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- Many people are gonna think
they know what this story is about.
But they do not.
- This morning, we look to America's
civil rights struggle of the '60s and late '50s.
Sadly, it's now estimated that one
if not two generations of Americans
are too young to have direct recollection
of those years.
Now, thankfully, the years are dramatically reconstructed
in a six-part documentary series
which begins on PBS next week.
It's called "Eyes on the Prize."
Henry Hampton is executive producer
of the series, and he joins us now
from our newsroom in Burbank.
Good morning. - Good morning, Bryant.
- What is it you wanted to achieve with it?
- Well, I wanted to capture the miracle.
You had an extraordinary group of leaders
who emerged who literally
changed the course of the country's history.
- Camera roll 1032, sound roll 114.
- Mark it.
- Copy that. - Team K.
- The purpose of this series is really to put the cameras
on those unknown individuals, those little-known people
from the backwater counties
of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi
who really made this movement.
- Have you seen the original "Eyes on Prize," Prentis?
- Yeah, of course. - Okay.
- I mean, not in a long time, but yes.
- The first time I saw "Eyes"
I must've been a teenager.
My former high school teachers
had all these cassette tapes.
It had such an impact on me.
I don't know if I would be doing what I'm doing now
if it weren't for "Eyes on the Prize,"
if I didn't have representation,
if I didn't have a place to see,
you know, what was possible.
- I always remember being inspired
but very traumatized.
I was traumatized by looking at the water, the dogs,
these people dressed up in this beautiful style
having coffee poured on them, not moving.
I'm just enamored and terrorized
and inspired at the same time.
So it was like this tender rage and this beauty and terror.
- I watched "Eyes on the Prize"
on the south side of Chicago in my community center.
I was like 14, 15.
A bunch of Howard College kids came to talk to us
about their organizing campaigns on campus.
And then we watched "Eyes on the Prize"
for, like, three days.
- "Eyes on the Prize" kept us-- it was like a bridge
that kept us connected to this history long enough
for us to understand how important it was.
- When you really watch it and look closely,
it's like a record of...
- Of just Black brilliance.
Absolute Black brilliance,
and all that
we brought to movement--
our spirit, our love, our strategy,
all of it in there for the record.
- We have gone in our own past...
And in the past of others
to look for alternative visions.
- The archive ain't there to be enclosed in amber.
It ain't there to be
just dusted off every now and again.
It's a tangible, living thing.
And now it's like technology'll put things
in the hands of people that you--
that wasn't supposed to have it,
and now they get to tell the story,
and they get to shift the narrative.
Like, never before could you see
these things happen in real time.
- This country teaches you to forget.
We are supposed to forget. That is America.
If it doesn't run on anything, it runs on forgetting.
You forget what happened to you.
Move on. That is the past, right?
You walk it off, but we must remember.
Remember...
- My first memory of civil rights really revolves
around the story of a 14-year-old boy.
It became-- for many of us,
it was a time that we understood
our vulnerability in this society.
- In the summer of 1955, Emmett Louis Till,
a junior high school student from Chicago,
came down to the Delta to visit his mother's uncle,
Moses Wright.
- When I opened the door, there was a man standing
with a pistol in one hand and flashlight in the other
and wanted to know,
did I have two boys from Chicago.
I told him I did,
and said they wanted the boy that didn't talk.
- It's all yours, Kelly. - Okay.
How did you hear about
the Emmett Till case, Ms. Parks?
- Well, it was on the news.
- Would you start that again? Tell me what was on the news.
Remember, people won't hear my voice.
- Oh, I'm sorry.
The murder of Emmett Till--
I believe he was about 14 years old
who was visiting his relatives.
His home was in Chicago,
and the...
news came that he had been brutally murdered
and put into the river.
His body was removed from the river
after it had been weighted down
and he was so badly mutilated
he was unrecognizable.
- I believe that the whole United States
is mourning with me.
For him to have died a hero
would mean more to me than for him just to have died,
and I hope that his death will certainly start a movement
in these United States to clean up
our own back alleys.
Emmett was not just mine.
He was a universal child.
- I'm never gonna get my son back.
He's never gonna come back.
So I'm gonna use my time and my energy
to help somebody else's son,
to make a difference in somebody else's life.
- I believed in all of the stories of America.
You know, I thought I could be the exceptional one.
And very quickly over those years,
those Obama years specifically,
I think, for a lot of us, the veneer of what the U.S.
has told us we could be and what we could do snapped.
