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[photograph of black people demonstrating for civil rights]
Eyes on the Prize II

The Fight Continues
The civil rights movement from the '60s through the '80s

by Julian Bond
In 1987, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954 - 1965 (Eyes I) documented in six compelling hours of television the glory years of the modern civil rights movement in America. Viewers followed the movement's development, met its leaders and shared in its triumphs.

This month marks the debut of Eyes on the Prize II. The second series chronicles a different and troubling period in American race relations – a period when blacks and whites, who had marched together, steadily drifted apart.

Under the skillful direction of executive producer Henry Hampton, both series use news tape and film to summon memories in older viewers and to set the scene for younger ones. Archival footage is combined with current interviews with movement leaders and participants.

Eyes I and II are television at its best – instructive without lecturing or hectoring, moving without romanticizing or embellishing.

Viewers pushed their chairs back from the first Eyes with some self-satisfaction – the southern civil rights movement had achieved its early goals. There were good guys and bad guys, and the good guys won. By 1965, Jim Crow was legally dead. Peaceful protestors had withstood the angry mobs, the billy clubs and the fire hoses; and democracy had witnessed its finest hour.

The second Eyes is sure to prompt a different response. Southern sheriffs are replaced by northern mayors and peaceful demonstrators by Black Panthers. Nonviolence in Selma gives way to violence in Watts; racist mobs outraged at integrated buses in Alabama segue into racist mobs outraged at integrated busing in Boston. Former allies find themselves on opposite sides as the fight moves north of the Mason-Dixon line.

As the movement travels from southern cotton fields to northern ghettoes, and the sweet Freedom Songs meld into chants of Black Power, the viewer comes face-to-face with the complexities of the unfinished struggle for equal rights.

Some recurring characters demonstrate how little change occurs in the midst of racial revolution. Although hair, clothing and rhetorical styles shift sharply, many of the faces remain the same.

The new faces that appeared in the era on which Eyes II focuses were thought hostile, sullen, angry by whites; blacks felt a surge of pride.

Today's viewers will see how easily pluralism is defined as separatism when the proponents' skins are black; how pride becomes arrogance when

8 'GBH January 1990