being occupied during a sit-in by some of the most effective organizers in America when the SNCC staff and supporters take a break from a conference to demonstrate [The Movement]

Date1963, printed later

Credit LineGift of Dinesh Gauba and Sheila Dobee

Dimensions11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

Object number2018.024.062

Label TextBorn in 1942 to a Russian-Jewish mother and German-Jewish father living in Brooklyn, Danny Lyon has cited the state of the world at the time of his birth as underpinning his sensitivity toward unjustly marginalized groups in America and those who live on society’s fringes either by choice or out of fear. World War II raged as the United States and the Allied forces battled against a Nazi regime intent on genocide. During his youth, segregation was brutally enforced in thirteen American states and the Black vote was suppressed in the Deep South.

Lyon came to view photojournalism as a powerful voice for social activism and change. By his early 20s, he 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 and gender. The voices of young Black women, in particular, were heard and respected. Non-conformist and non-hierarchical, SNCC planned, organized, and mobilized quickly, and their non-violent sit-ins, demonstrations, and Freedom Riders offered an urgency that spurred the civil rights movement forward. Lyon immortalized their actions and their bravery.

His photographs affect the viewer; whether the lasting impression is one of strength, beauty, struggle, or pain, they speak insistently to the human condition. Lyon has remarked that all his work, which includes photographs, books, and films, concerns “the existential struggle to be free.”

John Lewis appears in this photograph, in conversation behind central figure Judy Richardson, another prominent member of SNCC. The photograph was taken at a whites-only restaurant in Atlanta called the Toddle House 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.
Exhibition HistoryTestament: Danny Lyon Photographs, Michael C. Carlos Museum, October 10 - January 17, 2021
Published ReferencesDanny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 129.

ProvenanceEx coll. Dinesh Gauba and Sheila Dobee, United States.

MarkingsDate and Bleak Beauty stampe on verso.

Status

Not on view

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