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The Civil Rights Movement In Kathryn Stockett's The Help

821 Words4 Pages

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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