Abstract

Eyes on the Prize: Fighting Back

This article focuses on the book "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," by Juan Williams and edited by Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Vincent Harding and Darlene Clark Hine. This article focuses on the television series "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," by Juan Williams and edited by Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Vincent Harding and Darlene Clark Hine. ed. Eyes on the Prize, a series of six one-hour programs that starts on PBS on January 21, 1987 is not only a splendid accounting of what happened during the most active years of the civil right movement of the U.S., but also of why it was so important. The series is the realization of a twenty-year dream by Henry Hampton, its executive producer and the president of Blackside Inc. Operating on funds from a variety of corporations and philanthropies, Blackside's interracial staff and scads of consultants gathered film from the era and combined it with interviews conducted in the past few years. There are dozens of points at which the story of the movement could begin. In its first installment the series moves swiftly through America's shameful history of enforced racial separation to the years following World War II, when blacks who had been exposed to the wider world, and at least a semblance of equality, returned to their segregated hometowns.