by Shani K. Collins, Your Black World
On Tuesday, Hinds County Circuit Court Judge, Tommie Green dismissed a lawsuit against Kathryn Stockett, author of the widely successful novel, “The Help,” which centers on the lives of elite, southern, white Mississippi families and their African-American domestic workers during the Jim Crow era of the 1960s. The lawsuit was filed by Ablene Cooper, who works as a domestic for Stockett’s brother. Cooper claims the name and the likeness of Stockett’s main character, Abilene, are too closely related to her. The lawsuit claims that Cooper found it upsetting and highly offensive to be portrayed as someone “who uses this kind of language and compares her skin color to a cockroach.” Stockett’s refusal to admit that the character Abilene closely resembles her likeness “is so outrageous in character, and so extreme as to go beyond all bounds of human decency, and is utterly intolerable in a civilized community,” Cooper adds.
