NARRATOR: Before Baltimore... there was Birmingham.

Before Black Lives Matter...

Hands up, don't shoot!

NARRATOR: ...Black Power.

Free Huey!

NARRATOR: Before Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till.

Different decades, same story: America's continuing struggle for equality.

NARRATOR: No other film captured the triumphs and tragedies of the civil rights movement like the epic series Eyes on the Prize.

Tonight, a look back at the series and a look at its impact today.

Why this important work matters.

We need power!

That's what we need.

We need power just like anybody else.

NARRATOR: Eyes on the Prize: Then and Now.

Funding for this special presentation of Eyes on the Prize was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation.

This girl here was the first Negro apparently of high school age to show up at Central High School the day that the federal court ordered it integrated.

She was followed in front of the school by an angry crowd.

NARRATOR: Eyes on the Prize aired in 1987, bringing together for the first time film and first-hand accounts that exposed the longstanding struggle.

I'm tired of marching.

Tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth.

We're willing to be beaten for democracy.

NARRATOR: Exposed the vicious racism millions of African Americans endured.

We never have any trouble until some of our Southern niggers go up north and the NAACP talks to them and they come back home.

NARRATOR: The series, comprised of 14 hour-long documentaries, spans the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s.

What'd I do?

Just tell me, what'd I do?

NARRATOR: Nominated for an Academy Award and winning multiple other honors, including the Peabody and Emmy awards, the films were a major achievement in television history.

It's phenomenal.

You're not just making a film.

You're making an important historic document that will resonate and have value far beyond its initial broadcast.

Oh, it's the finest series in the history of America on one of its most wrenching problems.

All we would like to do, sir, is to go to the courthouse.

OFFICER: The courthouse is closed.

I'm sure that God will hear your prayer just as well down there, as He will up here, but you're not going on this courthouse lawn.

NARRATOR: But Eyes on the Prize almost didn't get made.

It was created only because of one man's persistence: Henry Hampton, founder of Blackside Incorporated, the largest minority-owned film company of the time.

It was Henry Hampton's dream to be able to make a series about the civil rights movement, but told from the perspective of the people that were part of the movement-- not so much the experts, not so much the authors, but the people that made it happen, who risked their lives.

Hey, can we get a doctor?

Can we get a doctor?

I think that Henry just always saw a heroic story.

He really saw a long-term story here that looked at a lot of things that were going on in America.

STOKELY CARMICHAEL: We've got to realize the white folk in the state of Mississippi ain't nothing but a bunch of racists, and the only people who can stop them are the black folk in Mississippi.

People talk about Steve Jobs being a visionary.

Henry had that same kind of vision of what he could do in the future as opposed to the past, which is interesting because that's what "Eyes" is about.

It is about the past, but it's also now...

I think it's about the present and the future.

This is what democracy looks like!

NARRATOR: Before he was a filmmaker, Hampton had been a young activist in St. Louis and in Boston.

He cared deeply about people and the human condition.

Most importantly, he joined the pivotal civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

There's this photo that we have on the wall.

We talked about trying to get it into the film.

It's Henry at Selma.

DEVINNEY: Henry had marched in Selma.

Selma was very near and dear to his heart.

He got his inspiration from actually being on that bridge.

He knew at that moment he had to tell that story.

OFFICER: This is an unlawful assembly.

You're ordered to disperse, go home, or go to your church.

I've got nothing further to say to you.

(shouting) JUDY RICHARDSON: There are a lot of similarities between the civil rights movement but one of those similarities is that we didn't know whether we were going to make it.

I mean, we never had enough money.

It took ten years, ten years for Henry to raise the money for this, and it was a struggle.

You can imagine raising money for a controversial idea that dealt with some of the sorest problems of the United States of America.

"Eyes" started with only about 20-30 percent because Henry realized if the project was not begun, it may never be finished.

Fundraising continued all the time that production went on.

It was terrifying.

NARRATOR: With partial funding in hand, Hampton green-lit six episodes covering the civil rights years from 1955 to 1964 and introducing viewers to the unsung heroes of the time.

♪ We're marching up to Zion ♪ We're marching up to Zion... ♪ Henry understood in his heart that it had to be not only about the greatness of Dr. King and people like Rosa Parks, but also all of those local leaders.

So a lot of what "Eyes" is about is that local leadership and all those local movements.

And that's typified by a piece in the earliest program with Jo Ann Robinson.

She mimeographed 35,000 copies of the Montgomery Boycott memo.

JO ANN ROBINSON: I called every person who was in every school and every place where we had planned to be at that house, somebody at that school, or wherever it was, at a certain time, that I would be there with materials for them to disseminate.

I didn't go to bed that night.

I cut those stencils, I ran out 35,000 copies.

