”Freedom isn’t something that’s passed down in your blood. It’s got to be fought for generation after generation,” Phillip Agnew says towards the end of “Eyes on the Prize: We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015,” a follow-up to the landmark 1987 series about the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Agnew wasn’t around during the time of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and barely out of the crib when the electrifying history that Henry Hampton and crew put together initially aired on PBS, but he nonetheless would take away its central lesson that the struggle is never over after becoming an organizer himself out of Chicago as a co-founder of the group Dream Defenders, giving up a steady 9 to 5 when it became obvious that he was living in a country rife with inequality for those with his skin color in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death.
With a new generation of civil rights activists to cover that could surely inspire the next, “Eyes on the Prize: We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015” presents a number of regional movements that have added up to a much larger push for social justice across American society with episodes about communities that have taken matters into their own hands where the system has failed. Opening with “America, Don’t Look Away” directed by Geeta Gandbhir, the series starts out on the East Coast where the Black and brown communities find a path to home ownership in abandoned buildings in the Bronx that they could pay for with “sweat equity” rather than cash, putting their back into restoring them while across the city the AIDS crisis was underway, and across state lines in Pennsylvania, a collective called Bebashi was doing its best to raise awareness for the growing AIDS crisis as the government turned a blind eye. In subsequent episodes, residents of West Virginia and Florida speak up for their safety as their health is threatened by companies eager to operate in areas too poor to have much oversight (Rudy Valdez’s “Spoil the Vine”) and public defenders note how police procedures disproportionally affect the Black community (Samantha Knowles’ “Trapped”) and these, along with more national efforts such as the Million Man March, the subject of its own hour directed by Muta’Ali, and affirmative action (Smriti Mundhra’s “We Don’t See Color”), can be seen to have made a real difference over time.
Asako Gladsjo, who was a series producer on the project after serving similar duties on the Henry Louis Gates-hosted series “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” and “Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise,” handles the the final episode “What Comes After Hope?”, considering how the election of the first Black president in Barack Obama might’ve served as a bit of a smokescreen to the issues the country still has when it comes to race when so many believed it pointed to a post-racial America. As the director traces the march of Agnew and others from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach to where Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida, leading to the local police actually bring charges against his killer, this latest installment of “Eyes on the Prize” demonstrates the power of resistance, even in the most turbulent times, and well as how important it is to reinforce efforts now with how they have worked before, making the ongoing series’ commitment to share this history as far and wide as possible extraordinarily moving.
With not only the entirety of “Eyes on the Prize” unspooling now on Max, but her doc “The Calling: A Medical School Journey” premiering on PBS on March 17th about a group of medical students learning the ropes in the Bronx, it was a particular privilege to get to catch up with Gladsjo recently to talk about where one even starts with such a major undertaking as well as her decision to close out this particular chapter of the series as well as why for as much injustice as it depicts, it also has the capacity to give people hope.
You’ve got a wealth of experience with major undertakings like this, but that “Eyes on the Prize” title carries a tremendous amount of weight. What’s it’s like to take on this responsibility?
It was huge. When I first was contacted by [the series’ executive producer] Dawn Porter, I thought, “Oh no, I’m not up to the task. This is too big a legacy for me to do,” and I was hesitant to take it on. But once I had agreed to do it, it was amazing to be able to carry on this legacy. It was really important also that we worked with people who’d worked on the original series. They became advisors to us and were so helpful throughout the process. They gave notes on the treatment. They had whole meetings with us where we were all in one room and they were coming in on Zoom, and many times they shared their experiences with us and talked about what was important to them. It really was their choice at the end to say “We really feel like this carries on the spirit and you can call it ‘Eyes on the Prize III’” because there was a whole [question] at the beginning, “It’s a continuation, but are we going to call it that?” And they gave us their blessing, which was amazing.
One of the wonderful things I felt was that it really did have the spirit of the original series and yet there’s this focus on more regional stories. How beholden did everyone feel to what came before versus charting your own path?
