Plot Summary

Danny Lyon's SNCC (2020), brings together hundreds of never-before-seen black-and-white photographs made by Lyon during the years that he was employed as the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Beginning in 1962 in Cairo, Illinois when Lyon, then a University of Chicago student, met John Lewis, Freedom Rider, the film traces the story of their friendship alongside the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States. The images are layered with archival audio recordings of speeches by and conversations with Lewis, Julian Bond, and Dotty Zellner, among others, as well as freedom songs that were recorded by Alan Ribback in churches and meetings in Atlanta in the 1960s and recently rediscovered by Lyon.