MICHAEL AMBROSINO: An entire revolution was happening in that city.

They were organized.

It was the people's Montgomery Bus Boycott.

We tried to honor that fact, that ordinary people drove this movement.

NARRATOR: Hampton also knew he had to make it clear this was not just an African American story, it was the story of all Americans.

So I asked the Mayor, "First of all, Mayor West, do you feel that it's wrong "to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of his race or color?"

I could not agree that it was morally right for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service.

NARRATOR: He underlined that from the moment he started hiring staff.

BARBARA HOWARD: The producers by design were always black, white, male, female.

So there was intentional tension built in by Henry Hampton.

NARRATOR: The producers brought their own very different perspectives to the production as they wrestled with what to put in, what to leave out.

And so we'd have these knock 'em down discussions sometimes, around the ping pong table.

And we had terrible fights about how to tell stories and how to get to where we all wanted to get to.

I remember a really bitter fight about how to tell the Emmett Till story.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I found out about it 9:30 Sunday morning.

I was in bed.

I got up, called my mother, and I got the news.

SMITH: Eventually we won, but not without having to go through the exercise of recutting that story.

The entire story.

NARRATOR: Even the narrator of the show, Julian Bond, was more than just a voice.

RICHARDSON: What was great about Julian Bond as the narrator is that he himself had been grounded in the civil rights movement.

So it's not like he's a narrator, he's a regular voiceover talent, although he's brilliant at it.

It was also that he brings that sensitivity of what that movement meant, and that carries through to all of his narration, I think.

NARRATOR: As the film team struggled with painful and emotional stories, Hampton struggled with raising the needed funds.

It was a high-wire act all the way through, but in 1988, it paid off with significant awards and reviews touting the series as prized television.

With the success of these six films, Blackside moved to produce eight more.

Go down to your homes and protect your own properties.

That's the best thing you can do.

NARRATOR: Hampton wanted to zero in on some even tougher stories of America at the racial crossroads, 1965 through 1985.

One of the films I produced and directed really dealt with the birth of the Panther Party in 1966.

MAN: Am I under arrest?

Take your hands off me if I'm not under arrest!

MASSIAH: Which is also about the black community and policing, and that's how it begins, but it also becomes much, much bigger in terms of what the Panthers were.

MAN: Black Panthers preach, every day, hate.

"Kill whitey, kill the police, kill the pigs."

Hate, hate, hate-- that's all you hear from them.

We don't hate nobody because of their color.

We hate oppression.

We hate murder of black people in our communities.

"Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More," that was my show.

Cassius Clay is a name no more, is that right?

Yes sir, it's Muhammad Ali.

And that was going to be about Muhammad Ali, who refused to go into Vietnam.

ALI: The real enemies of my people are right here, not in Vietnam.

POLLARD: It was the times, the '60s, you know, it was the emotion of the Black Power struggle.

The Black Power movement was at full throttle.

We look at Miss World, we see white, we look at Miss Universe, we see white.

Even Tarzan, the king of the jungle in black Africa, he's white.

And I knew that history, I really knew that history well.

For me to work on "Eyes," it was like, "Wow!

This is like a religious experience."

That's seriously how I took it.

NARRATOR: Together, the images in these 14 films, the images of protest, passion and people moving forward...

I hereby declare my candidacy for mayor of Chicago.

NARRATOR: ...had an important impact on viewers and on the nation.

I was 14 years old when I first saw Eyes on the Prize, and my mom had been active with SNCC, my father had been active with CORE.

My grandparents had been active in the NAACP, as my mom also was when she was young.

And so it added images.

It added context.

It affirmed that their stories were important.

VECCHIONE: The stories in Eyes on the Prize are the roots, the basis of today's questions around race and American society.

And that was true when we were making the films, and it's true today.

One thing that "Eyes" did, both part one and part two, was it put people's feet to the fire and said, "Look at these stories."

And they're stories that are still here today that resonate from back in Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, the segregation in the '30s, the civil rights struggles in the '50s and '60s, they resonate today.

In some ways, that's tragic, but that's the reality of America.

JEALOUS: I'm raising really young children, and the world they've inherited is not the one that I wanted them to inherit.

Voting rights are under attack, police brutality is a real problem, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to believe in the American system.

No, no, never again.

(chanting) KEVIN POWELL: You still have segregation across this country.

You see communities where people are just isolated.

I live in Brooklyn, New York, which is one of the most diverse communities in America-- over 100 different ethnic groups, 70 different neighborhoods-- but I can take you to places where people have never left their neighborhoods, and they just are there and they're isolated and it's almost as if it was 1955 all over again.

In many ways, we've gone backwards.

In certain things, like housing, we've never really made that much progress in the first place.

Every time Negroes went in, the real estate agent said, "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have anything listed.

