The Watsons Go to Birmingham Movie Vs Book

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was the civil rights movement scenes. The director of the movie, Kenny Leon, did such a good job on focusing on the vital points of the civil right movement, the peaceful marches, the speeches, etc. In the novel they only focused on the Watsons and their journey through Birmingham, even though the book was dedicated to the four young African-American girls who died in the Birmingham bombing (Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, Cynthia Wesley, 14) but in the movie, they concentrated on racism in the South so much better than the book did. There was even that one scene where Byron and Kenny walked into the Diner about to order a Hotdog when the waitress told them that the diner they were in was an Whites-Only Diner, Byron became frustrated while Kenny became disgusted he didn’t know why they were treating them like that. There was also an earlier scene where Kenny and Byron met their cousins (something that the book did not have). Their cousins talked to them about walking in the marches and how so many people were making their voices heard or how none of the African Americans used violence or how that so many people got arrested that their weren’t enough jail cells to contain any more people anymore. We learned so much new information about the civil rights movement that we didn’t know before because of the movie, which seriously influenced how we saw the movie or the book.

Racism was something that was in both the movie and the book but it was only depicted higher quality in the movie, the book had its own way of showing the racism that was happening such as in the church scene, they didn’t go right out and yelled “RACISM.” In that moment but you could visualize it. Now in the movie you didn’t need to visualize it because it was already so clear in its own way, they had those individual black and white scenes, the diner scene, even the part of the movie where they had to go through in the book doors for the theater, everything gave us a better view of what racism was. Now in the book as I said before it didn’t focus on racism as much as the movie, if you go and look through every single chapter from chapter 1 to chapter 15 you will hardly find any evidence that has anything to do with racism other than the church bombing, racism wasn’t the books main priority something like family was.

In conclusion, the book and the movie were better than each other in their own ways. If you’re looking to learn more about racism I would think you’d like the movie better, but if you were looking for something like family I’d think you would like the book more. The book and the movie both had their own pros and cons or they both had their strong point and bas points but in the end, they are both balanced out, and you might enjoy both more than you thought you would.