The Real Help

              Recently I re-read the book, "The Help." Made into a major motion picture a year or so ago, "The Help" has become a favored book club read and important book for showing civil rights issues in the mainstream media on the surface, and at first I agreed with that. However, when I re-read the book and looked at some articles on the book, I noticed something different about the book, that it may not be the civil rights darling that I thought it.
               The problem, I and many others, found with the book was that although it was proclaimed to be about black maids in the conservative south essentially liberating themselves and show their strength and bravery, the book only showed that this could happen if a white person stepped in to help. Aibeleen doesn't give any serious thought to changing her life or standing up for herself until Skeeter (a white lady) comes in with the idea for a book exposing the treatment of maids in Jackson, Mississippi. The book shows the struggle for civil rights as being brought about by a white lady, and implies exactly the opposite of the civil rights movement: that african americans cannot help themselves to justice.
              This disconcerted me as the media had marketed as something totally different, and everyone from the Oscar's to the "New York Times" had heralded it as an important book. It made me think about the media today, it doesn't seem to look very deeply into what it is telling us. Based on a lot of what I've read, the media doesn't make you think, it makes you think about what it wants you to think. And this, I believe, is wrong.

Claudette Colvin: An Unheard Shout

         Recently I finished the book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose. I had been devoid of reading material after I finished the books on my kindle and was wanting for some new stories to sweep me up into their fantastical and implausible world where everything turns right in the end and the characters either always know exactly what to say or turn muteness and societal awkwardness into something worth reading about. I picked up this book thinking that it was the fictional antidote to my boredom but found something entirely different. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice was about a civil rights figure, a pioneer, who stood up for her rights and spurred the segregated African American community of Montgomery Alabama by refusing to . And all at the age of 16. However, Colvin did not stop there, even after facing a difficult teenage pregnancy with a married man, Colvin struck out at segregation again when she was asked by lawyer Fred Gray to testify in the groundbreaking trial Browder vs. Gayle. I was shocked. It wasn't because I had thought the book to be fictional, but because I had never heard of her before.
              In Social Studies lessons on segregation and the civil rights movement Rosa Parks is the name most referred to, or even little Ruby Bridges, commonly known as the first black child to attend a white school. I have admired these people all my life, but Claudette Colvin was a teenager like myself and broke barriers 9 months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. I think the reason why Colvin is so unknown today is because she was a teenager. Teenagers were known to be unruly and irrational. Therefore it was easy for white people to ignore as just another rash act by a black teenager rather than a formal protest for her rights and a stand for her people. While this was the reason that many whites ignored it, I also believe that the african american community did not want a teenager at the face of their civil rights movement as teenagers are changeable and not recognized as conscious and educated adults that a court of law might take seriously. As Hoose states in the book, "{Rosa Parks} wasn't a teenager....{or} feisty and emotional as Claudette was rumored to be..." Both of these subtle motivations probably prompted her fading away into the back pages of history books, as well as the fact that she got pregnant right afterwards and, in her words, "they all {the NAACP} turned their backs on me when I got pregnant." Claudette herself felt bitter at the time and remembers thinking, "Hey I did that {refusing to give a seat to a white person on the bus} months ago and everybody dropped me."
                I think that teenagers not being respected as valid members of society and having their actions dismissed as merely hormonal or rebelliousness is a problem in todays society and was a problem even back then. Young people have important things to say and they deserve to be heard. Dismissing someone just because they are young is not only insulting (as Colvin felt), but also damaging to a society that might have benefited from the ideas spoken.  Rosa Parks might have been a better candidate for spurring the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6 because she was "widely known as an activist," "respected by both the black professional class and ordinary workers," "light skinned but not white," "and struck almost everyone she met as a contained, pleasant, committed and levelheaded individual," but I believe that Claudette did not deserve her chameleon like status as someone who was not important. I am so glad that this book was written so that the world can know of her heroism and courage, even though she was a teenager.