Juan Williams is giving new eyes to a project that he first started more than 30 years ago, penning a book on what he describes as the growth of a 21st century civil rights movement.
“New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement” will be released in January, publisher Simon & Schuster announced this week.
The tome is a follow-up to Williams’s 1988 bestseller-turned-award-winning PBS series, “Eyes on the Prize,” which focused on America’s Civil Rights Movement years of the 1950s and 1960s.
“When you say Civil Rights Movement, people know what you’re talking about — they go back to [Martin Luther King Jr.] most specifically. But they don’t think, ‘Oh my God, we’re in another civil rights era right now.’ It’s like we don’t see it as that,” Williams, an opinion contributor for The Hill, told ITK in an interview.
“We don’t identify the ongoing American story of dealing with race as continuing into the 21st century,” added the Fox News senior political analyst.
Williams, 70, points to then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama’s (D) speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as an inflection point.
Following Obama’s keynote address, Williams said, “Everyone started talking about a postracial future for this country, with all the demographic and political change. And it accelerated then when Obama was elected, and it accelerated again with all the fights against the Affordable Care Act, the kind of angry outlash there. Then came Black Lives Matter and the killings of Black people by police. And then came the birther movement and [former President Trump]. And the question now is, where are we going with this movement?”
“The purpose of this book is to say to people: We’re living this history. This is an ongoing civil rights movement of its own kind. It’s not the first movement, and we need to all wake up and understand we’re in this telling moment, a new era of American history and American civil rights history,” Williams said.
He began writing “New Prize for These Eyes” in 2021. While he had to make some minor updates last week when Vice President Harris jumped in the 2024 White House race following President Biden’s exit, he said the political earthquake didn’t shake up his writing.
“The idea was already in the book,” Williams said. “It’s not just Harris, it’s [Supreme Court Justice] Ketanji Brown Jackson. It’s the tremendous amount of change we have seen … in the culture, and it’s all around us. I’m just trying to pull it together so people see it and say this pattern exists.”
Since it’s been more than three decades from the publication of “Eyes on the Prize” to the Jan. 14 release of “New Prize for These Eyes,” ITK asked if Williams was already getting started on a third installment that could hit store shelves around 2054.
“Oh my gosh,” he replied with a laugh, “Give me a minute!”