PBS UNVEILS CIVIL RIGHTS SERIES, MOYERS SPECIALS

The Public Broadcasting Service’s moving, six-part series “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965” was almost called “We Shall Overcome.”

The latter title was rejected as perhaps limiting the potential audience, but it might have aptly described the producers’ perseverance.

“American corporations are not anxious to become involved with this kind of documentary,” said Henry Hampton, executive producer of the series, which premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. on PBS (Channels 28 and 15).

“We went to 100 corporations and you can see their eyes go opaque (when) you say civil rights .”

But Hampton, appearing alongside former civil rights activist and series narrator Julian Bond, was able to present glimmers of a dual victory Tuesday to the nation’s TV critics gathered at the Century Plaza. The series, presented by Boston PBS-station WGBH, scrounged together adequate funding--much of it at the last minute --from 44 corporate sources.

And, perhaps more significantly, “Eyes on the Prize” presents the historical triumphs of the civil rights movement with a distinctly black voice. An example shown the critics is the final installment on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., which intersperses news footage and televised commentary of the day with recent interviews with many of the event’s participants.

Bond calls the series “a case study in how to affect our democracy.”

By showing the struggle for change that came from within the black community, Bond said, “Eyes on the Prize” demonstrates a solution to oppression not typically found in documentaries such as one done for CBS last year by Bill Moyers, another PBS stalwart who met the critics later in the day Tuesday.

Moyers, who has returned to PBS after his recent stint as a CBS commentator, last year presented a special on CBS titled “Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America.” It focused on the growing problem of fatherless families in black urban centers.

“We as a country are not likely to do much about (that) problem because even though we see these people (on TV), they are an invisible people,” Bond said. “When and if they become like people in Selma and say, ‘We’re not taking this anymore,’ then I think we’ll begin to address it.”

Added Hampton: “Bill’s (Moyers) programs are fine television documentaries and I think they have certainly a point of view--which I think in some ways skews the reality--but his point of view is valid. I guess I resent a little the idea that we don’t always have the opportunity to have the same say about those issues.”

Hampton and his fellow producers created such an opportunity for their point of view with “Eyes on the Prize.” It’s compelling drama as well. Producers scoured network archives and many lesser-known sources, finding footage of the Selma march in as unlikely a place as the basement of WVTM-TV in Birmingham, where a young engineer had been saving the newsreels.

Hampton’s restriction on the series is that everyone pictured on camera had to have been involved with the event that serves as the catalyst for each of the six segments. That includes, for example, two young women, now in their 30s, who recall being tear-gassed on the Selma bridge two decades ago.

The series also “demythologizes” the civil rights movement, Hampton said. It shows, for example, how Republican judicial appointments made by President Dwight D. Eisenhower often did more for blacks than those by President John F. Kennedy, who had strong ties to the Southern faction of the Democratic Party.

For Bond, then-leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, there’s still a nostalgia of sorts for those years.

“This period of the civil rights movement was the most engaged period of my life,” he said. “Although my wife tells me that I’m living in the past, I don’t think I will ever be as involved personally in anything in my life.”

Moyers, who began his TV career at New York public-television station WNET with a show that became “Bill Moyers’ Journal,” is as concerned with the quantity of his work as well as the quality. He had only one “CBS Reports” special in 1985, four in 1986.

So he’s back at PBS, where he will earn “approximately 10% of what I made at CBS . . . but I’ll be on the air 20 times as much.”

Via his new Public Affairs Television Inc., based at WNET and co-created with producer Joan Konner, Moyers this year will present at least five projects for PBS.

The announced projects include “In Search of the Constitution,” a 90-minute special; “God and Politics,” a six-hour series on the effect of religion on politics, and “The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell,” also six hours long, produced from interviews with the noted mythologist.

Moyers also will produce “Philadelphia Journal,” a five-day-a-week series of 3-minute reports on the events leading up to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution 200 years ago.

Moyers’ funding successes tell a different story from Hampton’s struggle: Moyers has commitments adding up to $10 million from such sources as Public Television, General Motors, Chevron, the MacArthur Foundation and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting’s program fund.

If the major networks want “to save themselves from irrelevancy,” he said, “they have to go back to serious reporting.” Television should be “a continuing course in public education and not just a means of delivering audiences to advertisers.”