An American Flash Point

Jump to the bottom of this story for details on how you can see the Flash Point exhibit and other on-campus art and history exhibits this fall.

In the summer of 1962, University of Chicago student Danny Lyon packed his camera and hitchhiked south. By August, he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, in a cell across from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Lyon linked up with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group of mostly Black college students that became a driving force in the Civil Rights Movement. Lyon photographed SNCC members as they organized and protested. He captured lunch counter sit-ins and voter registration drives, dangerous activities that could lead to being jailed or beaten. Lyon set out to document the movement, but his photos became much more than historical records. They were tools of civic change. 

Now, more than 50 of Lyon’s most famous photos are set to be displayed at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and have been promised as gifts Wake Forest by James Agah (P ’26, ’28) and Wendy Agah (P ’26, ’28). “Flash Point: The Civil Rights Photography of Danny Lyon” will run from Sept. 17- Jan. 3.

“Of the many ways to reflect on the American quarter-millennium, a look back at its art is one of the most rewarding,” says Phil Archer (’95, MBA ’05), the Betsy Main Babcock Deputy Director at Reynolda House and co-curator of the exhibition. “Artists are aware; they notice things in their own time that their fellow Americans overlook.”

“Danny Lyon’s photographs provided information about what was happening in the South visually: They were published in SNCC pamphlets, posters and calls to action, and, as a result, helped to sway public opinion,” says co-curator Ashley Givens, an adjunct assistant professor of art history. “He photographed protestors in calm moments of song as well as revealing the violence inflicted upon protestors and activists.” 

Lyon’s photographs include images of musician and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, singer Bob Dylan, and civil rights activists Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis. 

Some of Lyon’s photos, which include King and James Baldwin, could give the impression that the movement was driven by extraordinary individuals. But most of his work shows that history is not shaped by prominent individuals alone. Instead, it highlights how great change was created by ordinary people, many of them young, whose everyday acts of courage and commitment made lasting change possible. Winston-Salem’s history contains one important example.

John Lewis, center-left, and others demonstrate at a public pool in Cairo, Illinois, in 1962. © Danny Lyon / Magnum Photos. www.bleakbeauty.com. Instagram: @dannylyonphotos2

SNCC photographer Clifford Vaughs, center, is arrested by the National Guard at a demonstration in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1964. © Danny Lyon / Magnum Photos. www.bleakbeauty.com. Instagram: @dannylyonphotos2

In 1960, 10 Wake Forest students joined students from Winston-Salem State University (then called Winston-Salem Teachers College) in sit-in protests at the lunch counter at Winston-Salem’s F.W. Woolworth’s. That sit-in began just a week after the famed Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in nearby Greensboro, North Carolina, led by students from North Carolina A&T University. The Winston-Salem sit-in led to the desegregation of restaurants and lunch counters in the city.   

“Societies can undergo change gradually or in bursts of radical reshaping. For young people who are brave, engaged and informed, these periods of concentrated dissonance are golden opportunities to contribute to reform,” Archer says.

Lyon did not come to Winston-Salem for the sit-in, but he witnessed plenty of similar actions, which are on display in “Flash Point.” The collection includes searing images of Carmichael and Clifford Vaughs and the National Guard during 1964 demonstrations in Cambridge, Maryland. In the documentary “SNCC,” Lyon recalled photographing a group of teenage girls who had been demonstrating in Americus, Georgia. They included girls as young as 12 and one who was pregnant, and they were confined in a stockade without beds or working toilets.

For Michelle Gong (’27), an art history minor, Lyon’s photographs of routine activism are as important as those taken during pivotal moments. “Take, for example, the photo of a young John Lewis kneeling in prayer outside a segregated swimming pool,” Gong says. “In that photo, Lewis is this 22-year-old kid bowing his head with other students. I really love the quiet irony of this shot. … Lyon’s photo seems to ask: ‘Really, are these the scary protestors disturbing the peace?’ ”  

Archer describes Lyon’s photos as a metric for America’s success at living up to its founding ideals, showing “how challenging it was, a century after emancipation, for Black Americans to exercise their constitutional rights to vote, to assemble in public, to read and speak without governmental censorship.”

Now, visitors to Reynolda have an opportunity to reflect on those themes as we mark America’s semiquincentennial. The art collection at Reynolda asks viewers to “think afresh about declarations that were inscribed, treaties that were honored or broken and constitutional provisions that were observed or amended,” Archer says.

How to see it yourself

Events marking and reflecting on key moments in the nation’s history are ongoing at Wake Forest this semiquincentennial year, including several exhibits this fall on or near the Reynolda campus. Together, they invite guests to examine the stories and perspectives that shape America. Here’s how to plan your visit: