The books, although sometimes labelled as "illustrated" by Franklin McMahon, had the same kind of ["on site"] drawings as those from the courtroom, the political arena, and all his other spheres of activity.

Because cameras were not allowed at the Mississippi trial of the suspected killers of Chicago teenager Emmett Till, Life commissioned him to go there to sketch courtroom events.

McMahon's on-site and on-deadline images from Mississippi, published nationwide in Life magazine, provided the visualization that helped spur Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat on the bus in December 1955,[10] which then led to the Montgomery bus boycott and to bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention, along with fellow boycott leader Ralph Abernathy.

The 8th defendant, Bobby Seale, was eventually bound, shackled, and gagged, then separated from the group and sentenced for contempt of court by the judge.

[12] In 1971, Marv Gold produced and directed the film 69 CR 180, an artist's report by McMahon featuring his courtroom drawings of the 1969 trial.

[13][14] Civil rights was a continuing interest and vocation: he covered the presidential campaigns of black candidates Shirley Chisholm, U.S. House ('72) and the Reverend Jesse Jackson ('84, '88), and was at the 1995 Million Man March.

During the Space Race of the 1960s and 1970s, Franklin was to return frequently to NASA's mission control, including his coverage of Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon.

He covered every Democratic and Republican campaign from 1960 through 2008, including attending a vast majority of the conventions, He made first-person drawings of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon Debates (the first broadcast on live television) and later of Kennedy's funeral.

During Richard Nixon's successful 1968 presidential run, Franklin also drew the "unelected White House guys" (H.R.

McMahon accompanied conductor Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on their first European tour in 1971.

He worked for Sports Illustrated Magazine on assignments ranging from the 1959 American League champion baseball team Chicago White Sox and Goose Hunting in Cairo, IL to the Acapulco Yacht Race in Mexico.

A series of decorative plates which he designed with Chicago themes for Continental Illinois National Bank (1972–1982) were given out as premiums at that time.

[15] He did other work for Continental, and also had commercial commissions for McDonald's Corporation, International Harvester, Marshall Field & Company and Borg-Warner, among others.

Franklin and wife, Irene, formed a film distribution company called Rocinante Sight & Sound.

Other books with his drawings include Vittles and Vice (1952),[21] You are Promise (1974) with Martin Marty, and From the land and back (1972) with Curtis Stadfeld .

He also received the Minority Economic Resources Corporation's Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Civil Rights Achievement (2000), and honorary degrees from Loyola University Chicago (1985)[32] and Lake Forest College(1979).

[36] Franklin McMahon's on-the-spot drawings were generally done with a charcoal pencil, then colored in his home studio afterwards, using acrylic watercolors.

[37] In the films for which he won the Emmy and Peabody awards, the process is similar to what is often done when scanning old daguerreotypes: using a moving camera to make more than a dry slideshow from a series of still images.