Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015

Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.

The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:

• Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
• Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
• How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
• The Million Man March in 1995.
• The environmental movement (1982-2011)
• “The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways.”
• The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
• The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.

In a review for the Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg writes:

Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.

The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.

In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says “nothing you could watch this week is better”.

• Eyes on the Prize
• politics
• racism
• trailers
• TV
• USA
• video