There is no denying the impact the 1960's Civil Rights Movement made on the American people of all races. African Americans were expected to bow down to the assumed to be 'superior white man' while they were commonly believed to be employed as maids, nannies, gardeners, field hands, or any other lowly job of the day. They were viewed as less important than the white man just because of the color of the skin they were born into. Many steps were taken by African Americans and people around the world to try and eradicate this negative opinion. One major way was film. The revolutionary film La Noire de 's main point, racial inequality, can better be understood though the knowledge of Jim Crowe Laws, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X's protests, and the retaliation of the racist white Americans. 

In the University of South Carolina's FILM 300 class an English dubbed French film called La Noire de  which translates to "The Black Girl of " is worked into the curriculum. This is a film about an African woman, Diouana, who wants to find a job as a nanny. She sits on the side of the road and finally her day arrives. She is whisked away to France to be the nanny of a rich, white family. She quickly discovers that she was brought there to be a maid. All she wanted to do was watch children, not be a paid slave for people who are too lazy to do basic, mundane tasks for themselves. Finally the day came for the children to return home and she finally got to be the nanny she had waited so long to be. Soon she became not only the nanny, but the maid as well. She is under appreciated and under paid. All the house lady did was yell at her and tell her how worthless she was. The nanny quickly descends into a depression and refused to work. If the nanny/ maid refused to work, the house lady refused to feed her. The house lady enjoyed this feeling of power over another individual during the nanny's stay in her apartment. The nanny quickly descends into such a depression that she inevitably slits her own throat in the house lady's bathroom. This whole film was showing the effects of when someone else's happiness is made to be a joke that it completely ruins them and forces them to face the ugly sides of themselves to accomplish the goals that they feel they need to accomplish. 

Thanks to the Jim Crowe Laws, African Americans were unable to sit, drink, or even use the bathroom in the same places as their white counterparts. In theory, these laws were put in place to create separate but equal facilities for African Americans and whites to use, but instead, these laws were created to limit on the freedoms of African Americans even though slaves freedom had been put into place hundreds of years before. Just because slavery had been legally abolished, former prejudices still existed. Diouana understood those prejudices. Even though the movie was based in France, Diouana was forced to stay in the kitchen when guests were over at the apartment to be entertained and was used as some sort of puppet to entertain the guests when the house lady felt appropriate. She was made to feel less because of the color of her skin. In the film, one of the houseguests remarked, "Why, I have never kissed a black woman before" (Ousmane) like she was a type of circus animal ready to do flips for the audience. She, of course, was humiliated, but was forced to take and accept the unwanted attention from the much older, drunk man. According to the Jim Crowe Laws, if the roles were reversed and a white Diouana was kissed by a black gentleman, he would have been not only heavily fined, but also most likely lynched by an angry mob of white racists. 

The 1960's brought about a substantial change in the fight for racial equality. Martin Luther King was one of the forerunners of this movement and aimed to bring awareness to the wrongs that had been done to African Americans over the span of hundreds of years into his present day. Martin Luther King utilized a Ghanaian approach to the unethical treatment of his race. He spoke of peacefulness and kindness, and for the most part, African American's followed his example, but as Malcolm X so eloquently put, "You haven't got a revolution that doesn't involve bloodshed" (Malcolm X). As King tried his best to have a peaceful, impactful protest, Malcolm X wanted to go straight for the white man's throat. He was ready for bloodshed like no other. In all fairness, Malcolm X had a point. Even though some of his ideas were radical beyond compare, he was correct about the bloodshed. At first, Diouana tried to be peaceful and just simply refused to cook and clean anymore until she was able to do what she loved, but her pleas were ignored so she slowly slipped into a pernicious frame of mind. The thought of being a maid physically made her so sick that she finally retaliated toward her paid master. The fight that ensued was over a mask that Diouana had brought with her from Africa. This mask symbolized the African culture and the struggles of her people. All she wanted was to hold onto the last piece of herself that she could possibly find. She kept screaming over and over "It's mine! It's mine!" (Ousmane). Much like the Diouana tried to gain her complete, true freedom to do as she pleased, the African American people were trying so hard to gain those same freedoms. Martin Luther King famously said, "And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream." (King). 

Countless beatings and lynchings were done to the African American population over the course of the Civil Rights Movement and many years prior. "During that year [1919] seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a Chicago riot of August; from twenty-five to fifty in Phillips County, Arkansas; and six killed in Washington" (Pilgrim). The southeast was a place of constant unrest between the whites and African Americans. Ku Klux Klan members were killing innocent people just because they were doing things that the Klan did not like. In a well known incident, a Ku Klux Klan member bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four young girls, one as young as eleven years old. These young girls had done nothing to the man other than the fact that they was born with darker skin. The attacker was "looking down toward the Sixteenth Street church, like a firebug watching his fire (Raines).'' He was taking pleasure in the suffering of a church congregation. Four young, innocent girls had just died as a result of his actions, and he seemed to be enjoying it. This kind of unrest was something that Malcolm X would have thrived off. He would have used this (completely validated) anger and used it to propel unrest with the whites. Diouana also lost her life at the hands of the white man. Maybe she was not physically murdered by one of them, but mentally they made her feel so worthless and helpless that she decided that the only way to help the situation was to end her own life. This speaks volumes about how African Americans must have felt during the Civil Rights Movement. If this woman ended her own life over a job, the amount of bloodshed over something as important as the Civil Rights Movement must have been exorbitant. Through years of trials and hardships the African Americans fought to break down the walls of segregation and prejudice, but their efforts did not come without a price.  

La Noire de  thought the viewer to look though the eyes of a worker in a completely different way. This film was revolutionary in its day as the first film to use completely African actors and settings to portray African people. This movie brought attention to the harmful effects of treating people like they are nothing. It helped whites see that even though they were led to believe that African Americans were beneath them, that they were people too and the laws that was being bestowed upon them because of their skin color were completely unfair. Terrible things happened to African Americans because of their skin color and their race is still reeling from that. All prejudice has not gone away, but every day we are one step closer to finally being united as one race, the human race.

