| Eyes On The Prize |
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| history of african-american civil rights | |
| documentary television series | |
| historical television series | |
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The series has been hailed as more than just a historical document. Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University history professor and editor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers, remarked that "it is the principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century." Because of its extensive use of Primary Sources and the depth of coverage of the material, it has been adopted as a key reference and record of the civil rights movement. It has also seen extensive use in schools and other educational settings as a way to convey the experiences and history of that period in the struggle for civil rights. By the mid-1990s, it was unavailable on video or TV, due to limits on the licenses of the Copyrights of the archival footage used. While Hampton's sisters were seeking funding to re-secure the rights to further use of that footage, the only legal means available for accessing the series was through aging and deteriorating video tapes or obsolete laserdiscs. Some agreement must have been reached; on January 14, 2006, PBS announced that it would be airing ''Eyes on the Prize'' in fall of 2006. {Link without Title} CONTROVERSIES Independent of the producers, the organization Downhill Battle initiated the "Eyes on the Screen" project, along with civil rights activist Lawrence Guyot , in January of 2005 to encourage the use of File Sharing Networks such as BitTorrent to distribute the film - without regard for copyright restrictions. They also called for people to display the film, particularly on February 8 - during Black History Month . Others took exception to Downhill's use of the series as a tool in the cause of challenging existing copyright law Some affiliated with the production of the series (particularly producer Henry Hampton's family) have objected that a series about the civil rights movement had now been repositioned as an icon of the Copyright Reform movement[http://www.sharp-tools.net/archives/000192.html . They pointed out that widespread distribution of illegal copies would make investors and donors less interested in funding a public re-release. As a result, soon after their campaign began, Downhill Battle removed their BitTorrent links and issued a statement asking that all digital and illegal copies of the series be destroyed. They expressed the hope "that our efforts have not interfered with Blackside's efforts" to bring back the series to the public. The Download Battle campaign instead began to emphasize the promotion of public screening of the series in each state. Meanwhile, the Eyes on the Screen campaign had been endorsed by groups such as the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, who wrote: "Therefore, in the spirit of the Southern Freedom Movement, we who once defied the laws and customs that denied people of color their human rights and dignity, we whose faces are seen in "Eyes on the Prize," we who helped produce it, tonight defy the media giants who have buried our story in their vaults by publicly sharing episodes of this forbidden knowledge with all who wish to see it." [http://downhillbattle.org/eyes/bavcrm.php TOPICS COVERED The topics covered in the episodes of the series: Part 1
.... Part 2
Part 4
EPISODES Part 1: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1964
Part 2: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985
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