Real help on “The Help”
This week, millions of eager fans will be flocking to see the film “The Help.” Based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, “The Help” is about African-American domestic workers in Mississippi during the 1960s. As an act of civil disobedience, the women tell their stories to a young, white editor in their community, who goes on to publish them. When Lisa Krissoff Boehm first read the novel, she was floored because – like the editor in “The Help” – she’s also a white woman who collected and published the stories of African-American domestic workers in Mississippi. Her book is called “Making a Way out of No Way: African-American Women and the Second Great Migration,” and she joins us to speak about the film.
Inez Crockett Smith is a former domestic worker in Mississippi as a teenager, at age 22 she married and moved north with her husband to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and went on to earn her master’s degree in curriculum and education from Michigan State University.
Here’s the trailer for “The Help”:
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