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The Civil Rights Movement In Kathryn Stockett's The Help

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The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s helped change the way colored people were treated in America and positively shaped America in the way civil rights and race issues were dealt with. In The Help, Kathryn Stockett focuses on civil rights as the main social and political issue by using different literary elements such as parallelism and different points of view to show contradicting sides of one story as well as properly explain from different narratives. Moreover, she also uses various events and conflicts among characters to show segregation, which was a pivotal cause of the movement and acts that took place. Stockett uses distinct parallelism between the white and black communities in Jackson, Mississippi when Medgar Evers was shot, …show more content…

After slavery ended, Jim Crow laws were created and many public places were segregated. This kept a clear division between the two races. People took it very seriously and were angered when members of the contrasting race used the wrong facility. Segregated bathrooms were a key representation in The Help and often were the main reason for conflict to arise. When Louvenia’s grandson, Robert accidentally uses a “whites only” bathroom, he is blinded and beaten up, causing lots of attention to the situation by people who were angry yet could not speak up against it in fear of the same thing happening to them. When Hilly pushes the idea for her bathroom initiative of having a separate bathroom for the help in each house, Skeeter compares it to Jim Crow laws by saying, “... 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” (Stockett 203). Even though Hilly tried to hide the racism in her desire for the “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” (Stockett 60) by talking about “different diseases,” it represents how people similar to Hilly accepted and praised Jim Crow laws that kept both races clearly

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In the book The Help, the Medgar Evers’ Assassination is a crucial historical element portrayed. In the 1960’s segregation was a significant deal that affected many lives. During this time period many historical events were in duration for example, Martin Luther King, Jim Crow Laws, Rosa Parks, and the March to Washington are just a few to name. The Medgar Evers’ assassination was an important historic element in American history, was portrayed in the novel The Help, and was presented differently in the novel. Medgar Evers’ was a black civil-rights activist who received national attention in the civil rights movement (Britannica).

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Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, attests to the hateful and cruel reality that is the life of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi circa the 1960’s. Stockett writes many anecdotes surrounding the relationship between Constantine, an African American maid, and the child she cares for, Skeeter. Skeeter reflects upon a memory of Constantine and

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Unfortunately, even though Ms. Hilly’s help worked hard and did as they were told, she still did not give them the light of day. To put it simply, Ms. Hilly did not see colored people as equals. For example, “’All these houses they’re building without maid’s quarters? It’s just plain dangerous. Everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do...

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The Help (2011) directed by Tate Taylor, is an inspirational, courageous and empowering story about Southern women in the 1960s. It's the story of the help: the black maids of Jackson, Mississippi, and the relationship with their white employers. The central theme of the film is courage, and how the characters embrace courage to overcome obstacles and fight for social justice. Whether it is their ability to deviate from in-group norms, or overcome fear, courage is essential throughout the characters' journeys. In this essay, I will analyse the situations endured by the characters, and how they respond to these situations with courage.

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The social groups focused on in this novel are white housewives, whose group consists of Skeeter, the privileged daughter of a farmer, who just returned from college, and “the help” or a group of maids who are of course of African American decent. The help is forced to obey their irrationally needy bosses, cooking for them, cleaning for them, and even raising their children, only to be treated inhumanely and unfairly by petty housewives. For example, one of the housewives, Hilly Holbrook, a seemingly conflicting character alone, was very suggestive of a bathroom act being enforced, which made it mandatory that every home have a separate bathroom for its help as a “safety precaution” because they could transmit diseases through their bodily functions. In situations like these, African Americans were very alienated, and it really displayed the gap in reality for the two groups. This in turn caused conflict between them, as African Americans were looked down at by whites and the whites were seen as threatening and wicked minded by African Americans.

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1.0 INTRODUCTION The Help is an example of American drama film. It was released in August 9, 2011 and its length was 146 minutes and directed by Tate Taylor. The film was adapted to a novel, where there has been a long tradition of African- American women serving as “The Help” for upper-middle class white woman and their families. Descriptions of historical events of the early activities of thecivil rights movement are peppered throughout the novel, as are interactions between the maids and their white employers.

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