[‘Eyes on the Prize III’ Review: Essential HBO Docuseries

Back in 2021, Max premiered the new documentary Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground.

Despite being an extension of one of the most acclaimed television franchises ever produced, Hallowed Ground was basically ignored by critics.

I mean, I reviewed it, but to date, Sophia Nahli Allison’s film doesn’t have enough reviews to have an average score on either Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes.

And I get it. HBO/Max barely promoted the documentary and it was an extremely complicated project to approach — not exactly a sequel to Henry Hampton’s seminal chronicle of the Civil Rights Movement, which aired its first six episodes in 1987 and the eight-hour second part in 1990, both on PBS. Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground was a 61-minute complement to the brand, a formally experimental meditation on Eyes on the Prize, its importance and its limitations. But if you were looking for something that picked up where Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985 left off, this was not it.

I hope that the response will not be as sparse around HBO’s Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015.

Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.

The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.

In Hallowed Ground, Allison critiqued Eyes on the Prize for generally defining the Civil Rights Movement through eyes that were male and straight, barely laying the foundation for the crusade’s more intersectional growth.

That evolution is at the center of Eyes on the Prize III, which is bookended by two episodes that put women and queer voices at the center of an evolving crusade. Unlike the first two seasons, these are only sometimes stories that are known on a national level — given how central the series was to my own early education on the Civil Rights Movement, I can’t say if it chronicled stories I knew or if I knew the stories because it chronicled them — but it’s easy to see why they were given their spotlight here.

“America, Don’t Look Away,” the first of six episodes premiering over three nights on HBO, is separated into a pair of vignettes. The first looks at the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association in the Bronx, which introduced the concept of “sweat equity” through a racial lens; the second looks at Bebashi, the Philadelphia-based non-profit that gave support and a voice to minority queer communities at risk of getting left behind in the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic.

As was the case with earlier seasons, the show foregrounds the figures who were on the ground in these key social and political moments, including Bebashi founder Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer, who reflects on how she, as a Black and Muslim woman, was able to carve out her space in the AIDS crisis and get people to welcome her and take her seriously; and many residents of Banana Kelly, a small pocket of the Bronx in which residents took it upon themselves to renovate and rejuvenate city blocks in the aftermath of the “Bronx Is Burning” epidemics of arson and poverty.

In both stories, Ronald Reagan is a featured adversary, but the real struggles are institutional and easily overlooked on a national level. They’re tributes to ground-level organizing and incremental victories, treated by director Geeta Gandbhir with the same respect earlier Eyes on the Prize directors gave to events more likely already to have chapters in history books.

The series closes with Asako Gladsjo’s “What Comes After Hope?” — an episode that dances around the ways the Obama presidency was, on some levels, a disappointment because of how it gave a certain segment of the population the opportunity to claim that the struggle was over and equality had been achieved. The episode shows the young organizers who looked at what Fox News might try to call a post-racial world and said, “Wait, the job isn’t done.” It shows how Occupy Wall Street and protests in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin seeded the ground for Black Lives Matter and other associated movements that walk in the footsteps of the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement, but with women and the queer community at the forefront.

Both episodes are built on the principle that just because people with platforms try claiming that the work is done doesn’t mean that the work is done, and both could serve as “How To” manuals for mobilizing and organizing around issues that are both specific to the Black community and universal.

The mixture of “stories you know” and “stories that are local, but tie into larger narratives” is essential to the rest of the series as well.

The stories are as big and familiar as the Million Man March, which is given the entirety of the Muta’Ali-directed third episode, and as seemingly tangential as the pair of environmental justice case studies at the heart of Rudy Valdez’s “Spoil the Vine,” which works as a primer for any discussion of environmental racism. We also get snapshots of the ongoing role of race in education in “We Don’t See Color,” which examines the affirmative action cases at the University of Michigan, and in the criminal justice system in “Trapped,” which reflects on the brief gang ceasefire that followed the L.A. Uprising and on the challenges for public defenders in Washington, D.C., during the first Bush administration.

Like I said, the series isn’t perfect. The “Trapped” segment on public defenders, for example, is a worthy but clumsy effort to show how crime prevention policies disproportionately impacting people of color are implemented even in cities where people of color seemingly control governmental institutions. The “Million Man March” episode acknowledges myriad concerns about the March — Louis Farrakhan’s history of antisemitism, the exclusion of women, etc. — but tends to gloss over those mixed or complicated messages in favor of general hagiography for the event. “What Comes After Hope?” is passionate, but so many of its points and featured participants are a familiar reminder that the documentary marketplace is more vibrant and inclusive than it was in 1987 and many of these stories have been previously told in PBS and HBO and Netflix documentaries in recent years.

We live in a world in which politicians on the right are attempting to legislate and executive-order DEI, affirmative action and critical race theory out of existence under the ruse that the problems those programs were instituted to fix have been solved. And we live in a world in which politicians on the left are pondering which vulnerable constituent bases must be jettisoned in order to appeal to an imaginary “mainstream.”

In that context, it’s impossible to watch Eyes on the Prize III without constant awareness that the fights from the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s are indistinguishable from the fights that still need to be had today — that without vigilance, every inch that was gained can be pushed backward.

The series can be an inspiration for viewers on the left, the only audience likely to actually watch in these polarized times. But if anybody with a conservative bent were to tune in, there are non-confrontational explanations for why programs like affirmative action are still relevant and why environmental racism is far from an outlandish concept.

And for people on both sides, Eyes on the Prize III serves notice that however things look in this moment, a response or a backlash is coming. Provided that dedicated people keep their eyes on the prize, the country doesn’t regress willingly and the battles fought have their roots in decades of movement and struggle. Remembering these truths has perhaps never been more important.