"The Help" and the Struggle for African American Equality

         In school today, we are all learning more and more about racism and inequality in the past, and specs of it in the present. In the movie,"The Help," I witnessed incidents of unfair treatment towards colored people.
       One incident that occurred was the wages colored maids would make in a month, that couldn't support their families. Maid owners could control wages as well, which forced maids to take the oppression from their employers. Maid owners would treat their maids like dogs, and in the movie "The Help" the maids were more motherly-role to the children than their genetic blood-Mothers. Maids would have to deal with listening to racist and unfair talks when there was gatherings at a white family's house.
       Another incident I witnessed from "The Help," was that the white women would be disgusted when the colored maids would use their restrooms. The white people would spread false rumors such as,"black people carried diseases," so they could not use their restrooms. One of the women tried passing a house requirement that required any homes with a maid to have a separate bathroom built for the maids. In contrast, that same person that passed the law was embarrassed later on in the movie and put in the newspaper.
      Something that really made me feel bad about was the kids of the African American maids and the small hope for living a better life. Earlier in the beginning of the movie, one of the maids is interviewed and one of the questions went like this,"Do you have any other dreams besides being a maid?" It left the made speechless. The made said she also knew that she would be a maid when she grew up, it rules out everything else she should be able to do. She had no other intentions besides being a maid, restricting the rights given to us: Life, liberty, freedom. She couldn't dream being anything else, this type of thinking passes on to the children which made me feel bad for them.
      In the movie,"The Help," a group of maids were interviewed to tell stories of oppression and unfair treatment they deal with from their employers. They revealed their everyday struggle and eventually their stories were published into a book for the world to get a taste of what was happening in Jackson, Mississippi.