Flash Point: The Civil Rights Photography of Danny Lyon
September 17, 2026 — January 3, 2027
Mary and Charlie Babcock Wing Gallery
In the fall of 2026, Reynolda House will mark the occasion of the nation’s semiquincentennial (America250) with two exhibitions exploring pivotal movements in American art and history. In the Babcock Wing, Flash Point: The Civil Rights Photography of Danny Lyon will be on view from September 17, 2026 to January 3, 2027. In the historic house, Art & Democracy will assemble the museum’s collection as a visual chronicle of the nation since its founding and will remain on view for a year.
Danny Lyon (born 1942) joined the movement for civil rights in the early 1960s as the official photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The young staff at SNCC organized peaceful direct-action protests, leading lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives, for which they were frequently jailed, beaten, and some were murdered. He represented a new breed of documentary photographer, for whom the camera was more than an objective recorder; he was a witness to and implicated in the action, and potentially endangered. In his commitment to the cause, Danny Lyon realized that “my camera could be a sword for justice.”
In 1962, Lyon—then a University of Chicago student with a borrowed camera and a historian’s instincts—hitchhiked south and embedded himself in the thick of nonviolent planning and protest. Within a week of crossing the Mason-Dixon line, he was jailed in Albany, Georgia in a cell across from Martin Luther King, Jr. His personal commitment, rather than press credentials or newspaper assignment, gave him unfettered access to the movement. He marched when the students marched, he slept where they slept, and his images were reproduced on SNCC posters and pamphlets and in newspapers throughout the country, revealing the depth of injustice and helping to shift public perception.
Flash Point will debut more than fifty gifts promised to Wake Forest University by James and Wendy Agah, parents of a current student and a recent alumnus. The collection represents the largest single gift of photographs in the university’s history and allows a comprehensive understanding of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Lyon photographed the violence, but he was also able to elevate the organizers, planners, orators, scribes, and publicists of a complex national network of youthful patriots engaged in direct, non-violent action. For their own sake—and the nation’s—they courageously pursued a course charted by Dr. King: “The way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”
Flash Point is co-curated by Phil Archer, Betsy Main Babcock Deputy Director, and Ashley Givens, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University
Header image: Danny Lyon (b. 1942), Toddle House Sit-In in Atlanta, 1963, Gelatin silver print. Promised Gift of James P. Agah and Wendy S. Agah (P’26, P’28) to the Wake Forest University Print Collection