Ask schools not to use "The Help" as a tool to study the Civil Rights Movement

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Patty Fox
7 years ago
This is the worst movie and has absolutely nothing to so with civil rights nor any truth to how Black women treated their employers.
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Murray McPhie
7 years ago
Because the cruel and deliberate lack of justice facing African Americans at that time is glossed over or omitted. As a white person, I believe African Americans are owed the truth about Civil Rights.
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Dewey Barksdale
7 years ago
Civil rights are important but this story is not the right medium.
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Dave Garofalo
7 years ago
A perfectly nice story, but it reduces a horrifying part of American history into an after-school special. Pre-civil rights, minorities were treated in a shocking, abhorrent, and often violent, way. While this book itself probably did not intend to sugarcoat that, others are using the book for that purpose.

Some powerful people in this country, people who have control over school curricula, seek to downplay both past and present racism by manipulating what our children our taught. So "slavery" is referred to as the "triangle trade", and this country's shameful history of racism and bigotry is doused in perfume, or wallpapered over completely, by using books like The Help to, ostensibly, describe what it was like. "We'll stop teaching children about racism as it existed and replace it with a watered-down version", the logic goes, "and kids will grow up thinking it wasn't such a bad deal." It's downright Orwellian.

Let's stop it.
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Keva Anderson
7 years ago
Because the truth is important to me.
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Melvin Lindsey
7 years ago
The phrase, "the dumbing down of America" has never been more apt than in this example of education in America. You'd get a more indepth education on the reality of the American Civil Rights Movement in Finland than here in this country.
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Gregory Farrell
7 years ago
Because it stereotypes racial relations in a bad way.
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Sheila Huff
7 years ago
It is highly insulting to use this movie as a representation of the Civil Rights Movement. In the film, Blacks speak "broken English;" are uneducated; fear Whites; etc. I was a young adult during this era, and know occurred. School Districts should contact the NAACP for an appropriate Reading List, or for a list of accurate films. Thank you.
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Keryl McCord
7 years ago
Really. This is the best they can do? There are so many other books to read, Sula, The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, A Raisin in the Sun, Five Smooth Stones, I could go on and on. The Help is at the bottom of the list, if it makes the list at all.
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Darlyne Baugh
7 years ago
The story is too benign for what truly occurred and it's impact on women of color.
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