- When Trayvon happened, it echoed to Emmett Till,
but it also echoed to the people in my own life
whose names we all didn't get to know.
- This exists.
The country, no matter who is the leader of the country,
the steward of the empire, it's gonna remain the same,
gonna be recalcitrant,
gonna be evil, gonna murder.
- For them, I feel committed
to creating new possibilities for us.
That feels like the honoring. That feels like the listening.
Understanding what's created it
and making it less possible each time
for that to happen to any more of us.
That that is how
we create a monument for them.
- What kind of impact
did his death have on you personally?
- Well, just like any person murdered,
I couldn't be any way than...
Very upset,
very...devastated
by the...
fact that in...
The United States of America,
that a child could be
just taken out and killed.
- Listen to me!
They'll pretend
that I'm crazy!
Let me tell you something right here.
Listen to me!
- So you go ahead and vote. So what?
- How you gonna tell me to love
this property that has flaunted me every day?
- Anger inside me night
after night!
- I wanna get your-your-your feelings-feelings
specifically towards white people at that time.
- At the time he was killed? - Mm-hmm.
- When Medgar was felled by that shot,
and I rushed out and saw him lying there,
and people from the neighborhood
began to gather,
there were also some whose color
happened to have been white.
I don't think I have ever
hated as much in my life
as I did at that particular moment
with anyone who had white skin.
I screamed at the neighbors,
and when the police finally got there,
I told them that they had killed Medgar,
and I can recall wanting so much to have
a machine gun or something in my hands
and just stand there and mow them all down.
I was just--
I can't explain the depth
of my hatred at that point.
- On the day that Medgar was--funeral.
I mean, there was violence.
I mean, there was no way to predict it.
There was a different element, the people
who had never participated in the movement before.
The police department and others came there.
They actually antagonized the people.
They were there in full battalion gear
with the riot armor on and guns,
and they were being pretty rough
with the people on the street.
And the people just said, "We're not going to take that.
"This is a funeral of our leader.
"And here they are, you know, harassing us,
and the white folk killed him."
Don't shoot! Hands up!
Don't shoot!
We're still here!
- When I think about...
The times I have felt ancestral rage,
it has been in moments
where Black dignity was stripped away.
I remember everything about August 9th--
where I was, what I wore.
I understood the interaction.
Police officer stops Black person.
Harasses them. I understood that.
Every Black person in St. Louis understood that.
What I didn't understand
was how that stop
turned into Mike Brown being killed.
- Your child's in my heart. - Thank you.
- And when I went, and I saw...
I saw all these Black people holding space.
I knew what that was, right?
This, like--this mourning, this public funeral,
this grieving out loud.
And then I saw police come in to attack that.
Black mourning out loud was a threat,
and they reacted as if though it was a threat.
Black people being together in public was a threat.
To try to suppress our mourning,
I had a visceral response to that,
that there are mothers who were crying,
that there were people's children out there,
and they drove down that street,
and they got out those cars,
and they had these dogs,
and they had these aerosol cans of mace.
And I just remember thinking, "This is violence.
"You killed somebody.
"And then you get to come in and tell us
how to mourn what you did?"
- You are in the streets blocking the roadway.
You are unlawfully assembled.
You need to disperse immediately,
or you will be subject to arrest.
Do it now.
- I was mad because Black people couldn't be.
Mike Brown couldn't be,
and then the people who came
to mourn Mike Brown couldn't be.
And that felt deep in my body like something
I had never felt before, that level of anger.
- I think that was the most fearless
I've ever been in my life.
I was so out of body.
It felt like all spirit, all heart.
Those long nights in Ferguson.
The boots, the cop boots,
the baton sticks that they use,
the shields, the weapons.
It's like I have never heard coldness, right?
But...
In that moment, at that time, I did.
It felt and it sounded
just cold.
It just felt dangerous,
and it felt like a loveless place,
and time felt still.
I would be out in Ferguson
from as early as 6:00 p.m.
until about 4:00 in the morning.
No concept of time. I wasn't even on my own time.
It wasn't until one day--
I was doing my rotation at a children's hospital,
and I had to draw up some medication.
And my hands were shaking.
That was the day I went home from clinical...
I made a phone call,
and I said, "I'm dropping out."
If I have to choose,
I have to choose the community.
That's where my heart is at...
And I'm glad I did
because Michael Brown
changed this world...
And the people who fought for him
changed this entire world.
