The Help

On June 12, 1963, two months before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous ”I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., prominent Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed by white racists outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, we experience this murder through the eyes of Aibileen, one of many black maids working in the city – the “help” to whom the title refers.