How Is The Butler Related To The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in The Butler In America’s past history, the Civil Rights Movement was a time period where African Americans undoubtedly faced many hardships and struggled to survive through discrimination and segregation. The film, The Butler, captured the life of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement through different perspectives of the two main characters, Cecil and his son, Louis Gaines. The story starts with Cecil Gaines as a young boy who witnessed a tragic event of his father getting shot by a white man, which triggered him to have a slight fear of speaking out against injustice acts throughout his life. Cecil Gaines continued his life as a butler and served in the White House through many presidents while Louis

While his father kept silent and lived his life fairly peacefully in the White House, Louis lived down South to battle segregation even though he was brought up in a household where the topic of politics was always ignored. The film showed one of Louis’s first stance against racism in the scene where he was part of the Freedom Riders and chose to take a seat at the white section of a segregated restaurant. The cinematography used to show the intensity of this scene was flashback, a technique that cuts from the narrative present to past event, and parallel editing, the process of intercutting two or more lines of action that occur simultaneously. While Louis and the other Freedom Riders were being attacked in the restaurant, a flashback occurred that showed how they trained themselves to handle the verbal and physical abuse that would happen in the restaurant. The flashbacks gave the viewers a feel for how the Freedom Riders were determined to break through segregation since what they prepared themselves for came to reality when they were in the restaurant. While Louis and the Freedom Riders were struggling to to stand up for the injustice acts of segregation, the film also showed Cecil working in the White House at the same time by using parallel editing. The use of parallel editing presented a comparison of what Louis and his father were doing during the Civil Rights Movement. When the two scenes were showed at the same time, it informed the audience that there were two groups of people during the Civil Rights Era, those who accepted the challenge to fight inequality and those who did anything they could to keep their family safe and alive. Even though both sides had pure intentions of how they were living their lives, Louis’s perspective was more impactful because of the flashback and parallel editing showed him having a harder time dealing with the harsh