“The Butler”

Short commentary

After watching Lee Daniels’ The Butler, I’ve come to realise how much US’ society has
changed over the past century, not only through modernization and technological influences, but also
through the ways of community (race, social class etc.) perceivedness. The Butler is a historical film
based on the real life of Eugene Allen, an African-American who worked as a butler in the White
House for over three decades and through eight administrations.
His career started even before he had left the cotton plantation, at the age of 19, in order to
escape the strict, low-class life the white people were pushing the black into. Historically accurate, The
Butler’s storyline presents what the coloured have been through in order to destroy the racism that has
built up during the XX century. Beginning with the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, African
Americans wanted equal status in the eyes of the law. Not only that, they also struggled against abuse,
both physical and mental, by racist members of society. Thought, while the 1950s were something of a
golden age for all middle class white citizens, it was hardly a period of expanding opportunities for
African Americans. In the 1950s half of black families lived in poverty, unlike white families. When
they were able to get union jobs, black workers had less seniority than their white counterparts so their
employment was less stable. And their educational opportunities were severely limited by sub-standard
segregated schools.
Cecil is hired by the White House during Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration as a butler,
who is reluctant to using troops to enforce school desegregation. Louis, Cecil’s elder son, becomes a
university student at Fisk University in Tennessee, although Cecil feels that the South is too volatile.
Louis joins a student program led by Southern Christian Leadership Conference activist James
Lawson, which leads to a nonviolent sit-in at a segregated diner, where he is arrested. Rigid
segregation was the rule throughout the country, especially in housing, but also in jobs and
employment. In the South, public accommodations were segregated by law, while in the North it was
usually happening by custom or de facto segregation.
In 1961, after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, Louis and others are attacked by members of
the Ku Klux Klan while on a freedom ride to Birmingham, Alabama. Louis participates in the 1963
Birmingham Children's Crusade, where dogs and water cannons are used to stop the marchers, one of
the movement's actions which inspires Kennedy to deliver a national address proposing the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Kennedy’s bill prohibited discrimination is public facilities, restaurants, shops and
any federally assisted program, and it also included proposal for new fair employment programs. The
bill became The Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the help of President Lyndon Johnson, after Kennedy’s
assassination.
Martin Luther King was a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race who traveled
over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was
injustice, protest, and action.
He directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C. "l Have a Dream", he conferred with
President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards
of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named
Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American
blacks but also a world figure.
Later on, Louis joins the Black Panther, an organization formed in California in 1966 and
they played a short but important part in the civil rights movement. The ideology of extremism was
exemplified by this party. When the Black Panthers resort to violence, Louis leaves the organization
and returns to college, earning his master's degree in political science and eventually running for a seat
in Congress.
Realizing his son's actions are heroic (joining and resisting the protests against racial
segregation), Cecil joins Louis at a protest against South African apartheid; they are arrested and jailed
together. The murder of civil rights leaders continued when Martin Luther King was killed in April
1968, and Robert Kennedy 2 months later. Despite racial tensions continuing into the 1990s, progress
has been measurable. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 is seen by many to be a
culmination of centuries of work in favour of racial equality.