A documentary on the career of legendary journalist Wilson F. “Bill” Minor will make its debut on Mississippi airwaves on Thursday.

Set to air on Mississippi Public Broadcasting at 7:30 p.m., the documentary, “Eyes on Mississippi,” shares its title with Minor’s long-running newspaper column. The nearly one-hour film offers an in-depth look at Mississippi civil rights history through the lens of Minor’s reporting.  

Directed and produced by Ellen Ann Fentress, a journalist and former colleague of Minor, the documentary draws on 24 different historical archives and over 40 hours of footage from interviews of Minor by Fentress. The documentary was first released in 2015 and has since been partially re-edited with new archival material from MPB. 

A portrait of Minor and his dispatches from the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement, the film offers viewers a trenchant look at how journalism and race relations intersect.

“I think this is very auspicious timing for this story to come out,” Fentress said at a documentary screening in Jackson on Tuesday. “We need this story and the relevance of honest journalism and truth-telling. Telling truth to power could not be more important than it is right now.”  

Minor covered Mississippi politics for over 70 years, from 1947 until his death in 2017. He earned professional accolades and awards for his gutsy reporting of civil rights violence and the political and social forces that drove it. 

Minor offers an inside view of landmark stories such as the murder of civil rights workers in Neshoba County and the trial of Willie McGee, both of which captured national attention for their window into the racist violence and unequal justice system that infected the Jim Crow South.

The documentary features interviews with figures such as civil-rights leader Myrlie Evers and former Gov. William Winter, the latter calling Minor “our own interpreter of who we are as a state.”

Minor came to Mississippi as the one-man bureau reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In the years that followed, he documented and explained Mississippi’s society for countless others, including fellow journalists across the nation.

A native of Hammond, Louisiana, Minor was a Tulane University journalism graduate and a World War II Navy combat veteran.

When Fentress decided to make the film, she said that while the film’s title, “Eyes on Mississippi,” was the name of Minor’s column, it also was his strategy – that “the fastest route to change was to get the unvarnished facts of the struggle out. The more eyes on Mississippi, the more the pressure for transformation.”

After Thursday evening, the documentary is set to air on MPB again on Friday at 2 a.m., on Sunday at 2 p.m. and on Dec. 17 at 4 p.m.