Posted on May 31, 2025 in Featured Review
Authors:
Andrew M. MayerNew Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement, by Juan Williams. Simon & Schuster, 2025. 288p, 9781668012352 $28.99, 9781668012369, 9781668012376
Juan Williams, a Panamanian American journalist and political analyst known for his candid opinions on race and culture at outlets like The Washington Post and Fox News, has written a groundbreaking history of what he terms the “Second Civil Rights Movement” in the United States. Williams first gained national prominence for his best-selling volume Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (CH, Jan’88), which accompanied the Emmy Award–winning documentary series of the same name that aired on PBS. His other books include Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (CH, Sep’99, 37-0622) and What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?: Trump’s War on Civil Rights (2018).
Williams’s current book provides a twenty-first-century update to his original, groundbreaking text, although it stops short of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, in which Donald Trump was elected over Kamala Harris, the first Black female vice president. That result has since produced a slew of challenges to civil rights. Even so, Williams acknowledges that the Second Civil Rights Movement, much like the first, has moved in contentious times.
In his original volume, Williams charted the first Civil Rights Movement from the U.S. Supreme Court’s pathbreaking ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case to the March on Washington (1963), led by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the march on Selma (1965). This movement advanced the efforts of Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph and the union he founded, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), and the desegregation of the armed forces under President Truman in 1948. These forces also contributed to a second Great Migration of millions of Black people leaving the South for northern and western cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles after World War II and continuing through the 1960s. As is well known, this period was replete with violence against African Americans, including bombings and countless lynchings, prompting widespread social action to fight for equal rights. Unfortunately, this tumultuous period also witnessed the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Williams briefly recounts this history in the introduction to New Prize for These Eyes to lay the groundwork for better understanding the present.
Williams criticizes Obama for not standing up firmly enough for civil rights for Black Americans, especially against police violence.
In his new follow-up volume, Williams’s chronology primarily centers on the period 2004–23, beginning with Obama’s entrance into national politics as a largely unknown Illinois politician with a sterling rallying cry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in an attempt to boost the candidacy of presidential nominee John Kerry. Obama rode that speech to two successful Democratic presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. However, Williams criticizes Obama for not standing up firmly enough for civil rights for Black Americans, especially against police violence. This issue erupted onto the national stage in 2012 following the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Sadly, this was followed two years later by two more tragic killings. In 2014, police infamously shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Around the same time, Eric Garner was killed in a choke hold by police in Staten Island for selling loose cigarettes. In none of these cases were the police officers or vigilantes involved in the killings found guilty in a court of law or even, in some cases, prosecuted. However, the collective outrage over these injustices sparked the Black Lives Matter movement nationwide.
In 2020, Americans once again learned of another killing of an unarmed Black man by police. Upon witnessing the infamous killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, which was captured on video, protests erupted nationwide. In this case, however, the officer involved was not only prosecuted but convicted. That same year saw the killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. In Arbery’s case, the killers responsible for his death were also convicted and sentenced.
Within this context, Williams lays out the political contests of 2016 and 2020. As he notes, Black voter turnout reached a record low in 2016, which Williams argues likely cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election. However, the efforts of former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Georgia to increase voter registration, particularly among Black voters, later helped Joe Biden win South Carolina and Georgia against Trump in the 2020 presidential election. In fact, voter turnout surged across the electorate in 2020, in which record-high numbers of Black Americans voted.
Williams interestingly presents a somewhat hopeful view for the future despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s negative decisions pertaining to abortion rights and affirmative action in 2022 and 2023, respectively.
Unfortunately, much of the Democratic Party’s gains in the 2020 election were lost in the 2024 election, but the timing of this book’s publication means that the 2024 election results are not covered. Instead, Williams interestingly presents a somewhat hopeful view for the future despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s negative decisions pertaining to abortion rights and affirmative action in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Despite the new conservative nature of the U.S. Supreme Court, Williams feels that the appointment of the first Black female justice in 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is a positive note.
At the time of this writing, Donald Trump had just won the 2024 presidential election over former Vice President Kamala Harris and has since issued a barrage of executive orders to reduce the federal government staff and cut DEI initiatives and U.S. aid abroad, among other cuts. Williams warns that despite the successes of the first Black president, Barack Obama, and inroads made by the U.S. Supreme Court prior to its current conservative leaning, the Second Civil Rights Movement will have to continue struggling against white supremacy and the MAGA movement to succeed. Finally, he feels that a new generation will eventually need to fuel a Third Civil Rights Movement to advance the rights and needs of a new generation, because by the year 2045, the United States will cease to be a white majority nation, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections.
Thoroughly investigating the state of race relations in the United States over the past two decades, Williams presents a balanced and enigmatic history of American life in the twenty-first century.
Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Political Science – U.S. Politics
Andrew M. Mayer is professor emeritus at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. Previously, he was the night librarian for The Washington Post, head librarian for the New York Law Journal, and senior research editor for Wenner Media and Condé Nast Traveler. He has published over 100 professional book reviews for newspapers and academic journals.
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