City Lights Books invites you to join the “True South” book discussion on Wednesday, January 25th at 7:00 pm in 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, California.
Henry Hampton’s 1987 landmark multipart television series, Eyes on the Prize, an eloquent, plainspoken chronicle of the civil rights movement, is now the classic narrative of that history.
Before Hampton, the movement’s history had been written or filmed by whites and weighted heavily toward Dr. King’s telegenic leadership. Eyes told the story from the point of view of ordinary people inside the civil rights movement—the “fan ladies” and “ordinary world parishioners,” mostly African American.
Hampton shifted the focus from victimization to strength, from white saviors to black courage. He recovered and permanently fixed the images we now all remember (but had been lost at the time)—Selma and Montgomery, pickets and fire hoses, ballot boxes and mass meetings.
