Quoted

"It was very important for me—and for Tate—to not make this into a Civil Rights piece, but they were being infiltrated and hunted down for their color." - Kathryn Stockett (author)


"One thing that Tate wanted to make sure of was that kids under age 30 don’t really have any idea of where the Civil Rights movement was at its most violent and Jackson, Mississippi, was right in the middle of it. So it shows that for the women, writing this book is putting them in a life-threatening situation without beating it over our heads and having a noose in the tree." - Brunson Green (producer)


From "The Help: An Oral History" on The Daily Beast


Actually, the idea that somehow a story about black maids in Mississippi in 1963 can be understood as separate from "Civil Rights" explains a lot about the issues I had with this movie. And I would suggest that people being unfamiliar with a history means that they do need to be beaten over the heads with it to some extent, but that's just me. Independent of any depiction of "the Civil Rights Movement" under its narrowest definition, if people can't see the continuities where the movement is, at its core, about reacting to experiences like the ones depicted in The Help, then you're not making a substantive contribution to their understanding of how those things fit together.