Last month, Downhill Battle tried to get Americans to download copies of the landmark civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. Eyes is not available any longer, because it is prohibtively expensive to clear the copyright to all their clips. Various entities — the production company, Martin Luther King, Jr's estate — shut them down with legal threats.
The Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement have released a statement supporting the distribution and public screening of Eyes on the Prize. Included in the signatories is Judy Richardson, who was Series Associate Producer and Education Director for EotP.
To us, knowledge is a human right every bit as important as the right to vote and the right be treated with courtesy and respect. Therefore, we do not believe that reading, or viewing, or listening is, or should ever become, a crime. Nor should access to information become a luxury sold only to the wealthy.
The events, images, narratives, and songs of "Eyes on the Prize" were not written, created, or performed by the corporations who now have the copyrights under their lock and key. It was those who gave their lives in the struggle, the heroic children of Birmingham, the courageous citizens of Mississippi, the Selma marchers, the school integrators, the sit-ins and Freedom Riders, and the people of a thousand colleges, towns, and hamlets across the South who created the Civil Rights Movement and we have a right to have our stories told.
Therefore, in the spirit of Southern Freedom Movement, we who once defied the laws and customs that denied people of color their human rights and dignity, we whose faces are seen in "Eyes on the Prize," we who helped produce it, tonight defy the media giants who have buried our story in their vaults by publicly sharing episodes of this forbidden knowledge with all who wish to see it.
(Thanks, Art!)
