True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

by Jon Else

Overview

“[TRUE SOUTH] does several things at once. On one level, it’s a biography . . . On another, it’s a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement . . . A warm and intelligent book.”—The New York Times
 
“No one is better suited to write this moving account of perhaps the greatest American documentary series ever made. . . . [Else] tells the story with the compassion and eloquence it deserves.”—Adam Hochschild, author of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, BURY THE CHAINS, and TO END ALL WARS
 
The inside story of Eyes on the Prize, one of the most important and influential TV shows in history. Published on the 30th anniversary of the initial broadcast, which reached 100 million viewers.
 
Henry Hampton’s 1987 landmark multipart television series, Eyes on the Prize, an eloquent, plainspoken chronicle of the civil rights movement, is now the classic narrative of that history. Before Hampton, the movement’s history had been written or filmed by whites and weighted heavily toward Dr. King’s telegenic leadership. Eyes on the Prize told the story from the point of view of ordinary people inside the civil rights movement. Hampton shifted the focus from victimization to strength, from white saviors to black courage. He recovered and permanently fixed the images we now all remember (but had been lost at the time)—Selma and Montgomery, pickets and fire hoses, ballot boxes and mass meetings.
 
Jon Else was Hampton’s series producer and his moving book focuses on the tumultuous eighteen months in 1985 and 1986 when Eyes on the Prize was finally created. It’s a point where many wires cross: the new telling of African American history, the complex mechanics of documentary making, the rise of social justice film, and the politics of television. And because Else, like Hampton and many of the key staffers, was himself a veteran of the movement, his book braids together battle tales from their own experiences as civil rights workers in the south in the 1960s.
 
Hampton was not afraid to show the movement’s raw realities: conflicts between secular and religious leaders, the shift toward black power and armed black resistance in the face of savage white violence. It is all on the screen, and the fight to get it all into the films was at times as ferocious as the history being depicted. Henry Hampton utterly changed the way social history is told, taught, and remembered today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101980934
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/24/2017
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Jon Else was series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize and has produced and directed many award-winning documentaries, including The Day After Trinity and Cadillac Desert. Else has been nominated for two Academy Awards and three Emmys, and is the winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and one Emmy, several Alfred I. DuPont and Peabody Awards, and the Sundance Special Jury Prize and Sundance Filmmaker’s Trophy. He is Professor and North Gate Chair in Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Cave Painting 5

Chapter 2 "Racism Is Like a Loaded Gun" 28

Chapter 3 America, We Loved You Madly 58

Chapter 4 Last Visionary Standing 77

Chapter 5 The Revolution Will Be Televised 87

Chapter 6 Mother Ship 105

Chapter 7 Not the Other Man's Country 113

Chapter 8 What Have I to Fear? 146

Chapter 9 Mississippi Goddamn 162

Chapter 10 Crossroads 175

Chapter 11 Emmett Till's Hometown 198

Chapter 12 Hunter-gatherers 206

Chapter 13 True South? 226

Chapter 14 Messy History 248

Chapter 15 The Selma Show 276

Chapter 16 It's Our Flag Too 293

Chapter 17 A Great Story 306

Chapter 18 A Great Healing Machine 324

Chapter 19 Will the Circle Be Unbroken 356

Chapter 20 Freedom Is a Constant Struggle 369

Epilogue 377

Acknowledgments 381

Note on Sources 383

Bibliography 385

Index 391

Editorial Reviews

[Else's] book does several things at once. On one level, it's a biography of Mr. Hampton…On another, it's a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement. It's also a book about how a long and complicated documentary is made. In the age before the internet, it was a mighty task to plow through newspaper morgues and sometimes crumbling and mislabeled television footage, and to track down through telephone books many observers who'd nearly been lost to history…Mr. Else…has a clear and easygoing prose style…True South is a series of braided stories that are each well told. Mr. Hampton, who had lung cancer, died at 58…He lives in his documentaries, and in this warm and intelligent book.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

11/07/2016
Else, an accomplished documentarian, chronicles the making of the 1987 TV civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, created by Henry Hampton, in this ambitious, sweeping chronicle. Hampton emerges as a charismatic leader whose vision was inspiring enough to draw in an amazing team despite his scattered management style. Else, a producer on the series, also describes his own time participating in the 1960s civil rights movement as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In recounting how Hampton and his colleagues treated various turning points—the murder of Emmett Till in 1954 and of three civil rights workers in 1963; the 1955–1956 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott; the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches; and many more—Else finds a new perspective on famous events. In effect, the reader gets to ask the same narrative questions as the documentarians, and feel the same mixture of satisfaction and disappointment when one narrative avenue is chosen over another. Footage isn’t unavailable or is mislabeled; eyewitnesses die or exaggerate or don’t want to speak at all. Doubtless there were struggles in Prize’s making that Else doesn’t cover, but his account feels thorough and important as a part of both social and documentary film history. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

