The film originated as two sequential projects. Part one, six hours long, was shown on
PBS in early 1987 as ''Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954–1965
. Eight more hours were broadcast in 1990 as Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965–1985''. In 1992, the documentary was released on home video. By the mid-1990s, both rebroadcasts and home video distribution were halted for several years due to expiration of rights and licenses of copyrighted archive footage, photographs and music used in the series. Copyright holders were demanding increasingly higher rates. Grants from the
Ford Foundation and Gilder Foundation enabled Blackside and the rights clearance team to renew rights in 2005. While the return of
Eyes on the Prize to public television and the educational market depended on the contributions of many, four individuals in particular are credited with achieving the complicated undertaking of rights renewals and the re-release of the series: Sandra Forman, Legal Counsel and Project Director; Cynthia Meagher Kuhn, Archivist and Rights Coordinator; Rena Kosersky, Music Supervisor; and Judi Hampton, President of Blackside and sister of Henry Hampton. None of the archival material in the fourteen-hour documentary was removed or altered in any way. PBS rebroadcast the first six hours on
American Experience on three consecutive Mondays in October 2006, and rebroadcast the second eight hours in February 2008. After a gap of almost eight years,
Eyes on the Prize was rebroadcast on
World Channel on fourteen consecutive Sundays beginning on January 17, 2016. PBS reissued an educational version of the series in the fall of 2006, making it available on DVD for the first time. It is now available to educational institutions and libraries from PBS on seven DVDs or seven VHS tapes. A consumer version of part one (1954–1965) was released in March 2010. The licensing issues from 1993 to 2006 generated what was called
Eyes on the Screen, an effort to disseminate the series by
file sharing networks without regard to copyright restrictions. ==Episodes==