Racism in the South – “The Help” – Read It or Watch It!

Thankfully, first-time author Kathryn Stockett did not give up when her novel “The Help,” was rejected 60 times. When someone finally had the wisdom to recognize its worth, and it was published in 2009, the book sold more than three million copies and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.

The brilliantly-written, masterfully-plotted book is based on Stockett’s own white, Christian, southern upbringing and her close relationship with the family maid who died when she was 16.  Years after moving to New York City, Stockett decided to write about that relationship that was so intensely influential in her life. It took five years for her to paint a vivid picture of the humiliation black maids in Jackson, Mississippi endured in the early 1960s by their white employers who trusted them to raise their children, but often times not to polish the silver.

In 2011, two-and-a-half years after the book was published, the film came out, and Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard, Allison Janney, Cicely Tyson, and Sissy Spacek brought the characters to life on the big screen.

When the green light was given for the book to be made into a movie, Kathryn Stockett reached out to Tate Taylor, her childhood friend in Jackson, Mississippi, who also grew up having a black maid. She wanted him to be the screenwriter and director of the film.

Taylor had only directed one small, unheard of, independent film that only grossed about $6,500 at the box office. He didn’t have the credentials to direct such a magnitude of stars in a much anticipated DreamWorks movie. Though Stockett was advised to choose another director, she remained adamant, saying no one else knew the story like he did.

Another first-timer associated with the film is lifestyle TV host, Nate Berkus who came on board as an executive producer before the book was even published. It was Nate who helped find the necessary funding to make the film.

“I was really nervous because this was my first time working in movies, but now that I’ve seen the finished film I’m elated,” Nate said. “We were all ecstatic when the book hit No. 1 on the New York Times, but that didn’t mean it would automatically become the film Kathryn envisioned. When a great book makes it to the screen as a great movie, it’s no small miracle.”

LIFE LESSON: Kathryn Stockett was a first-time author; Tate Taylor was in essence a first-time director; and Nate Berkus was a first-time producer. Hats off to them for showing everyone that we are capable of going beyond what we think we can do. Believe in yourself and be willing to bring your gifts to the table, no matter how the table is set.

I had the opportunity to interview two great actresses who appear in the film. Allison Janney, best known for her role on The West Wing, played Skeeter’s mom, Charlotte. And the legendary actress, Miss Cicely Tyson, played Skeeter’s beloved nanny Constantine. Both women are remarkable.

The Help shines a light on the brazen hubris certain human beings possess, but it is told with such warmth and humor that along with feeling anger, sadness and shame, you find yourself laughing, weeping, and ultimately cheering when a sisterhood of suppressed, downtrodden, courageous women come together and find their voice at a very dangerous time, when laws are being challenged and change forced Southerners to treat black people as equals.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The Help,” is told from the perspective of three women:

Minny Jackson—played by Octavia Spencer, who won an Oscar for the role—is a great cook and possibly the sassiest maid in Mississippi. Quick to speak her mind, Minny’s back-talk has cost her many jobs. In addition to the humiliation Minny receives at the hands of her white employers, she also puts up with her husband’s abuse at home. Then one day, Aibileen risks her own job to help Minny find a position with a new woman in town who has her own dark secrets.

Aibileen Clark—played by Viola Davis, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role—is a wise and loving maid who has given her heart to the 17 white babies she raised in her lifetime. But Aibileen’s world changed the day her only child, her 24-year old son was killed in a work-related accident. It took five months before Aibileen could lift herself out of bed and go to work for Mrs. Elizabeth Leefolt, a young white woman who just gave birth to her first child, a baby girl named Mae Mobley. Two years later Mae Mobley clings to Aibileen as her maternal figure, while she shies away from her neglectful, self-absorbed mother.

Then there is Miss Eugenia “Skeeter” Pheland, a young white girl whose family owns a cotton plantation that employs many black field hands—played by Emma Stone. After graduating from college, Skeeter comes back home to Jackson with dreams of becoming a writer, while her mother’s dream is for her daughter to get married.

Skeeter is devastated when she learns her beloved Constantine, the maid who raised her, has abruptly vanished. The story’s subplot has her trying to uncover the real reason despite her mother’s efforts to keep the truth from her.

Then one day during their weekly bridge game, Skeeter’s friend, the obnoxious Hilly Holbrook—played by Bryce Dallas Howard—starts campaigning for white households to have a separate bathroom built for their “colored” help to use, and Skeeter, the only color-blind girl in the group, begins to notice the abuse her friends inflict upon their maids.

That’s when she decides to reveal the truth to the world from the maids’ perspectives by writing a book about it. In the library she comes across a 25 page “Compilation of Jim Crow Laws.”

A Few Laws That Denied Blacks Equal Rights

• No person shall require any white female to nurse in wards or rooms in which negro men are placed.
• It is hereby forever prohibited for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void and punishable by imprisonment not exceeding 12 months or by a fine not exceeding $500 (which may as well have been a million dollars to a black person back then).
• The officer in charge shall not bury any colored persons upon ground used for the burial of white persons.
• Negroes and whites are not allowed to share water fountains, movie houses, public restrooms, grocery stores, ballparks, phone booths, circus shows. Negroes cannot use the same pharmacy or buy postage stamps at the same window as white folks.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.”

– Pearl S. Buck

“Though Skeeter is eager to expose the truth, the maids won’t talk with her. They are afraid of losing their jobs or even worse. Negros have been lynched in Mississippi. While The Help is fiction, it’s loosely interwoven with fact, like the death of Medgar Evans—the real-life civil rights activist with the NAACP, who was shot and killed by a member of the KKK on June 12, 1963 in the same Jackson, Mississippi neighborhood where Aibileen and Minnie live.