- I believed in all of the stories of America.
It's gonna be recalcitrant, gonna be evil,
gonna murder.
- Makani Themba caused 2020 a rupture.
- Taylor, a 26-year-old former EMT
was shot and killed by police in March.
- Justified in their use of force.
- Have not been fired.
- Protesters demanding swift justice.
- The death of George Floyd.
- And the police officer has not been charged.
- Violence and protests.
- You couldn't situate
the encounter George Floyd had
with those officers
without understanding the larger pandemic
and the economic devastation
Black folks were going through.
You couldn't separate the fact that Breonna Taylor
was a frontline worker
surviving COVID killed by police.
All of that came to a head at that moment.
In the face of a virus
that was literally killing people,
folks felt that it was still important
to be in the street.
So I understood it as a rupture.
That's how I understand it.
- What we're trying to do has never been done
in the history on Earth!
- Our lives matter. Black lives matter.
- Our streets! - Our streets!
- That uprising is so large because everyone was suffering.
- Human life, let it marinate.
So many people have reached out to me
telling me they're sorry
that this happened to my family.
Well, don't be sorry 'cause this has been happening
to my family for a long time.
Emmett Till is my family. Philando, Mike Brown, Sandra.
This has been happening to my family.
- And so by the time George Floyd come around,
I'm not surprised.
- Unarmed. - Unarmed.
- Black teenager.
- 18-year-old.
- 26-year-old. - 17.
- African American man. - Chicago woman.
- Shot and killed by police.
- Having any kind of conversation around this
with anybody that ain't Black is a chore in itself.
- This is nothing new. I'm not sad.
I'm not sorry. I'm angry.
And I'm tired. I haven't cried one time.
I stopped crying years ago.
I am numb.
I have been watching police murder people
that look like me for years.
- The dream of Black people in the United States
necessitates the destruction of this country
from its roots.
- They don't give two damns about us,
and a lot of us always turn around
worrying about what's good for America, what's good--
later for America. What's good for Black people?
- We must arm ourselves, that we are in imminent danger.
- Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?
- Why don't you place him under arrest?
- Liberation is not about being killed.
We are not interested in those suicides.
- We must continue to push for all of our demands.
- We want a new life. - All power to the people.
- We want a life that we remember vaguely
sometimes in the back of our heads
as a liberated African people.
- I think it's generally agreed
that if we are to solve our problems,
we've got to transform our powerlessness
into causative and creative power.
- Then you talk about Black power.
I wanna know what's wrong with it.
- We believe that Black power
is not only legitimate,
it is necessary because we feel it.
- We want Black power. - Black power!
- We want Black power.
We want Black power! We want Black power!
- A lot of people call a revolution
a confrontation.
Really what you and I meant by revolution
was a need to revolve more political power
and economic power back into the hands of the people.
That's really what revolution is.
- Power is always being used
against us, right?
Power has been used
as a force to oppress us,
and so we naturally grow up feeling like power
is inherently negative and bad, but power is neutral, right?
Power can absolutely be shared. Power can be broken up.
Power can be used. Power should not be hidden.
Power should be discussed and talked about.
And when Black people have power,
we have the opportunity to show what life looks like
when people use their power
for the betterment of other people.
- What the Black Panther Party has done and was able to do
and where they emphasized their work or effort,
you know, absolutely hitting the streets,
absolutely talking to people, and they're also organizing
but also caring for their communities too.
- The idea was obviously twofold
for the specific purpose of serving those people
who were directly benefited by our programs,
but also secondarily to influence
the minds of people to understand
not only that the Black Panther Party
was providing them this, but more importantly,
that if they could get food,
that maybe they would want clothing,
and maybe they want housing, and maybe they'd want land,
and maybe they would ultimately
want some abstract thing called freedom.
- Power is who gets to set the choices,
who gets to set the options.
I want Black people to have more choices.
I want them to define what those choices are,
not just respond to what
has been given to them as the options.
- Affirmative action is not reverse discrimination.
It is rather the recognition of the fact
that, for over 200 years,
Black persons in these United States of America
have been excluded
from the economic, social, and political milieu
of this great country.
- We got to be in every arena
where they have power.
We got to be willing to go contest for it.
- Tonight we show the world
that working people are united.
- We want teachers who understand our community.
- We will not compromise on any term.
- We are reclaiming this house
from a billion-dollar corporation.
