True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement by Jon Else (review)

Jon Else's True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement offers three intertwined histories. A producer and cinematographer on Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (1987–1990), a documentary series that charts the history of the black freedom struggle, Else illuminates the ambitions, limitations, processes, and personalities involved in creating the first six episodes of the series. Else, a close friend of and collaborator with Henry Hampton, founder of Blackside, Incorporated and creator of Eyes on the Prize, offers a portrait of Hampton as a fighter for racial justice in his own right. Hampton produced the signature documentary series on the civil rights movement, and his company, Blackside, was committed to employing African Americans in significant positions behind and in front of the camera. Having been a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Else also provides a firsthand account of the everyday lives of activists working for racial justice in the first half of the 1960s.

True South is a loosely chronological narrative that begins with Hampton's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, and ends with his tragic death from complications related to lung cancer in 1998. While Else reminds his readers that the final decisions on Eyes on the Prize were ultimately Hampton's, the book importantly details the work of producers and crew members who conducted the interviews, tracked down archival footage, battled over how to organize material, and painstakingly edited and re-edited individual episodes.

Throughout his narrative, Else draws comparisons between the filmmakers and the activists whose struggles the films would chart. In so doing, he underscores not only the material and psychological costs to Hampton's crew—compensation was erratic and work schedules were punishing—but also how the political work of the films was comparable to that of the civil rights movement. By privileging the voices of participants rather than experts, by refusing Manichean binaries and embracing the complexities of civil rights activism, and by emphasizing the triumphant battles against injustice waged by ordinary people, Eyes on the Prize affirmed the possibilities of participatory democracy and the power of protest to effect social change.

Else primarily worked on the first six episodes on Eyes on the Prize, which cover key battles in the southern civil rights campaigns. He was an adviser to Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965–1985, the final eight episodes of the series, but was not as involved in their production. As a result, Eyes on the Prize II—which covers topics such as Black Power, black nationalism, urban rebellions, and affirmative action—receives substantially less attention in his narrative; True South capably covers the main themes of these episodes and includes a few colorful anecdotes about their production, but its treatment of them is cursory. While this emphasis on Eyes on the Prize's first six episodes is congruent with most of the scholarship on the series, it unfortunately replicates the prominence accorded the temporal and spatial borders of popular civil rights history—the South between 1954 and 1965—that historians of the black freedom struggle have long sought to dislodge.

While there is a prodigious literature that explores how the black freedom struggle is remembered in sites of popular history, few texts offer an as analogously detailed account of how and why these sites were created as Else's True South. His account of the making of Eyes on the Prize underscores the myriad possibilities and constraints—such as financing struggles, copyright concerns, and failed interviews—involved in producing the series. In emphasizing the labor of the crew who assembled the series with Hampton, True South furthers the political project...