Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 25, 2013.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  Library Call Number: PS3619.T636.H45 2009.                                 

 

Excerpted from Kirkus Reviews:      “The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in…Stockett's ambitious first novel.  …recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter [Phelan] returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with…friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth's seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she's been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen…is careful what she shares…Encouraged by a New York editor, [Skeeter] decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen's help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town's social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter's dangerous naiveté. Skeeter's narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie's heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.”

Library Video of the Week, February 18, 2013.

Selma Lord Selma, starring McKenzie Astin , Jurnee Smollet-Bell, Ella Joyce and Clifton Powell. Directed by Charles Burnett.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.H5 S45 2003.

     From the Amazon Review:   …Based on Sheyann Webb's memoir, this movie effectively serves as a Mississippi Burning for kids. As 11-year-old Sheyann (Eve's Bayou's Jurnee Smollet) learns more about the degradation of her people, so, too, will a whole new generation. But the lesson is far from pleasant. With the exception of earnest seminary student Jonathan Daniels (Mackenzie Astin), a Yankee who's come down South to help register blacks to vote, the white people seem cartoonishly hateful. It's sobering to realize that this behavior really happened and was either sanctioned or ignored by the government. Being forced to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to vote and being gassed and beaten for marching are just some of the indignities Sheyann and her friends endure…  Inspiring, but a bit brutal…  --Kimberly Heinrichs

Library Video of the Week, February 4, 2013.

 

Murder in Mississippi, starring Tom Hulce, Jennifer Grey, Blair Underwood, CCH Pounder. Directed by Roger Young.  1990.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9M835M87 2008.

        In 1964, three civil rights workers who were registering people to vote in the county of Neosho Mississippi, were arrested and thrown into jail in Philadelphia Mississippi, then released in the early hours of the morning.  Shortly thereafter, they were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and their bodies buried in a levee.  There have been at least three movies made of the incident, but this one may be the most compelling, with its emphasis on the trio’s last days of working for the rights of southern African-Americans.  The dark days of the struggle for equal rights have been artfully scripted by Ben Stein and well-acted by all the primary players in this movie.  The film gives the audience a real sense of the tension and danger hovering over the northern volunteers who dared to follow their conscience and come south.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 4, 2013.

Devil in the Grove: the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King.  Library Call Number: KF224.G76K56 2012.

From the liner notes: In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

Library Video of the Week, February 6, 2012.

Boycott, starring Jeffrey Wright, Terrence Howard, and Carmen Ejogo . Directed by Clark Johnson. 2001.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.N4 B69 2001

          What became one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights Era is recreated here, with Jeffrey Wright superbly playing an obscure Baptist minister in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, who takes up the cause of equal rights. When a small, middle-aged black woman named Rosa Parks (played by Iris Little-Thomas ) is directed by the bus driver to give her seat to a white man and refuses, she is arrested.  The minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, is named to head what becomes known as the Montgomery Bus boycott.  African-Americans, who at that time were ¾ of the passengers, refused to board city buses leading to a financial meltdown of the city’s transit system.  In response, White Citizen’s Councils firebombed black churches and the houses of King and Reverend Ralph Abernathy.

          Boycott  faithfully recreates these events, which began in Montgomery and became a national cause. Wright is stellar as the charismatic King, capturing his tones and the power of his voice, while demonstrating his fear and vulnerability.