It was always a back and forth. It was definitely clear to Dawn to bring in six directors with different backgrounds and have us all put out what interested us, what were we passionate about, and what stories did we want to tell? And then to have these conversations with John Ellis and Judy Richardson and Callie Crossley, who had worked at Blackside, and talk about what mattered. We also watched the original series together, and what really felt important to us to continue was this idea of focusing not on the big leaders – the Dr. Kings or the Malcolm Xs – but to really focus on the ordinary people that made change happen. Because those people that were in the original series, like John Lewis and Diane Nash were not household names [at the time the series first aired]. People didn’t know who they were, but they were made known by the series. and what’s really essential to understand about movements, as Reverend [Al] Sharpton says, “Dr. King wasn’t getting on the bus, he wasn’t going and sitting at the lunch counter.” He was the leader that was recognized by the media and everyone [else] saw him as a leader, but he was more of a figurehead and you needed those people who were willing to put their bodies on the line and take the risks to really stand up and resist in their communities, wherever they were. That’s what made change happen. So it was really important to us to keep that approach of really focusing on the ordinary people, the people who were able to make a real difference.
Including yourself, this is a killer lineup of filmmakers. When it forms this cumulative whole, how much input was there in what stories would get told?
People had a lot of choice because we spent a lot of time talking in day-long meetings of what we were passionate about and also what we thought was important to cover in the era. Everyone had the freedom to choose their stories, but then as the series producer, I was overseeing the story and there were so many things that we thought about that we wanted to cover in the series, but there were only six episodes, so we couldn’t have an episode [specifically devoted to] voting rights or medical inequity, or many other topics that we had talked about. In the end, people took the subjects that they were passionate about and I arranged them in a kind of chronological order. The idea was these were all stories that helped us to understand this era where people felt that the civil rights movement was over and the gains had been made, so [they wondered] what were people complaining about? But it was really interesting to look at this era because there were so many pockets of resistance and struggles that were ongoing that were really a continuation of what they were fighting for in the Civil Rights Movement.
You bring the whole series together as the director of the final episode about the Dream Defenders – was that something you wanted to do from the start?
There were a few things that I knew I wanted to do and as a person who has kids, I wanted to know how did those young people see through the lovely illusion of this post-racial America [after the election of Obama]? How did they have the clarity to see that and to say, “Well, we’re not going to just say it’s good enough. We want real equality. We want real justice.” I was very impressed by that. But also the fact that it was a diverse movement – there were people with immigrant backgrounds and all kinds of young people that got involved in this and they had a more international perspective, so they had the idea to take this Recharge Genocide petition to the UN. That was something I knew I wanted to include no matter what and that’s where I learned about Black Youth Project 100 and the fact that there were these intersections between these different groups, As they say themselves, there were groups like them happening all over the country, and it was really inspiring and fascinating to learn their stories.
If anything, this hits home how vigilant people need to remain about their civil rights, which makes it curious whether there was much debate over the time period you’d cover in the series. You elegantly nod to the Black Lives Matter movement and the response to George Floyd’s murder, but the series ends in 2015.
It was actually one of the few things we disagreed with HBO about because they commissioned it in 2020 at the height of all of the movement after George Floyd. We had gone through the process of choosing our stories and starting to really hammer out what we wanted our approach to be and who was doing what stories and when [HBO] looked at the outlines, they said, “This looks good but we don’t see 2020 in here” and I had to say “We’re not doing 2020.We don’t know what happened yet. We’re still in it.” We all could feel already by 2021 when I came on the project, the backlash that was palpable. And we see the results today, so it was really important to us to tell the stories that we knew we could tell with authority.
If you look at the original series “Eyes on the Prize” ends in the ‘80s and I think the filmmakers and really the whole country had no idea of what the effects of the Reagan policies were going to have on generations to come. We felt the same way about 2020. So it was a clear choice. We said, “We can’t go into the Trump era because we are still feeling the fallout. We don’t even know what this is going to mean.” While we were making it, we did have the hope that there was going to be a complicated journey out of what had happened during the Trump presidency. Little did we know he would be re-elected. So in a way because there was a delay between when we finished and when it came out, I wondered if it would still feel relevant.
What was surprising to me was when we showed my episode at DOC NYC, the audience was so emotional when they watched it, first of all starting with the Obama election and then where we end up. People were crying, and coming up to me and saying, “I actually feel hopeful.” It felt more timely than ever in a strange way and I hope when people see the series today, even though it’s a much darker time now than we thought it would be, they understand that a lot of the progress that was made by the original civil rights movement has been rolled back or is rolling back now, but even in their small communities, people who don’t have experience with [activism or advocacy], they can always do something. They can resist. If they know what their principles are and they believe in freedom and equality, there is always something that they can do. And I think that was actually really refreshing to people at a time when everyone felt pretty dark.
“Eyes on the Prize: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest” is now streaming on Max.