Now you can find something somewhere else," and it was always back in the ghetto.

But they didn't have anything.

And then soon after that, we sent some of our fine white staff members into those same real estate offices, and the minute the white persons got in, they opened the book, "Oh yes, we have several things.

Now what exactly do you want?"

Housing is civil rights made personal.

If you look at schools, schools are tied to housing.

The types of jobs that are available in your community are tied to housing.

The types of services in your community are tied to housing, whether you have great parks or not, all of these things are tied to housing.

Until we break up housing segregation and make housing more equitable, I think we're never going to get as far as we have promised our citizens in terms of equality.

The question is whether or not there's been progress made in the field of education.

The answer is that it's extremely complicated, right?

It's yes and no.

It is a sad reality that in too many communities throughout this country, a child's access to opportunity is predicted by genetic code or ZIP code.

If you provide me with a map and a few data points, I can predict almost with fidelity whether or not a child will be placed on a birth-to-prison pipeline or a cradle-to-career pipeline.

NARRATOR: Education, police brutality, voting rights, jobs, and the right to a good life-- all stories in Eyes on the Prize.

You see the issues that are persistent today.

So when you see that Miami section... Get your hands up?

Y'all gonna put me in jail?

We want justice!

We want justice!

RICHARDSON: ...you're gonna resonate with Ferguson, you gonna resonate with Baltimore, all of the police brutality.

And you see the whole issue of economic disparities.

You see Dr. King in footage in Eyes on the Prize in a church in Memphis at a mass meeting talking about, "What we now need is a radical redistribution of economic power."

And it didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters.

It didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote.

But now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.

RICHARDSON: And he says that in Eyes on the Prize.

So the point is, you see all of the issues that we're dealing with today.

While the U.S. economy's on somewhat of a recovery, in Black America, the economic recovery has yet to take hold.

And so when we talk about wealth gaps, it disproportionately impacts a certain group of people: black and brown people, Hispanic and African American.

It disproportionately impacts women when you talk about a wealth gap.

It disproportionately impacts people who live in either extraordinarily urban centers or extraordinarily rural centers.

What gives me hope in this moment when it comes to a tough issue like police violence-- all these young men are being killed-- is that the young activists have really struck something.

The Black Lives Matter movement struck something, which I think they've found the strategy that will ultimately end police brutality.

Go home, killer cops!

We don't want no killer cops!

JEALOUS: The battle to end police brutality will succeed very much the way that the anti-lynching movement succeeded, which is through shaming the country jurisdiction by jurisdiction out of the process.

There are some who are outside of our community who try to create this narrative that the civil rights struggle is over.

But we recognize as activists today that it is a civil rights struggle, and it was a social justice struggle even at that time.

But you know, where it used to be Black Power, now it's Black Lives Matter.

♪ I go hard every day I wake up... ♪ ♪ OFFICER: Ma'am, come down from the pole.

(car horn honks) I was about 13 when I first saw Eyes on the Prize.

It made a really profound impact on me to see the role that young people played, people who are saying, "We are not waiting any longer.

We refuse to live the way that our parents did."

They really were the impetus behind a lot of what happened, so I really carried that with me when I was really making the decision to do what I did.

ANNOUNCER: The First Family of the United States of America.

(cheering) The presidential campaign of Barack Obama awoke the spirit of American youth in a way that was similar to what we had seen.

And then the horrors began.

Trayvon Martin happened, Michael Brown happened, and Sandra Bland happened, Renisha McBride happened.

It kept happening.

And Black Lives Matter happened.

PATRISSE CULLORS-BRIGNAC: Black Lives Matter started in July of 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman.

And many of us were disturbed, concerned, angry... What do we want?

Justice!

When do we want it?

Now!

...that George Zimmerman was let off for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Alicia Garza wrote a love note to black people on social media and she closed it off with "black lives matter."

And the moment I saw those three words, I hashtagged them.

OFFICER: Anyone standing in the street is subject to arrest.

DeRAY McKESSON: I'm a protestor.

I began in Ferguson around the death of Mike Brown.

I've been to many other cities across the country amplifying the work of protestors and supporting the work of protestors and using social media as a vehicle to organize and continue this work.

No justice, no peace!

BREE NEWSOME: I always had a certain level of political consciousness, but if I had to point to one particular moment that really kind of took me from being on the sidelines to really putting my body in the streets on a regular basis, it was the Trayvon Martin case.

And I know for me, the Trayvon Martin case was kind of like the Emmett Till of my time.

I pretty much always have been an activist.

I was born with this understanding that life should be fair, but it isn't, and I think that's always been a thing that I come back to.

If you go back in history in the '50s and the '60s, what was happening then was so much more overt, and now it's much more covert.

I'm not necessarily one to just sit back and say, "That's just the way life is."

