The Help By Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett provides insight on a time in American history when African American civil rights were neglected because of the pigment of their skin. An entire ethnic group of people were spurned throughout the 1960s and this novel reveals how they were treated by white society, including a closer look at their everyday lives. Not to mention, many people with white skin were heinously threatened for associating with black culture, which is also represented in this book. Throughout this story, three narrators of different colors and backgrounds tell their stories of segregation in the workforce and in their social groups. Race affected the lives of people in this story’s time period by limiting the black society’s economical status

African Americans were not allowed to share or experience common activities like going to the same movie theater as white people and they were not even allowed to share the same items like the books they read at their separated schools. A phrase that represented blacks at this time is “have not always been accorded full citizenship rights in the American Republic” meaning that black people were not welcome to civil rights as white people were (Garraty and Foner 1991). Black people for 58 years were considered “separate but equal” due to the Plessy v. Ferguson case that distinguished the two races until the Brown V. Board of Education case in 1954 repudiated this term to provide more equal grounds (History.com Staff Plessy 2009). Though this would seem to make life more fair for African Americans, the infamous Jim Crow laws still stood, segregating blacks from whites. In the novel, Miss Skeeter finds a copy of these Jim Crow laws in a public library and is intrigued by the rules set to regulate black people’s lives (Stockett 202). The laws said things such as, “No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls” (Stockett 202). After reading the pamphlet about these laws, Miss Skeeter notices a resemblance between the horrendous Jim

The author demonstrates this by following the lives of two black women who know past day Mississippi and what the people there are capable of, which is not typically care for colored women. At this time in America, being a black woman was practically the bottom of the pot when it came to segregation. For starters, women white or black were not allowed to vote until 1920 when Women’s Suffrage ended, supplying them with this birth given right (Dolton 2017). Though this unequivocally did not give black women the right to vote (nor did it give black men the right to vote). On the other hand, this did give white society just another advantage by segregating the two races unequally. Stockett manages to make this evident in the story by mentioning that Aibileen’s cousin’s car is burned up indiscriminately by a white person because she drove to the voting station (Stockett 120). This gave white society just another advantage by segregating the two races unequally. Like it says in the Black Women Archives, “...women were still excluded,” this being during this time period black women were still excluded even though white women were gaining more and more rights (History.com Staff 2009). Miss Skeeter knows this is the hard truth and she wishes to gain support for black women throughout the nation. That is her main reason for writing and having her version of The Help