Else Jon - True south: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the landmark television series that reframed the civil rights movement

T hroughout the winter of 196465, Selma, Alabama, simmered in a state of siege, broken by sudden explosions of violence and finally, on March 7, Bloody Sunday.

Two days later, twenty-four-year-old African American Henry Hampton set out along Broad Street toward the Pettus Bridge, together with his friend Rev. James Reeb and a thousand other marchers, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. Their goal was to deliver a voting rights petition to Governor George Wallace at the state capitol in Montgomery. A quarter mile ahead, on the other side of the Alabama River, waited hundreds of heavily armed Alabama state troopers, flanked by Sheriff Jim Clarks famously brutal mounted posse.

Hampton was on church business, sent by his Unitarian employers in Boston. Strikingly handsome and athletic, but slowed by the heavy steel leg brace he had worn since a childhood bout with polio, Henry found himself marching between a black Alabama sharecropper and the wife of Senator Paul Douglas.... He had a hard time keeping up with the crowd, and began to worry what would happen if he fell behind and became easy prey for white thugs prowling to thin the herd. But then Henry realized that half a dozen black citizens of Selma had, as if by magic, formed a protective circle around him, moving toward the troopers on the other side of the bridge at his pace, my own personal honor guard.

Only forty-eight hours before, those same lawmen, determined that black men like Henry Hampton would not have a voice in Alabama, had savagely beaten, bullwhipped, and gassed hundreds of peaceful men, women, and children. Local whites cheered from the sidelines. Outraged clergy across the nation answered a call from Dr. King and leapt into action. Henry, the lay national director of information for the Unitarian Universalist church, joined hundreds of northern ministers converging on Selma.

Now the new march was on, in violation of a federal judges order, headed for another confrontation. Cresting the bridge, they saw the helmeted troops arrayed across the highway, daring the marchersunder federal injunction not to cross the county lineto come forward. Still on the bridge, near the spot where lawmen beat John Lewis unconscious two days before, Dr. King unexpectedly stopped and knelt down while Ralph Abernathy led the demonstrators in tense prayer. Newsreel footage from that day shows the eerie image of a half dozen ministers standing around the kneeling King so that he would not present a clear target to a sniper.

What Henry Hampton and those thousand marchers did not know as they awaited their destiny was that King had brokered a secret deal with the White House only hours before: they would stop at the county line and go on to fight another day. Because they desperately needed the federal courts and President Johnson on their side, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders were loath to violate federal judge Frank Johnsons injunction against marching on to Montgomery.

With a sinking feeling, Henry now saw King and Abernathy turn around and lead the bewildered marcherswho had come to lay their lives on the line and see this thing through all the way to the state capitolback into Selma. What had begun as a mass expression of courage and moral witness ended in a meek retreat before the same forces who had smashed the Bloody Sunday march, all to avoid angering the president. Henry didnt know what to think, but suspected that the moral muck of national politics had caught up with the principled clarity of the civil rights movement.

Unfolding before the news cameras in the Turnaround March that afternoon was a harsh lesson in pragmatic realpolitik, resonating under the crisp moral shadow of its already famous big brother, Bloody Sunday. They would, in fact, live to fight another day, and very shortly brought American apartheid to its knees. As he trudged back to Selma instead of on to Montgomery, in that very jumbled strategic, tactical, and political moment, Henrya church representative, not yet a filmmakerthought to himself, Someday someone is going to make a great story out of this. This is going to make great television.

As sweet as their victory would eventually be, it was the process itself, the messy workings of history, that fascinated Henry. Over the next quarter century, in his battles with commercial television, public television, his own staff, historians, and the estate of Martin Luther King, he would never retreat from the complexity of that great story.

On a February night in 1986, two decades after the Battle of Selma, Henry Hampton met me curbside at Bostons Logan Airport. In his youthful days as a cabdriver, how many late-night fares had he picked up at Logan?

We were then in our seventh month of production on