I think it can be better, but we have to make it better.

NARRATOR: Making it better is what Jonathan Butler intended when he started a hunger strike at the University of Missouri in 2015.

JONATHAN BUTLER: The goal of the hunger strike was simple: to have the UM system president step down so we could have new leadership and usher in a new era of change on campus that can make it not just better for the students who are currently on campus, but for future generations of students, faculty, and staff.

And the love I have for social change runs so deep that I was willing to sacrifice my life for it.

MALLORY: I think what you see happening is that there is a new level of confidence that is being instilled in our young people, and it's such a leaderful movement.

That's a whole different conversation that people don't often like to have, because we've had a few stalwart leaders who I believe have done great things for our communities, and those people have been the faces and the voices, and now you just have leadership popping up all over the country.

When you go out to a protest, you know, you don't know who a protestor is.

It's such a broad group of people.

That's been sort of intentional work across the country.

They told me to go home, back where I came from.

Now the strategy is different because we have cell phones.

We have proof.

(gunshots) HANNAH-JONES: Social media has changed the game.

I think it's changed the movement, because before, mainstream media could choose what it would cover and it could choose to ignore.

It is democratizing the media, so I think that that is what is different about this new burgeoning movement is that there are a lot more voices, there are a lot more platforms.

One of the things that Eric Garner's movement did was make everybody understand the value of a cell phone.

Eric Garner was only believed because that young man videotaped, and him saying 11 times, "I can't breathe."

I can't breathe, I can't breathe.

I can't breathe... TAMIKA MALLORY: Social media has really been able to bridge that gap and be the engine that we go to and turn to to get the information we need and to link up with one another.

There are activists that I'm connected with in other cities that I've never met personally, but we work just as well together.

DAUNASIA YANCY: So it is definitely a diverse movement.

We have tons of folks of all different races who are involved and contributing.

We find ourselves in the middle of the climate change conversation, we find ourselves in the middle of immigration reform, we find ourselves in the middle of all those different movements, and we're about uplifting and working across them.

For us, this is the new human rights movement.

The reason why we want to call it a human rights movement is because that's international in scope.

That allows for us to have a conversation that's beyond U.S. borders.

The message is there's a new generation that has been awakened, and there were people who came before us who were very, very strong.

I guess our courage came out of because we didn't have nothing, that we couldn't lose nothing, but we wanted something for ourselves and for our children, and so we took a chance with our lives.

Instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klansman, I said to the Klansman police that came...

He said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast as I could."

I said, "Officer, you're not me.

"You go back and tell your Klan brethren "if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration."

I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there.

And so we now have that.

We're now products of that and we're taking this to the next level.

-What do we want?

-Justice!

-When do we want it?

-Now!

MALLORY: I think we're always gonna deal with there being different tactics and different ideologies for how we should go about fighting in this struggle.

We have to be able to draw on the wisdom of those who came before us in order for us to continue in their legacy and in their path.

Dr. King, I understand, used to call it creative tension.

And out of the tension, we move forward.

LEWIS: My advice to activists: study the lessons of the early civil rights movement.

Before any sit-in, before any march, before any standing at a theater, we prepared ourselves.

Read the literature, watch Eyes on the Prize.

LEWIS (archival): How long can we be patient?

We want our freedom and we want it now.

LEWIS: Never give up, never give in.

You're gonna have a great victory.

There will be some setbacks, there will be some disappointments, but I'm very hopeful, very optimistic that we will get there one day.

NARRATOR: When the series first aired, jobs and freedom were the prize.

So what's the prize today?

The prize now is protecting the freedoms they won and getting the rest, and equality, because the gap economically, the gap educationally, the gap in terms of the criminal justice system is still there.

So we are free in some areas, but not equal.

The prize today is still freedom.

Can I sleep at night when my 25-year-old son is driving across country in a family car, or my 23-year-old is out just a little later than she said she would be?

Can I trust that when they come into contact with people who we regard in positions of authority, can I trust that they're gonna come home okay?

Can my humanity be respected if I'm a person of color?

If I'm a woman, if I'm a gay brother or sister, whatever I am, can I be respected for who I am?

That's what Eyes on the Prize taught us: this is a journey, and you're going to pick up small victories along the way, but you never stop, because that big prize is that we all really are equals.

♪ I go hard every day I wake up ♪ ♪ I guess it just wouldn't be the same ♪ ♪ 'Cause I go hard ♪ Somehow, I got to make a wave ♪ ♪ Hurry, before I go insane ♪ 'Cause I go hard ♪ See, I'm just trying to make it out ♪ ♪ 'Cause I go hard ♪ See, I'm just trying to make it out ♪ ♪ 'Cause I go hard.

Funding for this special presentation of Eyes on the Prize was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation.