Opening More ‘Eyes’ to Racial Equality : Television: Documentary film maker Henry Hampton takes a risk with a sequel : to his acclaimed series on the civil-rights movement.

It was a risk taking on a sequel to his much-acclaimed 1987 public-television series about the civil-rights movement, Henry Hampton admitted.

“Eyes on the Prize” won two dozen prizes of its own, including the Peabody Award and the DuPont-Columbia Award. Hampton, the executive producer of the documentary series that covered the years 1954 through 1965, walked away with “I don’t know, eight or nine” honorary degrees.

But instead of quitting while he was ahead, which “would have been wise, and would have been commercial,” Hampton plunged heart-first, brain-second into “Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads.” The series begins nationally on public television Monday.

“Documentary film makers should die and go to heaven to get the kind of response that we did,” Hampton said at the headquarters of his Blackside Productions in Boston’s rapidly gentrifying South End.

“But it would have been a half-story and a pretense,” Hampton said. “And I really thought that the risk was worth it.”

Financed largely by private grants, Hampton’s first effort at documentary television was filled with the drama of the Supreme Court’s bold decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, chilling scenes of police dogs being loosed on crowds in Birmingham and the spirited marches of Selma, Ala., Washington, and elsewhere that marked that era.

By contrast, “Eyes II,” as the new project inevitably became known, delves into the personalities and politics within the struggle for racial equality. Alternately nostalgic, exciting and tragic, the new series shows Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy--brilliant communicators cut down by assassins’ bullets. It depicts the Black Panthers, carrying loaded rifles into the halls of the California State Capitol, and recalls the stirring moment in 1967 when Carl Stokes became the first African-American to be elected mayor of a U.S. city.

“We ain’t what we want to be, we ain’t what we gonna be,” Stokes declares at one point in his campaign. “But great God, we sure ain’t what we was.”

Sometimes, “Eyes II” tests its viewers with plodding, behind-the-scenes analyses of garbage and school strikes. To Hampton, however, the entire picture of race in America today remains greater and more crucial even than the sum of its parts.

“Race has been America’s change point, its point where it meets its own soul,” he said. “Whenever we confront it, most times we lose. When we put together a Constitution, you start out with the wonderful notion of equality and create three-fifths of a man.”

But the civil-rights movement, said Hampton, “is one of the few times when the nation is challenged and we meet the challenge.”

This mandate to remember and learn from the ugliness of racism comes from a man who grew up knowing little of it himself. Built like a gentle teddy bear, Hampton, 49, is the son of a St. Louis surgeon. Along with his two sisters--one is now a public-relations executive; the other, a psychiatrist--he attended suburban parochial schools. On the way to school each day, one parent or the other would give the children a spelling bee.

Hampton was 15 when he awoke one day unable to move his legs. While young Henry told himself, “I’ve got to shake this,” his father recognized his ailment instantly as polio. He walks with a stiff limp and a brace now, and describes flying his private plane as his “religion,” his escapist counterpart of jogging.

Hampton was nearly 30, a graduate of St. Louis University and an officer in the Unitarian Universalist Church, the first time anyone called him “nigger”--”gimpy nigger,” to be exact. It happened in Boston, his adopted hometown, just about the time that Hampton was founding Blackside Productions.

The company was thriving on a lucrative diet of industrial and documentary films when Hampton began yearning to do something about the civil-rights movement. Prospective funders at first greeted his proposals with the same enthusiasm they might reserve for a sitcom about bubonic plague. Though they later relented, many displayed the same initial skepticism about “Eyes II.” Hampton praises the courage of the underwriters who finally came through to endow the $6-million budget of “Eyes II.”

Part of what they paid for included a “civil-rights school” for Hampton’s race- and gender-balanced staff. Four teams worked on “Eyes II,” and Hampton wanted to make sure that all involved knew their subject. Hampton is not married and has no children, and so “in every sense of the word,” he said of his colleagues, “this is family.”

Toward his cinematic product, Hampton exhibits equal measures of what he concedes is a certain paternalistic pride. He is a man “compulsed” about “Eyes II,” he said, in part because he has seen the teaching value of “Eyes I.” There is no polemic in his film making, Hampton insists; rather, “an attempt to say ‘here is something we went through’ “--and in the case of “Eyes II,” “here is something that is still unfolding.”

And if, as Hampton continues, “I really believe deeply that it is terribly important to understand what it is that happened to us,” he feels equally strongly about the impact of the “Eyes II” message in the light of a changing world landscape.

As long as racism persists, said Hampton, “we are a country in some ways playing with a hand behind our back.” As a companion to the “Eyes” series, Hampton worked with Steve Faher and Sarah Flynn to write “Voices of Freedom” (Bantam Books hardcover). A forthcoming Blackside venture on the Depression will also appear in both book and documentary forms, as may another that Hampton is developing about the war on poverty.

In the meantime, Hampton is itching to try a feature film--and a comedy at that. He won’t discuss the subject, but promises it will deal with “some of these same issues.”

Though he stresses that he is “no soothsayer,” Hampton refuses to adopt a position of total negativism on the subject of race relations.

“I actually think we have made progress,” he said. “Most people would argue with me, but I really do believe that if we had some leadership, we could could deal with this.”