It’s hard to imagine a better person than Mr. Else to tell this story. . . . His book does several things at once. On one level, it’s a biography of Mr. Hampton . . . On another, it’s a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement. . . . True South is a series of braided stories that are each well told . . . [A] warm and intelligent book.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Reading this book feels like reliving the great stories of a legendary party from days gone by, one that continues to inspire. Else, a producer par excellence, is also a talented writer. . . . His memories are rich with detail and surprisingly candid.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Distinguished documentarian and MacArthur fellow Else has written a hard-driving, avidly detailed, and dramatic history of the making of Eyes on the Prize, the pioneering 1987 television documentary series about the civil rights movement. . . . With its many hooks and avenues, compelling portraits, and thought-provoking revelations, this in-depth chronicle of the making of a defining civil rights documentary is an invaluable and timely work.”—Booklist, (starred review)

“No one is better suited to write this moving account of perhaps the greatest American documentary series ever made. Jon Else helped film it, and, two decades earlier, as a civil rights worker in the South, he lived through part of the history involved. He tells the story with the compassion and eloquence it deserves.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains, and To End All Wars

“True South is the powerful story of a singular black man, Henry Hampton, who combined film and social activism to create the first people’s history of the civil rights movement. Jon Else’s insight into Hampton’s struggle to record and show history to a world in denial calls attention to Eyes on the Prize as a true American epic. It is hard not to be moved by this account––by both its author’s and its subject’s contributions to our society. This is truly great and important book, a magisterial chronicle of how we tell the story of the civil rights movement.”
  —Errol Morris, Academy Award winning director of The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line
 
“ Eyes on the Prize chronicled the small towns and back roads of the Deep South where the civil rights movement took root and flourished. Jon Else takes readers behind the scenes in the decades-long journey of the late Henry Hampton, Eyes’ visionary creator, and the motley team of us who ended up making history by telling this history.  True South captures the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary Americans who fundamentally changed America, and the extraordinary spirit and heart of a man committed to making sure their sacrifice was remembered.”
—Callie Crossley, Academy-award-nominated producer of the "Bridge to Freedom" episode of Eyes on the Prize

“Jon Else tells the amazing story of how independent filmmaker Henry Hampton overcame enormous obstacles to create the landmark documentary series, Eyes on the Prize. Written by a key member of Hampton's team, True South sheds light on the decade-long effort to transform American history during a crucial period of racial change into moving images that have shaped American historical understanding.”
—Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of history, Stanford University
 
"In detailing the financial struggle involved and the arduous process of finding interviewees and eliciting their stories, Else reveals the complexities of any such production. An illuminating look at racial strife and TV history."
—Kirkus Reviews

“Else tells the remarkable story in vivid detail, with some detours into the actual movement history, his own activism in the South in the ‘60s, and the back-and-forth between his Eyes on the Prize work and his career in Hollywood. For anyone more likely to think of Ken Burns than Hampton (or Burns and no one else) when considering historical documentaries, True South sets a proper context."
—Pop Matters

“In this fascinating book, Else, a producer and cinematographer who worked on the series, braids together Hampton’s story making the series and the dramatic national battle over racial equality that it describes. . . . Adding dimension to this marvelous account, Else . . . intersperses his own work for voting rights and against the Ku Klux Klan.”
—The National Book Review

"The emotional and factual combination that results from the documentary and the book is powerful and will endure."
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

From the Publisher

01/01/2017
In 1987, the multipart PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize told the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of its ordinary members. Here, series producer Else tells the story behind the making of the film. (LJ 12/16)

Library Journal

2016-10-20
Memoir, history, and biography meld in this account of the creation of a famed civil rights documentary.Producer and cinematographer Else (Journalism/Univ. of California Graduate School of Journalism), a MacArthur Fellow whose honors include several Peabody awards and four Emmys, offers a revealing chronicle of the making of the 1987 PBS series Eyes on the Prize. The author became involved in the civil rights movement in 1963 when he was a 19-year-old college student and took up political activist Allard Lowenstein's challenge to "draw fire and publicity in Mississippi" by registering black voters. John Kennedy and Medgar Evers had just been shot, and Else was filled with "missionary zeal." In 1964, he left school to work in Mississippi full time, courting danger in an area where the Ku Klux Klan flourished. Twenty years later, responding to an article in a Corporation for Public Broadcasting newsletter, he "cold-called" Henry Hampton, involved in a project to produce a TV series about the civil rights struggle. Else characterizes Hampton, who had joined the NAACP as an undergraduate at Washington University and who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. on the Pettus bridge in Selma, as nothing less than a genius, a "visionary leader" who "insisted on a bold multicultural, multiethnic, collaborative production process" that involved men and women, blacks and whites: "For him, diversity in teams trumped the powerful statement that an all-black production would have made." Hampton also privileged the voices of ordinary men and women who participated in the movement rather than focus on people and images that had, by 1985, become iconic. Hampton viewed the civil rights movement "as a patriotic story of America's realization of its ideals" and wanted white Americans to react positively to it. In detailing the financial struggle involved and the arduous process of finding interviewees and eliciting their stories, Else reveals the complexities of any such production. An illuminating look at racial strife and TV history.

Kirkus Reviews