Former Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a shotgun-felled James Meredith looking back toward his would-be assassin on a Mississippi highway in 1966 became an enduring image of the Civil Rights Movement, has died. He was 86. Thornell died Thursday at a hospital in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie from complications from kidney disease, his son, Jay Thornell said Friday. He worked for the AP from 1964 to 2004 and had a variety of assignments over the years, photographing politicians, natural disasters, crime scenes. But the struggle for racial justice punctuated Thornell’s wire service career from the beginning. He covered the integration of a Mississippi Gulf Coast school on his first day of work for the AP New Orleans bureau.…