It takes time and patience for Skeeter to gain the trust of a dozen maids, who in the end decide to break the unspoken code of rules and risk everything by sharing secrets about their employers with a white woman. Friendships are lost, and new and unlikely ones are forged as a new sisterhood emerges that threatens to expose the white ladies of Jackson.

The Help touches you in that core place where compassion and human decency reside. Toward the end of the book, I could only read one page a night trying to delay saying goodbye to the characters I had come to love.

The Freedom Riders

Coincidentally, or perhaps by design, The Help was released three months after the 50^th anniversary of the Freedom Riders—when 400 black and white men and women risked their lives by participating in a bold and dangerous experiment designed to awaken the conscience of a complacent nation. Beginning on May 4, 1961, the Freedom Riders challenged the mores of a racially segregated society by boarding a Greyhound bus in a simple but daring plan to violate segregation laws. Their tactic was to have at least one interracial couple sit next to each other and at least one black Freedom Rider sit in the front of the bus.

Here is a clip from the two hour documentary “Freedom Riders,” which was released in May 2011.

The Freedom Riders planned to travel through Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, ending with a rally in New Orleans, Louisiana.

An angry mob of Klu Klux Klansmen carrying baseball bats, iron pipes and bicycle chains firebombed the first of the two buses in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama and viciously beat the riders when they tried to escape the smoke and flames.

When reports of the bus burning and beatings reached U.S Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he urged the Freedom Riders to hold back, but there was no stopping this movement of people who had been suppressed for too long.

Under intense pressure from the Kennedy administration, Alabama Governor John Patterson reluctantly promised to protect the bus from KKK mobs and snipers on the road between Birmingham and Montgomery. But once the bus reached the Montgomery city limits, the Highway Patrol abandoned them. At the bus station, a mob waited for them and once again beat the Freedom Riders with bats and pipes, while the local police allowed the beatings to go on uninterrupted.

Behind the scenes, the Kennedy administration arranged a deal with the governors of Alabama and Mississippi. The governors agreed that state police and the National Guard would protect the Riders from mob violence (thereby ending embarrassing media coverage of bloody lawlessness) and, in return, the local police would be allowed to arrest the Freedom Riders for violating segregation ordinances when the buses arrived at depots, even though such arrests violated a Supreme Court decision.

During the summer of 1961, Freedom Riders also campaigned against other forms of racial discrimination and sat together in segregated restaurants, lunch counters and hotels.

That was what was going on in Kathryn Stockett’s hometown of Jackson, Mississippi where her characters Aibileen and Minnie and the other black maids lived in silence and fear.

LIFE LESSON: Change only comes when people are willing to stand up for what they believe in. It took tremendous courage for the Freedom Riders to do what they did. On the backs of those brave people, both black and white, things changed for the better.

On September 22, 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) bowed to pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and issued orders to take down all Jim Crow signs at all bus depots and train stations in the south. Colored and white signs came down in the terminals and separate drinking fountains, toilets and waiting rooms were consolidated, while lunch counters began serving people regardless of race.

That white uniform was her ‘pass’ to get into white places with us – the grocery store, the state fair, the movies. Even though this was the 70s and the segregation laws had changed, the ‘rules’ had not.”

– Kathryn Stockett – Author of “The Help”

While we’ve come a long way from those terrible days, many people in America are still filled with hatred and prejudice. On June 26, 2011 a video camera caught seven white teenagers in Mississippi committing a gruesome hate crime that left 49-year-old James Craig Anderson dead. The suspects reportedly left a Hinds County, Mississippi party with the intention of finding a black victim. They drove to a nearby predominantly black area of Jackson, where they attacked Anderson, the first black man they saw upon exiting the highway.

The incident was made available to CNN and shows a group of teens pulling into a parking lot and immediately attacking Anderson. The graphic images show them pummeling him with punches and kicks. It ends with shocking, detailed footage of one of the teens, identified as 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon, Jr., driving his Ford F250 pickup truck over Anderson as he sought to walk away from the scene of the attack.

Two teens were held for allegedly beating Anderson repeatedly and yelling racial epithets, including “White Power,” according to witnesses.

“This was a crime of hate. James Craig Anderson was murdered because he was black,” Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith told CNN.

Deryl Dedmon, John Aaron Rice, and Dylan Wade Butler were charged with murder. The three pleaded guilty in March 2012 to one count of conspiracy and one count of committing a hate crime. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves sentenced Dedmon to 50 years and five years to be served concurrently; Rice to 18 ½ years and five years to be served concurrently; and Butler to seven years and five years to be served concurrently. None of them are eligible for probation.

LIFE LESSON: What causes someone to hate so intensely? There is discrimination all around us in different degrees. There is prejudice against Latinos, women, gays. obese people, the handicapped, or the elderly. We need to be more aware and take the time to perform small, random acts of kindness that lets that stranger know that he or she is a worthwhile human being.

Even in the darkest darkness, there is evidence that love can overcome evil and change someone’s heart.

Here is a clip showing Elwin Wilson, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, who reunited with Congressman John Lewis from Georgia, one of the Freedom Riders he attacked 48 years earlier. It is a touching moment that offers some hope for the future of mankind.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

– Mark Twain

When you see The Help, my advice is don’t sit in judgement and compare it to the book or real life events. Don’t criticize, don’t be small-minded and stingy with your praise. It shows us that progress has been made since the 1960s, but there is still a long way to go toward equality for all.

It was my pleasure interviewing Allison Janney and Miss Cicely Tyson. Sadly Miss Tyson passed away on January 28, 2021. She was such an extraordinary legend.

I know you’ll enjoy reading the full article.