If you’re eagerly anticipating poring over the sources listed in the LibGuide companion to our upcoming voting rights exhibit, an excellent resource to hold you over is the award-winning PBS documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement”. Originally aired in 1986, the 14 part series is narrated by the late Julian Bond and features a treasure trove of archival footage and interviews with the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, including John Lewis, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, and many more. The emotionally-charged series traces the Civil Rights movement from its early days of the Montgomery bus boycott and the national reaction to the murder of Emmett Till to the election of Chicago’s first black mayor in the 1980s. Documentary films can make excellent sources for your research papers, and the heavy reliance on primary source material in “Eyes on the Prize” makes it a superior resource on understanding the Civil Rights movement in America.
GLAM Center staff is always on the lookout for great resources, and while conducting research for our upcoming voting rights exhibit, we were thrilled to find that this documentary series was made available through the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library’s Kanopy database. Kanopy is an on-demand streaming platform offering a large collection of award-winning films and documentaries. In addition to documentaries on a wide variety of subjects, Kanopy also streams a great selection of classic and modern films in genres ranging from comedy to horror, making it a great option for when you’ve managed to watch everything on your Netflix queue! The best part of all is that Kanopy is 100% free of charge; you only need to sign in with your Woodruff Library login to access hundreds of great videos!
Once you’ve watched all the great documentaries Kanopy has to offer on the struggle for voting rights in America, stay tuned for the opening of our voting rights exhibit at the Woodruff’s Archives Research Center (and its digital companion at https://glam.auctr.edu/) in early October!
-written by Gayle Schechter, GLAM Digital Exhibitions Coordinator