For my first connection, I will be talking about how racial prejudice divides communities.
Prejudice has the potential to cause a lot of pain to people. It can have such a negative impact on how people behave towards each other, particularly to those who are different. In the film “Mississippi Burning”, we saw this type of behaviour happening more than once. There was a group of white people known as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) who had a strong belief that non-whites were complete filth and that they didn’t deserve to live the same lives as them. The Ku Klux Klan would make their hatred towards the non-whites known through extreme acts of violence and intimidation towards them. The powerful use of dialogue shows how common racist thoughts were among people. There were several dramatic scenes that highlight really effectively how black people were treated by the KKK. Particularly the scene where the non-whites are coming out of the church and they’re all beaten up from the KKK members.
Towards the end of scene, one of the KKK members we’re getting ready to fled the scene with the rest of the members until he sees a young boy praying. The man then turns back around facing the young boy and kicks his head. After the man threatens the young boy’s life, he then kicks the boys stomach before running off again. They got beaten up strictly because they spoke to the federal agents. This connection also occurred in the scene when the federal agents walked in to the cafe. In the cafe, the non-whites were segregated from the whites.
There was a section where only the whites could sit and a section where only the non-whites could sit. This powerfully shows the hatred that the whites had against the non-whites. Even in the movie “The Help”, we saw this connection happening in the scene where Aibileen and Henry are on the bus going home late one night from work. A person has just been shot and murdered by the KKK in his house, which is in the same neighbourhood as Aibileen. The presence of the bus in this scene immediately establishes a sense of segregation. The whites are seated at the front of the bus while the non-whites are seated at the back.
The police gets on the bus and tells Aibileen and Henry that all blacks have to get off the bus. When Henry asked the police officer why, he simply responded some nigger got shot. This key piece of dialogue highlights the disregard that whites at the time, had towards non-whites. They used degrading language to their faces and they were more than willing to put non-whites into dangerous situations.
