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Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Award, and a Television Critics Association Award, Eyes on the Prize is one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries on the African American struggle for civil rights in America. Derived from the song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” the 14-hour documentary series narrates the story of the modern civil rights era by giving voice to the everyday people whose exceptional actions launched one of the nation’s most important social movements of the twentieth century. It conveys the struggle to end more than fifty years of racial discrimination and segregation. Eyes on the Prize is the story of the people—adults and children, men and women, northern and southern, black and white—who out of a sense of justice were obligated to right America’s civil wrongs sanctioned by both law and custom. They worked to eliminate a society that racially restricted African Americans from cradle to the grave.

Narrated by Julian Bond, the documentary aired in two parts. Using first-person accounts and historical film footage, part one, which is six hours long, originally aired early in 1987 on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), which covered The Awakening (1954–1956), Fighting Back (1957–1962), Ain’t Afraid of Your Jails (1960–1961), No Easy Walk (1961–1963), Mississippi: Is This America? (1963–1964), Bridge to Freedom (1965), and The Time Has Come, (1964–1966). The remaining eight hours aired in 1990 as Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads (1965–1985), which covered Two Societies (1965–1968), Power! (1966–1968), The Promised Land (1967–1968), Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More (1964–1972), A Nation of Law? (1968–1971), Keys to the Kingdom (1974–1980), and Back to the Movement (1979–mid-1980s). Henry Hampton (1940–1998), the founder of documentary film company Blackside (est. 1968), produced the series.

The series generated three books by noted journalists and historians. Juan Williams, an Emmy Award-winning radio and television correspondent, wrote Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965, published by Penguin Books in 1988, which serves as the series companion volume. In 1990, Bantam Books published Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, and in 1991, Penguin Books published The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954–1990, for which Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine served as general editors.

Linda T. Wynn

During slavery, spirituals and work songs provided affirmation and strength in the face of a system meant to debilitate and degrade.