- The Black Panther Party talked about the police
as an occupying force in the community,
but we had not really understood the extent
to which the whole criminal justice system,
the police, the courts,
the prison system
is very much intertwined
with the economic oppression
of Black people.
- The carceral system, it's a whole pie, right?
It's a whole thing. It has many slices.
Many different things that come into it.
We got cut somewhere.
We give our permission to cage our folks.
We take the resources from this jail,
our folks will be better off because that money
can go to our people,
and people can go home.
- So when we say "defund the police,"
we mean take their money and invest it in the things
that actually create safe communities.
We mean reimagine public safety.
When we defund the police, we have the capacity
to reimagine public safety and invest those dollars
in what actually makes safe communities.
- When you have power, you have the ability
to make your tomorrows
look like you wanted them to look like.
- I was talking about time.
It's so hard for me to believe in it.
Some things go pass on. Some things just stay.
I used to think it was my rememory.
- Who told you to buy a brownstone
on my block in my neighborhood on my side of the street?
- And our new Miss America
is Vanessa Williams, Miss New York!
- ...This happen just because
you were walking down the street
in a neighborhood where people
thought you didn't belong?
- Stop worrying about integrating
and being accepted and start thinking
about building for yourself, for our people
so that we can provide a future for our children.
- Liftoff.
- If we were up in space, I would be floating around.
- Lift me!
- You've seen these young children.
- What is it, a crime to be Black in this country?
- I felt that I had to tell the truth.
I could not keep silent.
- You know, the end of the '80s, early '90s
was very similar to this moment in history
where there was a lot of uprising,
a lot of, you know, people
who were doing movement work.
- We will picket. We will sit in.
- Corrupt creatures-- - We will march.
- Do you think age
is a problem in your community?
- You will be hunted no matter what you do.
- They said we did not have name.
- Where is the justice?
- Things like this still exist in America.
- I feel like the movement of the '80s and '90s is lost.
I came up in that. There are young people--
I met a young person from Ferguson
who was part of the Ferguson uprising
and stuff who was--beautiful spirit,
but he was telling me like, "We finally got, you know,
people pushing back against police brutality."
And I was like, "Are you--
are you-- what are you talking about?"
- What was happening to me was happening
to virtually everyone whom you could identify
in that community who was of color.
- Today we're willing to get arrested
just so Giuliani knows that we're really serious
and that the police shootings must stop.
- What happened today with Rodney King was unjust.
- Why'd they have to beat the mess out of him like that?
- Movement has to continue or it's not movement.
And so it may be lulls in it, but it never stops.
So many people jump from the '60s to 2013.
Yusef Hawkins,
Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima.
I was in the streets for all of that.
Million Youth March was, like, '98.
That was huge.
We were protesting. We were marching.
We were organizing, but a lot of that is lost.
Guilty, guilty, guilty!
- The documentation of movements,
they're essential.
And...
where would I be without that information?
I may have learned it a little late,
but I needed it.
I needed to know the truth.
What happens when we isolate,
when we single-story a systemic issue?
If we only see
Martin Luther King Jr. for example.
- We are depending on moral and spiritual forces.
using the method of passive resistance.
- If we see him without the administration,
without all the Black women that made it possible,
without Malcolm,
without understanding the story of the nation.
- By any means necessary.
- Sure, I learned about Bayard.
- My point is that all the police,
all the curfews, all the bully clubs,
all the guns will not stop rioting.
- But where were the other queer and trans people?
But the truth is, there were more of us
than I could even know about
because I'm here, and I'm not so unique.
I'm not so special.
- We had to find things, uncover things.
So much was hidden. So much was untold.
So much stuff was not even given a space
to be able to exist, right?
So there are many lost stories,
stories that weren't told at all.
- I do mourn for those stories,
that nuance, those details
that inevitably get lost in time.
- I truly believe from the bottom of my heart
that Black trans women are the architects of resilience.
I think about ancestors like Francis Thompson.
Many of us were taught in schools
that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first woman to testify
before a congressional committee,
but in reality, it was Francis Thompson,
a formerly enslaved Black disabled trans woman.
That testimony about the atrocities
that happened during the Memphis riots
was the reason why the 14th amendment
was ratified, which afforded Black Americans
equal protection under the law.
A Black trans woman's legacy
is forever engraved
in the United States Constitution.
The reason why she was robbed
of her historical acknowledgment
is because years later there started to be rumors
that she was assigned male at birth.
Francis Thompson's story is not an uncommon one.
