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More handpicked essays just for you.
The role played by women in the civil rights movement
Black maids in 1960
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The movie The Help covers the stories of several house maids in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi and the story is chronological. This movie is about a writer named Skeeter, who is trying to advance her career by writing an excellent story. After returning home from college, she discovers that her maid Constantine, an extremely close friend who helped raise her, has left while she was away, which greatly upsets Skeeter. Skeeter decides to write a book from the perspective of the African American maids who work for white families, also referred to as “the help”. This is against the law and nobody has ever done it before. Because this is a dangerous task, Skeeter can only enlist one maid named Aibileen, who works for one of Skeeter’s best friends, to help her at first. Aibileen tells Skeeter stories about her life to be put into the book. As the two grow closer and continue to make progress on the book, several other maids from around town, including a spunky and …show more content…
However, she does not let this stop her and eventually gets the book published anonymously. The book becomes an instant success and everyone in town is talking about it. The movie ends with Skeeter taking a job offer in New York. Aibileen is fired, but she decides she is going to try to be a writer. This film is historically accurate to some degree. During this time period, many people had the mindset of “separate but equal”. In the movie, Hilly wanted to pass a law that all white families must have a separate bathroom for the help. In this day, people believed that African Americans carried diseases. As a result, schools were not allowed to share books, and people had separate water fountains and restrooms. In the film, Aibileen was kicked off of the bus simply for being black. This is accurate because blacks often had to give up their seats to any white
The characters in this story are some very interesting people. They each lead their own way of life, and have their own interests at heart. Some of the main characters in this novel are: Sarny, Lucy, Miss Laura, Bartlett, Stanley, and Sarny's two children Little Delie, and Tyler. Sarny is the central character in this book. She is clever and knows exactly what to even in the worst of times. She is very emotional though, and can break down and cry when the slightest of things happens. This is perhaps from what she has experienced as a slave earlier on in her life. Sarny is fond of teaching people, as a friend named Nightjohn once taught her. Lucy is Sarny's close friend. She is also quite wise, but is a bit too optimistic at times. She never stops smiling and is very friendly. However, she does help Sarny find her lost children. Miss Laura is a middle-aged woman who lives a very luxurious life. She gives Sarny and Lucy a place to live and offers them employment. She also finds Sarny's children for her. Bartlett works for Miss Laura as well. He is a quiet and patient man who is helpful and quite kind. He was however castrated as a young slave boy, and cannot have children. Stanley is Sarny's second husband, for her first died from being worked to death on the plantation. Stanley is a gentle, big, fun-loving man, but is not intimidated by anything. This leads him to his death when he gets mad at a white man, and is confronted by the Ku Klux Klan. Little Delie and Tyler are Sarny's lost children. After she recovers them, and they grow up, Little Delie starts to like business, while Tyler wants to become a doctor.
The stories that the author told were very insightful to what life was like for an African American living in the south during this time period. First the author pointed out how differently blacks and whites lived. She stated “They owned the whole damn town. The majority of whites had it made in the shade. Living on easy street, they inhabited grand houses ranging from turn-of-the-century clapboards to historics”(pg 35). The blacks in the town didn’t live in these grand homes, they worked in them. Even in today’s time I can drive around, and look at the differences between the living conditions in the areas that are dominated by whites, and the areas that are dominated by blacks. Racial inequalities are still very prevalent In today’s society.
The first major literary feature in this book that creates the story so well is the setting. The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s. This was
The book talks about how there was segregation just about everywhere you looked. In the 1930's the white people had their own restrooms along with their own water fountains and the lacks had their own school and blacks usually did not go to school. They were too busy working on the farm to go to school. The schools only had one room for all of the grades. The children usually walked to school in those days,because they didn't have school buses. They also had to bring their own lunch to school in lunch pails. Today children ride school buses to school. It would kill us if we had to walk to school.We are not use to that much exercise. Also today they serve us lunch in the cafeterias. Although it it is not that good at least they try. They have to work with the limited stuff the school board allows them to buy. Speaking of buses, the blacks would have to sit in the back of the bus and the whites sat in the front. Although,thanks to Rosa Parks, who on day refused to sit in the back of the bus, now blacks can sit wherever they want to sit. Today whites use the same restrooms and water fountains as blacks do. Blacks and whites also attend the same schools. Today schools have different classrooms for every grade.
Janie who continually finds her being defined by other people rather than by herself never feels loved, either by her parents or by anybody else. Her mother abandoned her shortly after giving birth to her. All she had was her grandmother, Nanny, who protected and looked after her when she was a child. But that was it. She was even unaware that she is black until, at age six, she saw a photograph of herself. Her Nanny who was enslaved most of her lifetime only told her that a woman can only be happy when she marries someone who can provide wealth, property, and security to his wife. Nanny knew nothing about love since she never experienced it. She regarded that matter as unnecessary for her as well as for Janie. And for that reason, when Janie was about to enter her womanhood in searching for that love, Nanny forced her to marry Mr. Logan Killicks, a much older man that can offer Janie the protection and security, plus a sixty-acre potato farm. Although Janie in her heart never approves what her Nanny forced her to do, she did it anyway. She convinced herself that by the time she became Mrs. Killick, she would get that love, which turned out to be wrong.
