1960's vs. 2014
Back in the 1960's it was a fight for equality between black and white people. These years were the beginning of the civil rights movement. Black people were treated with disrespect and unfair. They were looked upon as dirt and not even humans to most white people. Jim Crow Laws were made to keep blacks and whites separate. They had to use separate bathrooms, sit in separate parts of restaurants, and even have separate schools. In 1954 the U.S Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine which caused the eyes of African Americans to see what they were truly dealing with. In The Help, it was very dangerous for the maids to speak about their treatment and what they seemed like was unfair because if they were caught they could be severely punished and no one would truly care because they are of color. In The Help, Aibileen Clark's son is killed in an accident at work when a white man accidently runs over him and crushes his lungs. The white man just dumps him at the hospital and leaves him there to die. African Americans were seen as an inferior race and could do nothing about it. They were accused of things they might have not done and they would be severely beaten or killed because of a small mistake. Emmit Till is a very good example of this cruelty towards blacks. He was a young boy from Chicago who went to visit his family in Mississippi. Since he was from up north, he was not use to all the racial discrimination because it was only very prominent in the south. Emmit Till was at the grocery store to get some goodies after a long day of work and some white kids accused him of either whistling, flirting or touching the hand of a white woman store clerk, who was the wife of the owner of the store. "Four days later, at approximately 2:30 a.m. on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright's home. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water. Moses Wright reported Till's disappearance to the local authorities, and three days later, his corpse was pulled out of the river. Till's face was mutilated beyond recognition, and Wright only managed to positively identify him by the ring on his finger, engraved with his father's initials—"L.T."
Still, in 2014, we are struggling with racial discrimination. A young, unarmed boy, named Mike Brown, was shot down by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer simply wanted them to move onto the sidewalk, but Brown and his friend did not want to. I mean, I don't blame them because it is not against the law to walk on the street especially if it is your own neighborhood. There was some type of altercation between Brown and the officer causing Brown to flee as the officer pursued him. After some shots were fired and Brown had been hit in the leg, he turned around and put his hands up in surrender to the officer. The officer did see this and he continued to fire several more shot. The result was Brown was hit 7 to 8 times and died. He was in surrender to the officer, but all the officer saw was the color of his skin and not that he was just a young 18 year old boy. The officer was tried in court and let free. I believe this was in a sense unfair, but I still do not know the whole story. Yet we still see our racial profiling today, not with just Mike Brown, but with many other African American young men and I believe we should have already reached a point in our history that we can no longer be discriminative towards any minorities or races.
We are STILL FIGHTING for our FREEDOM