- Darling, I want my gay rights now.
I think it's about time
the gay brothers and sisters got their rights.
- You know, when I was a kid,
I couldn't see far into the future.
I didn't see myself very far into the future.
There was so much richness, so much joy in my life,
but I grew up queer,
and I didn't know many queer people
who were the age that I am now.
So many people didn't make it that far.
- You need to begin with a movement
which is what Black Power
and the Civil Rights Movement was.
Then immediately within it,
you are going to get those people
whose differences are not being articulated.
- For me, it's a discovery to be this age.
Life or God is out here creating
just so many different ways of being.
What if I looked at the world with reverence
and not control? What would I see?
- Those balls and all that,
that's like our fantasy of being a superstar.
- What if I looked at myself
with curiosity and not control?
- It helps out when somebody else
is there in your corner.
- 'Cause with y'all
vicious mother , it do take nerve.
- And allowed myself to discover myself,
to unfold in front of myself.
That's what my experience as a queer person
is really about.
- I know how you watch as you grow older--literally,
that is not a figure of speech--
the corpses of your brothers
and your sisters pile up around you
and not for anything they have done.
They were too young to have done anything.
In any case, too helpless.
- Also just the wonder of creation, you know,
that I am, that we are.
That's really been the teacher of queerness for me.
- I don't want there to ever be a moment
in which someone else can tell us
what was true for us,
and we not have the proof,
the material,
the documentation to show otherwise.
We know what erasure can do to us.
- What movement does each time and what we are seeing happen
is that we're starting to even tease apart
the things that our movement has not done right, right?
The things that have been unseen that we made unseen.
And the thing that I think about the most
is how this iteration of movement centers
and lifts up the voices of people
who are often silenced in previous moments, right?
That, like, our labor has been unseen.
Our contributions have been unseen.
What does it mean for Black queer women
to be at the forefront of a movement?
What does it mean for trans folks
to be leading in this time?
- Ours didn't really cover women
as strongly as it should have,
you know, but at least we got to see them.
- It is staggering when you look at the history books
and get a sense that this period
was basically males because nothing
could be further than the true.
- Black women were playing extremely important roles.
The Civil Rights Movement would not have been what it was
without the roles of Fannie Lou Hamer
and Daisy Bates and Ella Baker
and Ruby Doris Robinson and Joanne Robinson,
and we can go on and on and on.
- We're not taught about Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker,
Fannie Lou Hamer, right?
And it's not just about the work that they did.
I think it's also who they are as people.
I know who I want to be, and it's informed
by a lot of these Black women
that I've seen, like, in movement spaces.
- When we think about the ways in which Black women
put our bodies on the line, our health on the line,
and our safety on the line for the rights and dignity
that everyone benefits from,
but yet we're the last ones to reap the reward.
- Black women have carried the labor
of cultivating this country and this world
on their shoulders in a particular way,
and a particular experience.
To navigate anti-Blackness, white supremacy,
and then on top of it, navigate patriarchy,
heteronormativity, transphobia,
and all of these other levels of oppression
creates this particular experience.
- I have literally, since 14 years old,
dedicated my life to Black people.
I don't--there's nothing I love more than Black people.
That includes Black men.
I have stood by, worked with, held up,
held down Black men my whole life.
But the minute I talk about violence against Black women,
I suddenly have become the enemy of Black men.
There was this whole uprising around police brutality.
Right? For the last several years,
definitely. This new wave of people
being outraged about police brutality.
What people said to me is this is not the time
for that "me too" stuff. We gotta deal with Black lives.
And I'm incredulous, all right?
I'm like, "So you think, you believe with all your heart
"that Black lives matter,
"and you don't think about the Black lives
that are ruined by sexual violence?"
Black women experience
the second-highest rate of sexual violence
in this country, and a lot of that violence
happens at the hands of Black men.
It's a truth that does not mean that Black men
are bad, immoral, evil,
but it does mean that we have to talk about something.
There's a conversation to be had
internally in our community.
I need somewhere for this truth to live.
This is a truth that Black women are holding.
- Last year... - Okay.
- Do you remember the young woman
Oluwatoyin Salau? - Of course, Toyin, yeah.
I didn't know you was gonna ask about that.
It still makes me emotional.
She was 19, you know?
And she looked like one of my daughter's friends.
- Our lives matter. Black lives matter.
Black trans lives matter. - Yes!
- Trans lives matter!
You cannot take my Blackness
away from me.
