The Help by Katherine Stockett and Marriage is a Private Affair by Chinua Achebe both expresses the issues with segregation through character development. These two stories are set in a time period where segregation was an everyday thing and not viewed as poorly as it is today. However, with this said, the same morals that we have today about segregation, especially over something so trivial as the color of their skin, were held by some and these people were the ones who actually stood up against this discrimination and did something about it. These stories are about people like this, the people who aren’t afraid to stand up against something they know is wrong, even in the face of danger. In The Help and Marriage is a Private Affair the characters that are being discriminated against are characterized as upset with the way they are treated, and although the others are pushing them down they remain strong and able to fight for what they believe in, and what they know deep down is right.
The Help is a perfect example of a book that has a lot of strong characters who are being held down by segregation. Specifically this book is talking about the unfair discrimination against colored people in the U.S. in the early nineteen sixties. Many people, mostly those being discriminated against, were angry about the injustices that they had endured and had a breaking point at some part of their lives. This was the point when those people decided that somehow they would change the wrong doings that affected people like them and make others see things their way, “it weren’t too long before I seen something in me had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore” (Stockett 2). It was a tough time for many people who were a different color then white. For whatever reason white people felt that they were superior to colored people. According to many white people of the time this ‘superiority’ gave them the right to control colored people’s lives and separate themselves from the coloreds as much as possible, “’But the guest bathroom’s were the Help goes’ Miss Hilly say” (Stockett 7). Segregation was so rampant in the early sixties that everything was still separated, although according to the constitution segregation ended almost exactly one hundred years prior (1864), and many people were angry if it wasn’t. Because of this, many people came up with ridiculous things for why they had to remain separated from the others, “Miss Leefolt’s building me a bathroom cause she think I’m diseased” (Stockett 24) in this line, for example, Aibileen talks about how the woman that she works for has segregated herself from Aibileen because she is under the foolish notion that just because of her color Aibileen has diseases that would be fatal to a white person. The continued segregation, which was still in effect because of the Jim Crow laws, made many black people unhappy, and they felt that they deserved to be equal as stated by...
