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![True South](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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True South
Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement
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- €4.49
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
“[TRUE SOUTH] does several things at once. On one level, it’s a biography . . . On another, it’s a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement . . . A warm and intelligent book.”—The New York Times
“No one is better suited to write this moving account of perhaps the greatest American documentary series ever made. . . . [Else] tells the story with the compassion and eloquence it deserves.”—Adam Hochschild, author of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, BURY THE CHAINS, and TO END ALL WARS
The inside story of Eyes on the Prize, one of the most important and influential TV shows in history. Published on the 30th anniversary of the initial broadcast, which reached 100 million viewers.
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 on the Prize told the story from the point of view of ordinary people inside the civil rights movement. 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.
Jon Else was Hampton’s series producer and his moving book focuses on the tumultuous eighteen months in 1985 and 1986 when Eyes on the Prize was finally created. It’s a point where many wires cross: the new telling of African American history, the complex mechanics of documentary making, the rise of social justice film, and the politics of television. And because Else, like Hampton and many of the key staffers, was himself a veteran of the movement, his book braids together battle tales from their own experiences as civil rights workers in the south in the 1960s.
Hampton was not afraid to show the movement’s raw realities: conflicts between secular and religious leaders, the shift toward black power and armed black resistance in the face of savage white violence. It is all on the screen, and the fight to get it all into the films was at times as ferocious as the history being depicted. Henry Hampton utterly changed the way social history is told, taught, and remembered today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Else, an accomplished documentarian, chronicles the making of the 1987 TV civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, created by Henry Hampton, in this ambitious, sweeping chronicle. Hampton emerges as a charismatic leader whose vision was inspiring enough to draw in an amazing team despite his scattered management style. Else, a producer on the series, also describes his own time participating in the 1960s civil rights movement as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In recounting how Hampton and his colleagues treated various turning points the murder of Emmett Till in 1954 and of three civil rights workers in 1963; the 1955 1956 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott; the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches; and many more Else finds a new perspective on famous events. In effect, the reader gets to ask the same narrative questions as the documentarians, and feel the same mixture of satisfaction and disappointment when one narrative avenue is chosen over another. Footage isn't unavailable or is mislabeled; eyewitnesses die or exaggerate or don't want to speak at all. Doubtless there were struggles in Prize's making that Else doesn't cover, but his account feels thorough and important as a part of both social and documentary film history.