During the early 1900’s, the time period in which the story took place, racism was rampant throughout the entire nation. While African Americans technically were equal by law, they were anything but, in action. Laws such as “separate but equal” were used to justify blatant discrimination, laws that were coined as “Jim Crow Laws.” (Wikipedia,
The Imitation of Life and The Help are both movies that revolve around black maids helping white families take care of their children and houses. In The Imitation of Life, Bea is a single mother raising her daughter, Jessie, while also trying to find a stable job to support her family. This is when Delilah shows up, with her daughter, Peola, asking for a room to stay in in exchange for a job that involves taking care of Jessie and Peola and keeping the house in order. In The Help, Skeeter, an up and coming journalist during the civil rights movement, heads home to Mississippi after graduating college to find a job writing for the local newspaper. Upon her return she finds that her old maid was unfairly let go and this encourages her to write
Mary Mebane used her own experience on the bus to show how segregation affected her life. Mary Mebane points out, white people “could sit anywhere they choose, even in the colored section. Only the black passengers had to obey segregation laws.” When Mebane was young, she saw a conflict on the bus. The driver asked a black person who sat in the ‘no-man’s-land’ to move back to colored section to give the seat for the white person who was standing on the bus because the bus was full. Segregation on the bus represented how white people unequally treat black people. When black people refused this driver to move, the driver try to send them to police. Black people were living in the shadow of racism and segregation at that time. However, that situation still affects school system and community now. Mebane asserts, “It was a world without option.” Black people have lower economic and social status because they are restricted to a small box because of segregation. “In Six Decades After Brown Ruling, in US Schools Still Segregated”, Dexter Mullins claims that in some schools like Valley West Elementary School in Houston, about 90% of people are not white people. These kinds of schools do not have enough funds to support adequate school resource to these students, and these students have lower opportunities to contact with cultural diversity. Both reasons negatively impact on the
During the early 1960 's, Jim Crow Laws were conclusively abolished and discrimination in public places was made illegal. This included the elimination of separate bathrooms for white and black people. Many Caucasians did not agree with this new rules, and they developed ways to get around them. In the novel “The Help,” Miss Hilly, a very influential white woman, pounded the idea of separate bathrooms for the help to her friend, Miss Leefolt. She called it the “Home Health Sanitation Initiative.” Her reason was that the help were black women
The Help is a novel written by Kathryn Stockett and is tells the story about black maids who work for white homeowners during the early 1960s. Within the novel gives a first person view of their lives by conveying to the reader the struggles that the maids in the novel had to experience. The novel continues with a white woman named Skeeter who wants to write a novel based upon the experience that the maids have to go through. While at first, many maids were reluctant to speak with Skeeter, two maids shared their experiences with Skeeter. One of these maids is named Minny Jackson, who provides many stories that she went through with her employers and the many struggles that she has to face.
The story of how Cally, Faye’s great great grandmother a newly freed slave had gotten hold of the plantation after the Civil War and how the family had held onto it through Jim Crow, the Depression, the World Wards, and the Reconstruction. Now that Faye is the owner of the plantation, she finds that the property taxes have gotten too high for her to sustain. But there is one thing she could do to save the plantation and the legacy of her family. With the plantation full of artifacts, she sets out to dig for them, which she believes she would get a good price for in the black market. However, instead of finding arrowheads and potsherds, she stumbles onto the shattered skull of a woman with a Jackie Kennedy like earing near the head. Faye is in a dilemma. If she goes to the police, she risks her illegal artifact digging activities being exposed, which would lead to the loss of Joyeuse and possible jail time. She does not intend to lose the plantation and knows that she has only one option – investigate the murder and history of the woman herself. What she does not know is that the killer still lurks and is ready to murder anyone that threatens to expose his dark
One of the main issues in the story was that using a bathroom that a black person used was not healthy for whites. In the book, it was a fact that you could catch a disease if you did. It really symbolizes what is wrong with the white community in Mississippi in the 60’s. A man was beaten for accidentally using a white bathroom. Little Mae Mobley gets spanking for using Aibeleen's bathroom.
In the film The Matrix (1999) in the scene “The Two Pills” help characters and relationships are developed and continuation of the films narrative through various components of cinematography and mise-en-scène. Most notable in The Matrix is the use of costuming, sound effects, props, setting and camera movement. Through the use of these techniques the audience becomes more involved in the narrative as Neo meets Morpheus for the first time and is given the opportunity to learn the secrets of the matrix.
The Help chronicles a recent college graduate named Skeeter, who secretly writes a book exposing the treatment of black maids by white affluent women. The story takes place in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The death of Medgar Evers triggers racial tension and gives the maids of Jackson the courage to retell their personal stories of injustice endured over the years. The movie depicts the frustration of the maids with their female employers and what their lives were like cleaning, cooking, and raising their bosses’ children. The Help shines a light on the racial and social injustice of maids during the era of Jim Crow Laws, illustrating how white women of a privileged society discriminated not only against black women, but also against their own race. The movie examines a very basic principle: the ethical treatment of other human beings.
“Boyhood” is a 2014 American coming-of-age drama film, written and directed by Richard Linklater, and starring Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, and Ethan Hawke. Filmed from 2002 to 2013, Boyhood depicts the childhood and adolescence of Mason Evans, Jr. (Coltrane) from ages six to eighteen as he grows up in Texas with divorced parents (Arquette and Hawke) Richard Linklater’s very own daughter Lorelei plays Mason's sister, Samantha. For the most part of the movie it centrals around Mason Jr journey of being a boy in first grade to a man going of to college. In the second shot of the movie “Boyhood” it doubles as the movie’s poster. With a young boy who is later intenfy as Mason Jr., just laying on the grass staring at the