Genre Documentary Narrated by Julian Bond | Based on Civil Rights Movement Original language(s) English | |
Also known as Eyes on the Prize I
Eyes on the Prize II Opening theme "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" | ||
Eyes on the Prize is an American television series and 14-part documentary about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The documentary originally aired on the PBS network and also aired in the United Kingdom on BBC2. Created and executive-produced by Henry Hampton at the film production company Blackside and narrated by Julian Bond. The series uses archival footage, stills and interviews of participants and opponents of the movement. The title of the series is derived from the folk song "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," which is used in each episode as the opening theme music.
Contents
A total of 14 episodes of Eyes on the Prize were produced over two seasons. The first season, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, chronicles the time period between the United States Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. The first season consists of six episodes, which premiered on January 21, 1987 and concluded on February 25, 1987. The second season, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965–1985, chronicles the time period between the national emergence of Malcolm X during 1964 to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as the first African-American mayor of Chicago. The second season consists of eight episodes, which aired on January 15, 1990 and ended on March 5, 1990, and was made widely available to educators on VHS tape. All 14 hours were re-released on DVD in 2006 by PBS.
Broadcast
The film originated as two sequential projects. Part one, six hours long, was shown on PBS in early 1987 as Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954–1965). Eight more hours were broadcast in 1990 as Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads (1965–1985).
In 1992, it was released on home video (in VHS and Laserdisc). By the mid-1990s, both rebroadcasts and home video distribution were halted for several years due to expiration of rights and licenses of copyrighted archive footage, photographs and music used in the series and increasingly higher rates imposed by the copyright holders. Grants from the Ford Foundation and Gilder Foundation enabled Blackside and the rights clearance team to renew rights. While the return of Eyes on the Prize to public television and the educational market involved the contributions of many dedicated people, four individuals in particular were responsible for the long and complicated undertaking of rights renewals and the re-release of the series: Sandra Forman, Legal Counsel and Project Director; Cynthia Meagher Kuhn, Archivist and Rights Coordinator; Rena Kosersky, Music Supervisor; and Judi Hampton, President of Blackside and sister of Henry Hampton. None of the archival material in the fourteen hour documentary was removed or altered in any way. PBS rebroadcast the first six hours on American Experience on three consecutive Mondays in October 2006, and rebroadcast the second eight hours in February 2008. After a gap of almost eight years, Eyes on the Prize was rebroadcast on World Channel on fourteen consecutive Sundays beginning on January 17, 2016.
PBS reissued an educational version of the series in the fall of 2006, making it available on DVD for the first time. It is now available to educational institutions and libraries from PBS on seven DVDs or seven VHS tapes. A consumer version of part one (1954–1965) was released in March 2010.
The licensing issues from 1993 to 2006 generated what was called Eyes on the Screen, an effort to disseminate the series by file sharing networks without regard to copyright restrictions.
Book
The book of the same title was created as a companion volume to the series during post-production by the producers and publishing staff at Blackside, Inc. They were assisted by Juan Williams, a Washington Post journalist. (hardcover ISBN 0-670-81412-1, paperback ISBN 0-245-54668-5). First published by Viking Press in 1987, the book used a portion of the iconic photograph of the Selma to Montgomery march taken by Look magazine photographer James Karales on its cover.
Reception
The series has been hailed as more than just a historical document. Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University history professor and editor of the published papers of Martin Luther King Jr., said that "it is the principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century". Because of its extensive use of primary sources and in-depth coverage of the material, it has been adopted as a key reference and record of the civil rights movement. However, it is a product of its time and as such its facts are not always current; for example, it states that nobody was ever convicted of the murder of Medgar Evers, which was true at that time. But Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of that murder on February 5, 1994, after having lived as a free man for much of the three decades following the killing (he was imprisoned from 1977 to 1980 for conspiring to murder A. I. Botnick). De La Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died at age 80 in prison in January 2001.
Awards
Episode six, Bridge to Freedom, produced by Callie Crossley and James A. DeVinney, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1988 during the 60th Academy Awards.