The Help Movie Essay

Introduction Many people are or have become ignorant to the fact that racism still exists. They see racism on the news, hear about racism on the radio and from their families and friends, yet still don’t accept the fact that African Americans are still being held back from prospering by our very own American government. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander elaborates on the still very existing discrimination of colored people, especially of African Americans. She proves to us that the idea of “slavery” is being kept alive but in a new way till this very day.

Considering the arguments discussed throughout the chapters of my analysis, the history and evolution of African Americans will always intertwine with society, since the slavery era. This thesis outlined the African American stereotypes and if they’ve progressed over time. This research also observed how the film industry continued to change negative stereotypes into accurate representations of African American culture and experiences. D. W. Griffith’s film changed the history of films and remains the original foundation of Hollywood cinema, even though, it is the most racist film in history. The Birth of a Nation’s narrative assembles negative black stereotypes to empower white supremacy, always affecting the cinema’s engraving of race.

Specifically, Zora Neale Hurston celebrated African American culture in a unique way by using authentic African American dialect and raw storytelling. The dialect used in the second paragraph of the story gives ample insight into the racial tension of that era, “Setting up dere looking dem white folks right in de face! They’s gowine lynch you, yet.” Hurston uses her grandmother’s African American dialect to celebrate her culture and to accent the story.

African American literature began to be defined and analyzed. Toni Morrison is the best known writer of this phase; she is a living proof that black women succeeded in this phase as novelists, poets, writers and

(King, 49). In the world today there are many ways people are being looked down upon including their religious beliefs, having a disability, or a person’s financial state. Although it has been fifty-five years since his famous speech, there is still injustice today. This injustice is seen in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Help (2012), as directed by Tate Taylor, is a story of African American servants in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi and their feelings towards the people they worked for. The film is narrated by the convincing housemaid Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and follows the story of a hometown writer Eugenia 'Skeeter' Phelan (Emma Stone) and the roles they both play in a publishing a truth-be-told testimony about the treatment of African-Americans in Jackson. Aibileen Clark does a good job showing both sides of the civil rights debate, however, she lacks a certain amount of detail when it comes to the whites views, especially the white husbands. The story is naturally biased towards the housemaids but this does not necessarily take away from the plot of the story. Throughout the film, the maids are portrayed as the underdogs and this plays into the final conclusions very well.

Langston Hughes was born February 1st, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. In the roaring 20’s he started writing professionally and was essential in portraying black life in America. Hughes grew up in a time of social injustice involving the treatment of minorities (specifically African Americans). As his career went on the Harlem Renaissance became a major movement in which he was essential to.

This quote shows the touching and emotional part of how the Negroes at this time is not living the life they were promised about 100 years later. Martin Luther King pulls with your heart strings to show you the emotional part of how the racism is affecting people therefore makes his speech powerful in the audience’s eyes and if it is powerful enough, which it is, the speech will have an effect on the audience’s perspective. Writers who

Alice Walker was able to use symbolism to represent the families of heritage on of living using in Everyday Use. In the short novel Alice Walker talks about the life and struggles of black women. As she was the eighth child of sharecropper parents. She grew up in the midst of violent racism and poverty which was influenced her later writings. After graduating from high school in 1961 she got a scholarship for Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she stayed for two years and wrote her first novel which was published in

Douglass understood this after the end of the Civil war, when blacks were treated just as poorly by whites in the south, and through the passage of the Jim Crow laws and segregation. However, he instead of fighting for the black vote, supported women’s suffrage. He even spoke on several occasions for Suffragette and friend Susan B. Anthony. Douglass understood that with more voters out there, albeit white, female, voters, this would pave the way for the eventual black

“Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston, Zora Neale” The book “Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston”, was written during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a period of time between the end of World War 1 and the middle of the 1920s where the cultural, social, and artistic explosion took place. Harlem was considered a cultural center for the artist, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars (Jim Crow). This book was the first novel to be written by a black woman in that Era.

On Tuesday, October 6th, “The William & Stephanie Clohesy Documentary Film Series” brought American film director, Dawn Porter, to discuss her documentary Spies of the Mississippi to UNI students. This paper not only discusses the documentary, but also goes through each step of the critical process to make an informed judgment about it. Description Spies of the Mississippi is based in the mid-1900s during the civil rights era in the southernmost state of Mississippi. It was a time when races were segregated and equality was desired by the black community. Change was not only wanted, but was fought for through various organizations, such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

This amazing essay is on the differences and the similarities of the wonderful book To Kill a Mockingbird and the spectacular movie The Help. To Kill a Mockingbird was based in the 1930’s when they had just made the dreadful slavery of blacks and colored people illegal. The Help was in the 1960s and the colored people have had right for a few decades now but they still faced discrimination, prejudice people, and racism everyday.

Hidden Figures is an inordinate movie that gives us the lesson that everybody has the potential to do great things if they work hard towards those things. In this movie, an exceptional girl named Katherine is given the chance to go to an extraordinary school so that she can get the education that she needs to fulfill her dream and become an engineer at NASA. The movie showcases the struggles, hard-work, and discrimination that she has to go through while working at NASA. Although some examples of racism are more easily noticeable than others in the movie, all of them show that many Americans did not particularly approve of African-Americans in the mid-1900s.