As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”

Before the Mayflower grew out of a series of articles Bennett published in Ebony magazine regarding “the trials and triumphs of a group of Americans whose roots in the American soil are deeper than the roots of the Puritans who arrived on the celebrated Mayflower a year after a ‘Dutch man of war’ deposited twenty Negroes at Jamestown.” Bennett’s history is infused with a desire to set the record straight about Black contributions to the Americas and about the powerful Africans of antiquity.

Selma focuses on the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr (David Oyelowo) and the people of Selma, Alabama to secure voting rights for African Americans. Though they have the legal right to vote, they are prevented from exercising it by underhanded tactics like the poll tax and outright violence. President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) has signed the Civil Rights Act into law and wants to focus on the issue of poverty, despite the insistence of Dr. King on working towards voting rights. Against the president’s wishes and the official position of the state of Alabama and Governor Wallace (Tim Roth), King organizes a march from Selma to Montgomery in peaceful protest. Being threatened and watched by the FBI, King’s marriage to his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) is threatened and King suffers second thoughts about his strategy for achieving equality. Though the movement receives tremendous support both from those inside and outside of Selma, the violence from those in power is seemingly inescapable.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

Produced by Blackside, Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today. Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Award, and a Television Critics Association Award, Eyes on the Prize is the most critically acclaimed documentary on civil rights in America.