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Juan Williams Discusses New Prize for These Eyes

Explore the forces shaping race, power and protest.

Understand how today’s civil rights movement is changing the rules and rewriting the story from one of the nation’s leading civil rights historians.

What does it mean to live in the aftermath of a dream deferred? In New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement, Juan Williams, award-winning journalist and author of Eyes on the Prize, examines the post-Obama racial landscape—shaped by resistance, new strategies, and a new generation speaking.

Digital organizing, cultural power, and mass mobilization drive this new civil rights era. From Ferguson to Charlottesville to January 6, today’s movement is built on visibility, shared experience, and a demand to be seen and heard.

Antonio Williams, a public policy leader and advocate for digital equity, and Juan’s son join the conversation to explore the evolution of strategy and what today’s fight means for tomorrow’s America. Together, they’ll dig into key themes, including:

• Why Obama’s presidency sparked a backlash
• How today’s movements differ from 1960s civil rights organizing
• The role of viral media in reshaping public memory and political urgency
• The cultural fault lines shaping the future of democracy

This event will be a critical conversation about race, resistance, and what comes next.

For reasonable accommodations, please contact the Center for Accessibility at 202-727-2142 or DCPLaccess@dc.gov. For ASL or tactile interpretation, please allow at least seven (7) days notice.

About the Author

Juan Williams is a prizewinning journalist and historian. He is the author of the bestselling civil rights history Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, which accompanied the PBS series of the same name. He also wrote the landmark biography of the first African American on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, as well as the New York Times bestsellers Enough and Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate. Williams worked for The Washington Post as a celebrated national political correspondent, White House correspondent, and editorial writer. His NPR talk show took ratings to a new high. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Ebony. He is currently senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a columnist for The Hill.

About the Book

In NEW PRIZE FOR THESE EYES, Williams shines a light on this historic, new movement. Who are its heroes? Where is it headed? What fires, furies, and frustrations distinguish it from its predecessor? “More than thirty years ago, I wrote my first book, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years,1954-1965. The book tells the story of America's great fight for racial equality—the dramatic, inspiring Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century,” Williams writes. “Today I see a great fight for racial justice taking shape in the twenty-first century, a new civil rights movement. It is built on the achievements of the First Movement, but it’s not an extension of the First Movement, and when we try to judge this new movement by comparing it to its predecessor of the twentieth century, we fail to see its true shape.”

In the 20th century, Black activists and their white allies called for equal rights and an end to segregation. They prioritized legal battles in the courtroom and legislative victories in Congress. Today’s movement is dealing with new realities. Demographic changes have placed progressive whites in a new role among the largest, youngest population of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in the nation’s history. The new generation is social media savvy, and they have an agenda fueled by discontent with systemic racism and the persistent scourge of police brutality. Today’s activists are making history in a new economic and cultural landscape, and they are using a new set of tools and strategies to do so.

The Second Civil Rights Movement was born out of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency and the hopes for a “postracial” era that came with it. Williams traces the arc of this new civil rights era from Obama to Charlottesville to January 6th and a Confederate flag in the Capitol, providing both a highly readable account of recent history and a forward-looking call to action

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