My Blackness is not
for your consumption!
It is not!
- There's no way that you should be able to
go to a action...
not have a place to stay,
and sitting on a bus stop on your way
to try to figure out your housing,
be taken and killed.
- That video is haunting.
She's just dancing and laughing
and twerking in the mirror and just being regular
like what she should be--
free and feeling good about herself,
and somebody took that away from her.
She was running from sexual violence
and ended up being vulnerable,
and there's just not enough spaces
for vulnerable Black girls to be safe.
- She loved it so much...
and she deserves to be here.
I see so many Black women in her.
I think about what could have been possible in her life.
Who loved her?
You know, what was important to her?
Was she loved?
Just her power and her dignity.
When she told her story
about what happened to her publicly,
and I think about,
"What if just someone would have listened,
"would've been there, would have intervened
in some kind of way?"
- I don't know if we have solutions--
the necessary solutions to patriarchal violence yet.
I want Black women particularly
to be able to live out their wildest dreams,
and so I hope that we can put more intention
into asking Black women and girls,
"What does it look like to feel safe?
"What would need to happen here for you to feel safe,
and how can we embody that?"
- So many of our girls
don't have a soft place to land.
- Yer. - What?
What is "yer"?
- My dream sacred space
involves a lot of trees around,
to being close to nature and feeling around it.
I would say that my sacred space
will also have my dog Dream 'cause she's like--
- Puppy! - Yes.
She's like-- she gives me--
like, you know, like, when I'm feeling sad
or when I'm, like, depressed and laying in my bed,
like if Dream comes and, like, licks my face or something,
it's like everything to me.
I would want a room that has--
that holds, like, a lot of emotional space for me
to be vulnerable.
And I think for me really to be okay
with being vulnerable and not being like,
"Well, you have to suck it up,"
or "You have to stop" because there's like
all this other stuff going on.
If I didn't have to worry about, like,
all of this other outside stuff,
there would be nothing holding me back,
but I think the fear of, like, not being settled
and not being like--
like it's not, like, necessarily,
I guess, a safe space,
but you know that your ends are gonna meet,
and you're gonna, like-- you're gonna survive.
And I think sometimes we choose survival over safe space.
That's the ultimate goal.
To just, like, be. - Yeah.
- To be, and we've been talking about that all day.
Like, no matter what we're gonna do,
being a Black girl, like,
there's always gonna be something,
and sometimes you just want to be.
- To me, building a home is like having
my own sacred space where I think like, "You're safe.
You're taken care of."
Like, yes, life is difficult,
but you're still growing every single day
and everything is temporary.
- A sacredness is a respect of the divine,
even in places of trauma and terror.
- These children unoffending,
innocent, and beautiful...
Were the victims of one
of the most vicious and tragic crimes
ever perpetrated against humanity.
- 18 days after the March on Washington,
Birmingham, Alabama,
a bomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist church
just before a Sunday morning service.
15 people were injured. Four children were killed.
- They are the martyred heroines
of a holy crusade
for freedom and human dignity.
We must be concerned
not merely about who murdered them,
but about the system, the way of life,
the philosophy which produced the murderers.
- Good night, sweet princesses.
- May the flight of angels
take thee to thy eternal rest.
- Places like Ferguson and Baltimore
where these uprisings took place
after these state-sanctioned killings
are hallow ground, right?
And so seven years almost after Mike Brown is killed,
I can't go on Canfield Drive
and not feel immense energy,
like, coming from the concrete.
- A sacredness is a respect of the divine,
even in places of trauma and terror,
that there's this idea and understanding
that there is something more to this,
that there is a spiritual dimension,
that there's always something happening
behind the scenes that we can't see.
I also I wanna uplift that
anywhere where Black people are
is a sacred space. You know?
- What then is Black
that it should be redefined?
Black is the form of forms,
the womb of infinity
out of which all things come
and to which they in time return.
It contains all things without distinction.
In its deep pitch,
the seed of life begins.
From its dark down comes healing sleep.
To its merciful ink,
consciousness flees pain.
From its infinite reach
comes the light of day.
Black plagued, blacklist,
Black Sunday, black market
notwithstanding.
- Roll 428. Marker.
- And I'm gonna ask you one more time.
You go--all Mississippi people go through,
the violence, the struggles, the...
Why--
why do you stay in Mississippi?
- We put a lot in it.
People like myself was born on this river.
I love the land. It's the Delta.
