Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest

Episode 1

Awakenings: 1954-1956

Wed, Jan 21, 1987 57 mins

The acclaimed documentary series opens with the earliest origins of The Civil Right Movement. As the United States emerges from World War II, many black men who had been relegated to second class citizenry at home, return home from overseas where they were trained as officers and other positions of authority. Returning home, they determined to put that authority into their lives on the home front despite resistance from white Americans. The lynch-pin of The Civil Rights Movement is formed form two specific events. First, is the murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a black Chicago teenager who was murdered by two white Mississippians for supposedly breaking the south's strict social code by making a pass at a white woman. In the midst outrage over the men being acquitted of the murder by an all-white jury, Till's mother put her son's disfigured corpse on display in an open-casket funeral so that the Black Chicago citizens could see the horror of his murder first-hand - then put the photos in Jet magazine so that all American could glimpse the terrible reality of lynching. The second event took place four months later as Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white passenger and was arrested. Parks was arrested and her protest became the touchstone for the year-long Birmingham bus boycotts in which blacks - led by a 26 year-old Martin Luther King Jr. - refused to ride the bus until the city agreed to desegregate the city buses. They won their demands after 11 months, but it would only be the beginning.