Standing on the Promises

Perhaps the most dangerous thing for America's rulers over the years has been the existence of people audacious enough to believe in America's promises. More than 200 years ago, Mr. Jefferson wrote the declaration promising a land of liberty and equality. And for two centuries those words have haunted America's powerful (Jefferson included) as successive generations of workers, women, blacks, native people, and immigrants have risen up to claim them. Until now the fact that those promises have been honored mostly in the breach has done little to dilute their emotional power.

The lingering power of America's promises is one of the lessons that emerges most clearly from the six-part public television series Eyes on the Prize, which aired nationally in 1987. With the title drawn from a favorite civil rights movement spiritual and subtitled America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, the series presents the most thorough film chronicle yet of the most important people's movement of post-war America.

One could say of the series that it had been a long time coming; it shouldn't have taken 21 years for such a cultural landmark to be erected. But you could also say that it's right on time. Our current rulers consider racism a purely private issue and define discrimination as what happens to white males under affirmative action. They wrap the flag of freedom around a foreign policy of terrorism against inconvenient brown and black people. And anyone who dares to stand against the tide is automatically anti-American.

In such a sinister context, this video history dares to remind us that the struggle to right America's wrongs and fulfill this land's democratic promise is in fact the very soul of patriotism. In telling the civil rights story, the producers bring home again and again that it was not just a black struggle, or a special interest cause, as the current wisdom would have it.

Instead the civil rights movement was genuinely a battle for the soul of the nation in which all Americans had a stake. And that's not a subtle new patriotism concession to the 1980s. That was the way black people deliberately and self-consciously cast their struggle in those years. In the best tradition of nonviolent strategy, they pressed their case not by threats or displays of alienation, but by an honest appeal to the best in the country's professed ideals.

Eyes on the Prize is also right on time because a generation has come to adulthood without knowing the pain and glory of America's civil rights years. The slogan "All are free or none are," seen on a Nashville picket sign in the series, may strike a strange but much needed chord for this generation raised on the notion of America as a Social Darwinist jungle. And the freedom movement's beloved community of nonviolent warriors makes it plain that the Rambos of the world have no monopoly on courage. In fact, throughout the six hours of Eyes on the Prize, we meet a steady parade of women, children, and men whose intestinal fortitude makes Sylvester Stallone look like a wimp.

It was the courage with which black Americans and whites of conscience pressed the cause that eventually moved the nation. In this series we see that nonviolent bravery in action against the Alabama troops of Sheriff Bull Connor in Birmingham and Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma. And we are reminded explicitly that those people found the courage to claim America's promises because they were also, as the Baptist hymnal has it, "Standing on the promises of Christ our King."

Dr. King and others recognized that the nonviolent tactics of Gandhi were, in fact, largely a 20th-century political application of the Jesus way. By bringing the two together, the freedom movement tapped the power of black Christian faith, a faith that did in fact move mountains.

EYES ON THE PRIZE also shows us that the movement's spiritual foundation and moral appeal did not preclude some sharp political strategizing. There were not nearly as many mystical coincidences as the casual reader of the period's history might think. The timing of campaigns and the selection of pressure points was carefully thought out to maximize the movement's impact. The leaders didn't just ask, "Is it right?" They also asked, "Can we win?"

But still, the movement's strategizing marched to the different drummer of moral imperative. They often chose the toughest strongholds of racism (Birmingham in 1963 and Mississippi in '64, for instance) rather than places more amenable to compromise, and they sometimes made apparently unattainable demands. The first calculation, it seems, was to trust the righteousness of the cause.

In Eyes on the Prize, we see that all of those elements--the appeal to American ideals, the faith foundation, and a conscious nonviolent political strategy--were present from the movement's very beginnings with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, a close friend and associate of King, recalls that the first act at the boycott's first mass meeting was to sing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." We hear a crude tape recording of King's maiden speech as a political leader. He begins with the words "We the disinherited of this land..." and concludes, "If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God himself is wrong."

We also hear Rufus Lewis, a leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, summing up the politics of nonviolence: "Rattlesnakes don't commit suicide. And ball teams don't strike themselves out. You've got to put them out." And we hear Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Council describing the taste of victory, saying, "If you've known what it is to feel like an alien in your own land...and then to finally feel that it's your country too, then you just know that America is a great country and it's worth doing everything we can to make it greater."

Later we see Rev. C.T. Vivian, visibly aware of the on-looking news camera, challenging a police officer with the words, "I'm ready to be beaten for democracy, while you make a mockery of democracy in these streets." And we see a teenager, Jimmy Webb, leading a group of youths on a march to the Selma courthouse. When the group is stopped, Webb politely informs Sheriff Jim Clark, "We are going to the courthouse to pray." When the sheriff suggests their prayers would be more appropriate in church, the youth replies, "Wherever there is evil there is a need for prayer." After a few more minutes of dialogue, Webb asks the sheriff, "Would you like to pray with me right now?" The apostle Paul himself never heaped such burning coals of nonviolence on an adversary's head.

WITH ACCESS TO miles and miles of news footage, much of it never aired before, the people at Blackside Inc., the Boston-based, black-owned media firm that produced the series, have shaped a comprehensive tapestry of America's first media-wise movement. The production team also drew on the wisdom of a number of historians and movement veterans (including Sojourners contributing editor Vincent Harding) in shaping the presentation.

They bring us the voices of the ordinary, unknown women and men who briefly became heroes, as well as the movement's more famous names such as Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, and narrator Julian Bond. And we get glimpses of the internal political conflicts that at the time were wisely concealed behind a united public front. Those were mostly between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and involved issues of hierarchy vs. democracy, charismatic leadership vs. grassroots organizing, and collaboration with the federal government. Ironically, by 1966 SNCC was splintered and largely spent, while King was beginning to adopt many of his young friends' more "radical" positions.

The years covered by the series coincide with the Supreme Court school desegregation decision at one end and the passage of the Voting Rights Act at the other. In the wake of the 1965 Selma marches, President Lyndon Johnson concluded a televised civil rights speech with the movement slogan "We shall overcome." Victory was at hand. But on a note of somber realism, the last item in the series' chronology is the Watts riot.

Civil rights didn't bring the human right to jobs and justice, and the struggle continued on new and more treacherous terrain. Henry Hampton of Blackside hopes to raise money for a sequel series that will carry the story through the Poor People's Campaign, welfare rights struggles, the rise and swift suppression of the Black Panther Party, and onward to the era of black mayors, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Rainbow Coalition.

The airing of Eyes on the Prize is accompanied by the publication of a 320-page book of the same title with 172 photos and text by Washington Post correspondent Juan Williams (Viking Press).

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.