And to me it's now a challenge. It's history.
It's everything of what Black people is all about.
We came up out of slavery.
And this is where we acted it out,
I suppose, all of the work, all of the hard work,
and all that.
But we put in our blood, sweat, and tears,
and we love the land.
- It's only fitting that--and inevitable
that Vincent Harding would be our first speaker.
He was without doubt
the spiritual father in many ways
of "Eyes" and led us from the very beginning.
- In this period,
I think that the major part
of our experience
has been the search for alternative visions.
And we have gone in our own past...
and in the past of others
to look for those alternative visions.
- If you're only looking at what's in front of you,
you can't look up.
- Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
I existed from the beginning of time.
I just didn't exist in this form.
All the particles and atoms in me
were somewhere.
They just weren't together yet to form me.
And so I've been here.
I have pride that I'm related in some form or fashion
to whatever heritage that I, unfortunately,
I don't know about. I share their blood.
They live inside me in some form or fashion,
and their energy has traveled with me too.
And I feel like they will always continue to guide us.
They will always live in us.
- My dreams are a space of radical imagination.
They are not restricted and confined to a world
in which white supremacy has dominated.
They allow for creativity and exploration.
Sometimes what we are fighting for
is right in front of us.
It's a safe house along the way
to the North Star.
Getting people safe,
improving their conditions gives them opportunity
to think about the North Star because if you're only looking
at what's in front of you, you can't look up.
- If we're gonna talk about a Black dream,
a Black African American dream, a Black diasporic dream,
it has to start at the radical root.
Who are we when we are not the benefactors
of the exploitation of women,
the exploitation of people
in so-called third world nations,
the exploitation of domestic colonies
within the United States?
Who are we when we reach that self-actualization,
that community actualization
where we can just be? Be who we're supposed to be?
- This work is about bringing people
back to their true nature,
to what you were before the terror
of white supremacy,
to what you were before the lies,
the terror of capitalism.
- Healing is the work of getting
other people's stories out of your system,
other people's shame out of your body.
- When I think about how our ancestors lived
and I think about African indigeneity,
in particular,
there wasn't "time." There was space.
There was us. There was place.
There was community. There was sustenance.
And that so much of what we operated by
was based off of the land.
All of us may not be free yet,
but we can create freedom portals,
and we can create these experiences of freedom.
- And we're talking about Black futures.
You can't get to a Black future without Black dreaming.
- Well, you know, the title of the series
is "Eyes on the Prize," and--
- And the prize remains elusive,
the prize being freedom.
- I think the prize remains well-defined
for many Americans, many Black Americans,
many women, many people out of the mainstream.
The prize still remains elusive.
But I think that those of us
who came out of that experience
continue to try and focus on those areas
where total dream of the movement
hasn't been realized.
- If I had a legacy to leave,
there's very little else I could ask of it,
but, of course, I will,
that maybe those countries that haven't seen it will
and maybe it'll be there for generations yet born.
- And then I'm gonna do my last one.
I want to know what the prize is.
- Hm. - You know?
What does that mean to you?
What is the prize that your eyes are on?
- Hmm. Wow.
Ooh, ain't that a question, huh?
- Mary Hooks says that the mandate
for Black people in this time is to honor our ancestors,
earn the respect of future generations,
and to be willing to be transformed
in the service of the work.
That willingness and that transformation
is the prize.
- I don't think I've ever really sat down
and thought what does a world without me,
like, having to fight for something look like.
I don't think we've ever historically
have had just, like, a moment of rest.
- The prize for me is that folks
should have the fundamental necessities
of what it means to be a human being,
that folks can live into their dreams.
- Most people would say the prize is freedom.
And I think we define freedom in different ways,
and think about freedom in different ways,
but, you know, prize is always our liberation.
- Just an equitable society that yields
dignity, safety, and access for all of us.
- The prize is abolition.
The prize is our ability
to determine our own destinies.
- The prize is we win.
And I know you want to ask, "What is winning?"
You know, what is the victory?
I think it's just hundreds of thousands
if not millions of people who are completely transformed
and know who they are, know whose they are.
They love each other.
They feel powerful in the presence of one another.
- Self-determination...
it's...it's...
Creation.
It's becoming all over again.
It's taking everything that has happened
and remaking the world in a new way.
It's Black children
that imagine futures
that I can't conceive of yet.
- Any and every part of my journey
has had ancestral guidance.
- Come on, now, rock with me.