This documentary fulfilled my expectations, although not all my hopes. The series of six one-hour programs on the civil rights movement, which premiered on PBS on January 21, is quite simply the most authoritative and stirring documentary yet produced on this critically significant topic of our history.
The first segment, “Awakenings 1954–1956,” highlights the courageous testimony of Mose Wright in the trial of two white men for the murder of his nephew, Emmett Till, in Mississippi in 1955, and the actions taken by Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the boycott against bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama.
“Fighting Back 1957–1962” depicts the clash of states’ rights advocates and federal authorities in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, and in James Meredith’s 1962 challenge to the White-only admissions policy of Ole Miss.
The especially exciting third program, “Aint’s Scared of Your Jails 1960-1961,” dramatically recounts the stories of the lunch-counter sit-ins by black college students in Nashville, Tennessee, and the vicious white mob at tacks on the Freedom Riders in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Alabama.
Focusing mainly on the emergence of Martin Luther King as the most prominent and charismatic civil rights leader, the fourth segment, “No Easy Walk 1961–1963,” chronicles the mass demonstrations against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, and displays the broad national support for civil rights evidenced at the 1963 March on Washington.
Then “Mississippi: Is This America? 1963–1964” truly reveals the potential of telehistory to bring the past alive in its searing account of the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the confrontation between Freedom Democrats and party regulars at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
“Bridge to Freedom 1965,” the final program of the series, details the bloody response of white segregationists to the black campaign for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, and the growing rift in the movement over strategy and tactics, and concludes with an emotional crescendo as Martin Luther King leads the climactic march from Selma to Montgomery.
Eyes on the Prize, inevitably, will be compared to Vietnam: A Television History, on which it is modeled. Very much like the telehistory on the Vietnam War, it most effectively and movingly evokes the past by its adroit use of extensive archival footage—much of it never before broadcast. If for nothing else, this series would be worth every penny it cost just for the opportunity it affords us to see and hear CORE’s Dave Dennis speaking at the funeral of James Chaney and Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer testifying and singing at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, or to watch the Rev. C.T. Vivian confronting Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma and the hospitalized Jim Zwerg vowing that the Freedom Riders will keep coming—no matter what the cost—until segregation is ended. Also like its predecessor, Eyes on the Prize tellingly makes its points without bombast or judgemental moralizing. Julian Bond’s low-key, yet poignant, narration is perfect. And like Vietnam: A Television History, it provides abundant historical perspectives and evaluations by frequently switching from the events depicted in archival footage to contemporary interviews with the participants.
Unfortunately, most of the recorded recollections are of the leaders and officials whose views are already well known and documented, and far too few are of the rank-and-file activists or even those prominent in the movement who have not yet told their story. The interviews add little to the historical record, and provide few surprises; yet what the movement stood for, and what it endured to try to make America be America for all of its citizens, is best communicated when Mrs. Rosa Parks recalls why she defied the Jim Crow law on the Montgomery buses, when the black students who desegregated Central High School remember their fears, hopes, and pride, and when Diane Nash emphasizes the optimism of black youth as a force for change—and still clearly exemplifies the dignity and strength that made SNCC so vital in the early 1960s.
The single greatest difference in the two series is music. Vietnam deliberately omitted a musical score to appear as dispassionate and balanced as possible. Eyes on the Prize pulsates with music. And correctly so, for no other social movement was so rich in song or de pended on them more to instill courage, forge unity, and sustain enthusiasm. The freedom songs and church spirituals sung in the mass meetings and sung in the jails were more central to the movement than any speech or book. And more than any other element in Eyes on the Prize, these songs emotionally convey what the struggle for freedom meant to those who marched and rallied, sat-in and boycotted, were sus pended from school and dragged into jail. I only wish the telehistory identified who is singing at the time, and whether the soundtrack utilizes later recordings or the singing authentic to the event being depicted.
Yet another difference from Vietnam, and more detrimental to the quality of Eyes on the Prize, is the truncated nature of the civil rights telehistory. Despite no lack of effort by the producer, not enough funds were procured to do the full thirteen-part ser es originally envisioned. Such traditional underwriters of major PBS series as the IBM and Xerox corporations, and the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, spurned Hampton’s pleas. The result is unfortunate. Unlike Vietnam, which devoted several segments to the roots of the conflict prior to the Americanization of the war, Eyes on the Prize begins abruptly in 1955. The various demographic, eco nomic, international, political, and social factors that were indispensable to the rise and success of the movement are never explained. The struggles waged by blacks prior to 1955, integral to what follows, are simply ignored.
Those who know nothing about the civil rights movement other than what they learned from this series will be left with the impression that it occurred as a result of the Emmett Till lynching. They will also have no understanding of what happened to the movement, of the meaning of its victories and failures, and to its consequences and legacies for all of us today. Eyes on the Prize offers us nothing on the impact of “black power” and “white backlash,” nothing on the effort to take the movement north and give it a greater economic focus, nothing on what, after all, changed fundamentally or remained essentially the same as a result of the freedom struggle. Despite my sympathetic awareness of the reasons for these omissions, Eyes on the Prize, lacking a meaningful historical beginning and end, is too incomplete to stand on its own as a history of the civil rights struggle in America.
Even most of the events portrayed in Eyes on the Prize require considerable amplification and interpretation to make them comprehensible to today’s students. Instructors using this series in a course will still need to utilize other materials to explore such matters as the reasons for and effects of the 1954 Brown decision or the strategy of nonviolent resistance, why young blacks sought increasingly more militant tactics and how that altered the nature of the movement, why the struggle became a “mass movement,” and how its internal dynamics affected the outcome. The de sire to make maximum use of film foot age that shows “action,” and to slight narration in favor of interviews with well-known movement participants of ten anxious to make themselves look good in retrospect, leaves Eyes on the Prize in need of additional analysis and other sources.
In sum, Eyes on the Prize is an emotion ally powerful TV series and a potentially wonderful teaching tool if utilized intelligently, but also a flawed and incomplete history and telecourse. At its worst it seemingly allows the availability of archival footage to dictate the pace and content of certain segments. This leads to some tedium as the series mechanically allots a half hour to each topic, whether or not the Till Lynching nor integration of Ole Miss may warrant less time and the sit-ins or Mississippi Freedom require more. But at its best—and this is the case for most of the series—Eyes on the Prize brings the movement alive and allows the viewer to glimpse the true meaning of its vitality and grandeur. No better documentary exists to give Americans a sense of the people and events of the movement, and an appreciation of how much we all owe it for having overcome so much of the worst of our common past.
This Flash Review is reprinted with permission from Film & History, newsletter of The Historians Film Committee. Flash Review is a service to subscribers of Film & History, by which they receive each year, via first-class mail, several reviews of films before they are aired. Harvard Sitkoff, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, is the author of The Struggle For Black Equality, 1954–80.
