The news footage looks like a quaint relic, but not very long ago it had the immediacy of the evening news. Six hundred demonstrators are crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma at the start of a planned march to Montgomery, Alabama's capital. A phalanx of state troopers bars the way. The two lines converge; people fall to the ground, tear gas explodes, billy clubs fly.
The drama in Selma in March 1965 was the culmination of a decade of civil rights activism, a decade chronicled in a remarkable new TV documentary, Eyes on the Prize. The six-week PBS series, produced...
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