Images Of

By Richard Zoglin

The news footage looks like a quaint relic, but not very long ago it had the immediacy of the evening news. Six hundred demonstrators are crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma at the start of a planned march to Montgomery, Alabama's capital. A phalanx of state troopers bars the way. The two lines converge; people fall to the ground, tear gas explodes, billy clubs fly.

The drama in Selma in March 1965 was the culmination of a decade of civil rights activism, a decade chronicled in a remarkable new TV documentary, Eyes on the Prize. The six-week PBS series, produced by Henry Hampton and debuting on Jan. 21 in most cities, uses a mix of historical footage and fresh interviews with participants to recount the major events that followed the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. Names and episodes parade by like battles in a familiar military campaign: Rosa Parks' refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus, nine black students' trying to attend high school in Little Rock, the murder of Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers and the 1963 march on Washington.

Eyes on the Prize is indispensable not just for its lucid treatment of the milestones of the era but for its keen eye on less noted events. A tense encounter between a band of demonstrators and a deputy sheriff on the streets of Selma, for example, turns into an impromptu "debate" between people from different planets: "Do you believe in equal justice?" "I don't believe in equal nothin'!" The narration by Julian Bond is admirably restrained, and - those interviewed (from such movement leaders as John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael to old foes like Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark) look back without sounding either self-righteous or defensive. Except for its evocative use of spirituals and protest songs as a backdrop, the documentary refuses to embellish a story already brimming with drama.

Like World War II, the civil rights struggle of those years has acquired an aura of almost romantic purity. The goals were clear-cut and indisputable, the heroes and villains easy to discern, the achievements tangible and lasting. As the documentary points out, Selma was not just a culmination but the end of an era. Soon to come were the big-city race riots, a more militant strain of student protest and a breakup of the coalition that had driven the campaign for racial equality. Eyes on the Prize recalls the days when the sheer rightness of the cause was enough.