Family Dynamics and Segregation: A Review of 'The Watsons Go To Birmingham'

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Recommended: Racism in literature

The novel I read was “The Watsons Go To Birmingham.” In this story, it talks about a family that is known as the “Weird Watsons”, and is about their life at school and at home and when they take a family trip to their mother's hometown in Alabama during the time of segregation. They live in Michigan, in their family there is three kids and two parents. The oldest kid is in the sixth grade and his name is Byron; he is the king of the sixth grade and always picks on his little siblings, the narrator is Kenny and he is in the fourth grade; he is always getting bullied and picked on by the king of fourth grade Larry Dunn and his older brother, and last but not least is Joetta which is in kindergarten; she always falls for the stuff that Byron says and is always telling on her older brother Kenny. During the school year Kenny had beaten up the king of fourth grade Larry Dunn because he was tired of getting picked on for being too …show more content…

The location of the novel would be Flint,Michigan and Birmingham,Alabama; which would be appropriate for the novel because it talked about the difference between the weather in the parts of the country that they are in. Some events that were appropriate for the time period would be that racism was in effect still, an example would be that in the story a negro church that Joetta was in had gotten bombed by two white americans but the book said the americans probably wouldn’t get caught for their act of crime because they were white and the topic of ending segregation was major back in the time period of the novel, and in the state of Alabama. A theme that would be appropriate for the time period of the novel would be that the author wanted you to know that racism is bad, and hurts people, but whites and african americans are equal and you have to put yourself in the negros

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