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Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965) is a documentary series about the American Civil Rights Movement. It originally aired on PBS in early 1987 with six initial parts; eight more parts were broadcast in 1990 as Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads (1965-1985), for a total of fourteen episodes. It uses archival footage to record the growth of the American Civil Rights Movement, with special focus on the ordinary people who affected the change. It was produced by Henry Hampton at Blackside Inc. Martin Luther King is perhaps most famous for his I Have a Dream speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom The Civil Rights Movement refers to a set of noted events and reform movements in the United States aimed...
PBS re-directs here; for alternate uses see PBS (disambiguation) PBS logo The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit public broadcasting television service with 349 member TV stations in the United States. ...
1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The civil rights movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all citizens of United States. ...
Henry Hampton, August 19, 1940-November 22, 1998, was the founder of film production company Blackside Inc. ...
The series has been hailed as more than just a historical document. Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University history professor and editor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers, remarked 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 the depth of coverage of the material, it has been adopted as a key reference and record of the civil rights movement. A primary source is any piece of information that is used for constructing history as an artifact of its times. ...
It has also seen extensive use in schools and other educational settings as a way to convey the experiences and history of that period in the struggle for civil rights.
By the mid-1990s, it was unavailable on video or TV, due to limits on the licenses of the copyrights of the archival footage used. While Hampton's sisters were seeking funding to re-secure the rights to further use of that footage, the only legal means available for accessing the series was through aging and deteriorating video tapes or obsolete laserdiscs. The copyright symbol is used to give notice that a work is covered by copyright. ...
Some agreement must have been reached; on January 14, 2006, PBS announced that it would be airing Eyes on the Prize in fall of 2006. [1] PBS re-directs here; for alternate uses see PBS (disambiguation) PBS logo The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit public broadcasting television service with 349 member TV stations in the United States. ...
Controversies
Independent of the producers, the organization Downhill Battle initiated the "Eyes on the Screen" project, along with civil rights activist Lawrence Guyot, in January of 2005 to encourage the use of file sharing networks such as BitTorrent to distribute the film - without regard for copyright restrictions. They also called for people to display the film, particularly on February 8 - during Black History Month. Downhill Battle is a non-profit organization based in Worcester, MA. It launched in August 2003 and argues that the four major recording labels have a monopoly that is bad for both musicians and music culture. ...
Lawrence Guyot was a civil rights activist who was the head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. ...
2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ...
The (new) BitTorrent logo This article is about the protocol. ...
February 8 is the 39th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ...
Black History Month is celebrated annually in the United States in the month of February. ...
Others took exception to Downhill's use of the series as a tool in the cause of challenging existing copyright law[2]. Some affiliated with the production of the series (particularly producer Henry Hampton's family) have objected that a series about the civil rights movement had now been repositioned as an icon of the copyright reform movement[3]. They pointed out that widespread distribution of illegal copies would make investors and donors less interested in funding a public re-release.
As a result, soon after their campaign began, Downhill Battle removed their BitTorrent links and issued a statement asking that all digital and illegal copies of the series be destroyed. They expressed the hope "that our efforts have not interfered with Blackside's efforts" to bring back the series to the public. The Download Battle campaign instead began to emphasize the promotion of public screening of the series in each state.
Meanwhile, the Eyes on the Screen campaign had been endorsed by groups such as the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, who wrote: "Therefore, in the spirit of the Southern Freedom Movement, we who once defied the laws and customs that denied people of color their human rights and dignity, we whose faces are seen in "Eyes on the Prize," we who helped produce it, tonight defy the media giants who have buried our story in their vaults by publicly sharing episodes of this forbidden knowledge with all who wish to see it."[4], [5]
Topics Covered The topics covered in the episodes of the series:
Part 1 .... Little Rock skyline Nickname: The Capital City, Rock-Town, City of Roses Map Location in Arkansas Political Statistics Founded 1821 Incorporated 1831 County Pulaski County Mayor Jim Dailey Geographic Statistics Area - Total - Land - Water 302. ...
It has been suggested that Montgomery Improvement Association be merged into this article or section. ...
Selma is the name of a number of places: in the United States of America: Selma, Alabama Selma, Arkansas Selma, California Selma, Colorado Selma, Indiana Selma, Iowa Selma, Kansas Selma, Louisiana Selma, Michigan Selma, Mississippi Selma, Missouri Selma, North Carolina Selma, Ohio Selma, Oregon Selma, South Carolina Selma, Texas Selma...
Part 2 The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a revolutionary Black nationalist organization in the United States that formed in the late 1960s and grew to national prominence before falling apart due to factional rivalries stirred up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ...
The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious and socio-political organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930 with a declared aim of resurrecting the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of the Black men and women of America and the rest of the world. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Part 4 The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Logo. ...
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC, pronounced snick) was one of the primary institutions of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. ...
Demonstrator at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a political rally that took place on August 28, 1963. ...
Episodes Part 1: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1964 - Episode 1: Awakenings (1954-1956)
- Episode 2: Fighting Back (1957-1962)
- Episode 3: Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)
- Episode 4: No Easy Walk (1961-1963)
- Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)
- Episode 6: Bridge To Freedom (1965)
Part 2: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985 - Episode 7 - The Time Has Come (1964-1966)
- Episode 8 - Two Societies (1965-1968)
- Episode 9 - Power! (1966-1968)
- Episode 10 - The Promised Land (1967-1968)
- Episode 11 - Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-1972)
- Episode 12 - A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)
- Episode 13 - The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-1980)
- Episode 14 - Back to the Movement (1979-mid 1980's)
External links - PBS Lesson Plans
- IMDB entry for Eyes On the Prize (1987)
- IMDB entry for Eyes On the Prize II (1990)
- Regarding the controversies:
- Wired Article on archival footage issue
- Eyes on the Screen
- Wired Article on Eyes on the Screen screening in the Bay Area
- Reaction from producer's family
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