The Penn Humanities Forum opens this week-long investigation of human nature and human rights with the U.S. civil rights movement. Denied human status under slavery and refused equality even after Abolition, African Americans launched a painful battle for civil liberties in the late 1950s and the 1960s, which still goes on in our day. Like any case for human protections and privileges, its premise is the equal status of the claimants. Thus, the civil rights movement provoked a full-scale exploration of black history and culture to establish the human worth, dignity, and pride of African Americans.

In this movement, the arts played a crucial role. It is impossible to decide which was more decisive to the success of the rights struggle: the marches and sit-ins and trials that forced concessions from the courts, or the fellow-feeling aroused in Americans by the pathos of Alex Haley's Roots, by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s glorious rhetoric, and by imaginative triumphs such as Toni Morrison's Beloved. We open our film festival with the celebrated writer and filmmaker Juan Williams and the distinguished historian Thomas J. Sugrue discussing race and rights in the U. S. and showing the prize-winning documentary, Eyes on the Prize, for which Juan Williams wrote the companion guide, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954—1965.

Peter Conn, Deputy Provost, University of Pennsylvania
Samuel Preston, Dean, School of Arts and Sciences
Wendy Steiner, Director, Penn Humanities Forum

Thomas J. Sugrue, Bicentennial Class of 1940 Professor of History and Sociology at Penn, noted authority on civil rights politics and race, and author of the award-winning book The Origins of the Urban Crisis, a study of race and inequality in postwar Detroit.
Juan Williams, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation and regular panelist on Fox News Sunday.

Eyes on the Prize
Blackside, Inc., Henry Hampton, Exec. Producer; Judith Vecchione, Series Editor
Through contemporary interviews and historical footage, much of it never before broadcast, Eyes on the Prize traces the civil rights movement from early acts of individual courage through the flowering of a mass movement and its eventual split into factions. Presented here are three one-hour films from this acclaimed documentary.

Ain't Scared of Your Jails 1960-1961, Series I:3
College students began to take an important role in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Lunch counter sit-ins spread from Nashville, Tennessee, throughout the South, giving life to a new force within the movement: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In what became known as the Freedom Rides, many students found themselves facing death to break down segregation in interstate bus travel below the Mason-Dixon line.

Bridge to Freedom, Series I:6
Ten years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, and nearly eleven years after the decree that "separate but equal" was unconstitutional, black Americans were still fighting for equality. In "Bridge to Freedom," the lessons of that decade are brought to bear in the climactic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Back to the Movement, Series II:8
Two cities, Miami and Chicago, were the scene of riots and destruction. Pummeled by the devastation of their neighborhood brought on by urban renewal, lack of jobs, and police harassment, Overtown, Miami's once- thriving black community, exploded in rioting. In Chicago, frustrated by decades of unfulfilled promises made by the city's Democratic political machine, reformers installed Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor. This final film in the PBS series ends with a look back at the people who made the Civil Rights Movement a force for change in America.

People's Century #120 "Skin Deep"
WHYY TV begins its week-long film series on Human Rights, developed in association with the Penn Humanities Forum, with Skin Deep, a profile of efforts to end segregation in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa. In the U.S., nonviolent protests and political actions such as the Montgomery bus boycott, lunch-counter sit-ins and the Freedom Riders, eventually brought about an end to segregation in public places and education and enforced the right of blacks to vote. When peaceable protests failed in South Africa, where apartheid was the law, some turned to guerilla fighting. The black majority eventually won their freedom and the right to vote, holding first free democratic election in the late 1980s.