The Eyes on the prize Book

The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle is an anthology of a plethora of speeches, essays, various documents, and firsthand accounts collected and edited by the team of Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine. It is a collection of documents from firsthand accounts, which spans the history of the American Civil Rights Movement.

For the most part, I rather like most if not all of these contributions. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle is an anthology that collected many documents from speeches, letters, personal essays or journal entries, interviews, and much more separated into fourteen sections, which presents a definitive collection about the American Civil Rights Movement.

Included are the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in its entirety; speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., and his famous "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"; an interview with Rosa Parks; selections from Malcolm X Speaks; Black Panther Bobby Seale's Seize the Time; Ralph Abernathy's controversial And the Walls Came Tumbling Down; a piece by Herman Badillo on the infamous Attica prison uprising; addresses by Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson, Nelson Mandel, and the list goes on.

Like most anthologies there are weaker contributions, but The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle may be the exception. It is a superb record of one of the greatest and most turbulent movements of this century and is essential for anyone interested in learning how far the American civil rights movements has come and how far it has to go.

All in all, The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle is perhaps the most comprehensive anthology of primary sources available, spanning the entire history of the American civil rights movement.