Racism And Segregation In Mississippi

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Can you imagine a time where the color of your skin defined you? Believe it or not a time like this is in the existed history of the United States. Day to day activities were limited because of the ethnicity of a person. To make it worse, for a long time no one tried to stop it. The Help took place in Jackson, Mississippi. Mississippi is a southern state and at the time the southern states were the worst about segregation. Stockett, the author, really brought to life how racism and segregation affected people, making them scared to speak up. Throughout the book the issue of race was very obvious. Segregation was natural for the time, which is awful to think about. Racism was very prominent in all aspects of African Americans lives. The ladies in the book, called the “help”, were …show more content…

The white ladies they worked for were very racist. All the ladies had a separate bathroom for the servant. The bathroom was outside of the house and not very nice. “I realize, like a shell cracking open in my head, there’s no difference between these government laws and Hilly building Aibileen a bathroom in the garage, except ten minutes’ worth of signatures in the state capital.” The white housewives, especially Miss Hilly, degraded the black women, calling them “unclean and inferior”. They said black people carried diseases that white people didn’t have. The white women didn’t let the maids sit at their table, eat with them, or touch them. The maids were however able to touch the white ladies children. The maids practically raised their kids, until they send them off to school. At school the