The Help by Kathryn Stockett

If you haven’t read the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett, then you definitely need to.  It is a great book that was made into a great movie.

It is set in the early 1960’s when the civil rights movement was in full swing.  As a person of color (usually I’m white but sometimes I’m red; often from all my falls I’m blue and green and black and purple and yellow; occasionally I’m light tan in the summer; and I’m always spotted with all my brown freckles), the book and the movie stirred my soul.  As someone who did not live through those times and those circumstances, I loved the book.

But as the national director of the Association of Black Women Historians, Ida E. Jones, says, “The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers.”  I’m quite sure there were many, many horror stories that could have been placed in the book as is hinted at by the character of Lulabelle Bates in her bold move that precipitated the firing of Constantine as well as the character of one of the angry maids who would not “play along” with Skeeter’s idea of the book.  The Help gives us just a touch of the circumstances of the lives of the people back then.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement.  A brave man among many.