Eyes on the Prize: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985 was the follow-up to the acclaimed original six episodes of Eyes on The Prize. Eyes I was a phenomenal success for PBS when it was first broadcast in 1987. Over 20 million people (almost a tenth of the American populace at the time) watched its initial broadcast. Repeats in following years matched those numbers. The series would go on to receive numerous Emmy and Peabody awards. An episode would even receive an Oscar nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Tens of thousands of schools and colleges purchased the program on VHS for use in the classroom. And it was distributed to fifteen countries including England, Australia, Germany, Japan, and Finland.

Initial planning for a second series began before the first one was even broadcast. Blackside producers wanted to tell the rest of the Civil Rights Movement’s story. The first series concluded with the Selma to Montgomery March and the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. While ending on a high note – nonviolent protests achieving a major landmark in the advancement of democracy in the United States – it was also a cliffhanger, of a sort. What happened to the Freedom Movement after African Americans ended Jim Crow laws? Was America finally the Land of the Free?

Due to the amazing success of Eyes I, Blackside knew that any follow-up would receive a greater level of scrutiny. Simply repeating the approach of the first series would not work for the second. The topics discussed were more controversial than the narrative in the first series. There was no coherent narrative to summarize what happened from 1965 to 1985; no clear heroes and villains that could conclude with a happy ending like the Voting Rights Act. The multiracial movement of Dr. King’s and SNCC splintered into more provocative and isolationist Black Power groups. African American communities in major urban areas erupted in uprisings. Law enforcement violently suppressed and assassinated Black revolutionaries.

Additionally, the histories covered in Eyes II were closer to the lived reality of the TV audience in 1990. Historians had not yet fully contextualized the events. Many white viewers, who might have seen themselves on the side of the marchers in Eyes I, could have found themselves agreeing with efforts to push back against affirmative action efforts and quotas in hiring.

Executive producer Henry Hampton himself, who marched in Selma in 1965, was less personally connected to Black Power groups like the Panthers than the protestors who inspired Eyes I. A few activists who advised Blackside on the first series were unhappy with the approach Hampton proposed for the second one and distanced themselves from the program.

Henry Hampton was well aware of the challenges facing Eyes II. He directly addressed the difficulties in telling the era’s controversies in a number of talks and writings. In an undated document entitled “Why a Second Series of Eyes on the Prize,” Hampton argued that the new episodes were needed to bridge the mythic, and by then somewhat sanitized, early days of the Civil Rights Movement – Mrs. Rosa Parks refusing a seat in the back of the bus, the 1963 March on Washington with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech – with the debates about racial justice occurring in 1990. Hampton wanted Eyes II to contextualize the present and revitalize the stories told in Eyes I.

In the same document, Hampton argued the one of the reasons for the ongoing strife between Black and White communities was, as he put it, the “lack of a common historical vocabulary.” Organizations and programs like law enforcement or affirmative action, or the then ongoing trial of the Central Park Five, were viewed very differently between the two. Hampton dearly hoped that Eyes II would provide that shared understanding of past events that would facilitate a common tongue of the present.

For Hampton, Eyes II was the story of America finally having to reckon with the enormity of its racial past. The first series was about how African Americans were finally made citizens with the enfranchisement. The second was about how they could acquire political power and self-determination. As Hampton wrote, America “still has that choice and it needs history [i.e. Eyes II] to make them wisely.”

Framed in that way, while Eyes II is perhaps more controversial than the first series, it is definitely more relevant now in the 2020s. Is America still stuck at its racial crossroads?