Katherine Stockett's The Help

The Help It was a cool August night in 1955 in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and sirens were blaring, World War II veteran, Lamar Smith had just been shot. This is only one of the several examples that help prove Katherine Stockett’s novel, “The Help” is historically accurate in the ways it demonstrates housewives, racial diseases and slurs, and white violence against African-Americans.

Housewives or “homemakers” was the main profession of white women in the ‘60s, although, they truthfully didn’t do anything. The “weak housewife was the one who hired help and claimed all the work and gave the help no credit.” White women would sit at home, have bridge club, go to events, and do their hair, but rarely to never did they pick up a rag and shine their

Therefore, came the Jim Crow Laws, and “baths and lockers of negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building,” because they were afraid of getting diseases. When hired as maids and “help” for white people, “the most black domestic workers had to worry about was whether the petty white ladies would let them use the bathroom indoors”. Even newspaper articles were coming out with separate bathrooms for them, saying, “99% of all colored diseases are carried in the urine, whites can become permanently disabled by nearly all of these diseases because we lack immunizes coloreds carry in their darker pigmentation.” Blacks stopped going to restaurants and “stopped buying certain soft drinks and fast foods after hearing rumors, fully believed by some, that there were ingredients in it to sterilize black men.” By the mid-1960’s, “the south was a fully segregated society. Everything from schools, restaurants, hotels, train cars, waiting rooms, elevators, public bathrooms, colleges, hospitals, cemetery, swimming pools, drinking fountains, prisons, and even churches were for white or blacks but never for

The most violence happened within 1955-1968. In May of 1955 “Reverend George Lee, vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and NAACP worker, was shot in the face and killed for urging blacks in the Mississippi Delta to vote.” Later that year in August “Lamar Smith, 63-year-old farmer and World War II veteran, was shot in cold blood on the crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging blacks to vote. In Local People, John Dittmer wrote, ‘although the sheriff saw a white man leaving the scene covered with blood, no one admitted to having witnessed the shooting’ and ‘the killer went free.’” White men were very violent towards black for several unknown reasons, “national media coverage of violence – even murder – directed toward blacks had outraged the American public.” In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus allowed integration of Little Rock’s Central High School by barring nine new black students who came to be known as “The Little Rock Nine,” fourteen-year-old Carlotta Walls the youngest of them. She describes the experience and “painful” and that the students fell into three groups: those who tormented her and the other black students; those who sympathized with them; and those who silently ignored the way that they were treated. Carlotta went to that high school for all four years, and four weeks before graduation, a bomb exploded in her