In the 1960s it happened a lot of racial discrimination, and unfortunately, it happens until today. The book Betty Before X, written by Ilyasah Shabazz – the third daughter of Betty X and Malcolm X, tells a story about a girl called Betty, that used to live with her Aunt Fannie Mae in Pinehurst, Georgia, but after she died she needed to move with Ollie Mae – her birth mother, in Detroit where she had 3 little step-sisters, 2 little step-brothers, and her mom and step-father, but after a conflict, she moved to Mrs. and Mr. Malloy’s house a place that she was treated like their daughter and they loved her and this book is inspired by the early life of Betty Shabazz or Betty X, who was an American educator and defender of civil rights. In the book, Lili’s Quest written by Lila Perl the main character, Lilli Frankfurter, is a 12 years old girl who lives with her family in Germany, but when her father, Josef, is taken to Gestapo Headquarters because of an unknown crime he committed. Because of this, a friend of Mutti that works as a Hitler Police says that where they live now is no longer safe because now the Hitler Police know that they are Jews and where they live, so the family went to live with the Bayer family. When they were living with the Bayer family Helga had the chance to leave the country and go to England, but she was a very stubborn girl and said that she didn’t want to go to England, she wanted to stay in Germany fighting for the rights that the Jews lost.
Lilli’s perspective of the world is not very different from Betty’s perspective, Lilli’s perspective is that World War 2, took lots of important people for her, so this is the perspective of the world for is an awful place that judges people by their religion, race/ethnicity, gender… Likewise, Betty’s perspective of her city and maybe the whole world is that her ethnicity is something terrible. Because of it, she suffers a lot in stores, supermarkets, and drugstores, and the people she cares about also suffer because of racial discrimination, this is why The Housewives’ League was created, it consist in making negro people only buy where they can be hired.
When Betty moved away from Ollie Mae’s house – because she didn’t even love Betty and didn’t try to ask her to stay with her, she moved to Mrs. and Mr. Malloy’s house – where she was loved and treated like their own daughter and there she started feeling like she was free, that she could do whatever she wanted, and it was kind of true because Betty got her bedroom, she entered The Housewives’ League, she didn’t even need to make her bed, but this doesn’t mean she can do whatever she wants she can only do those things if she is well behaved and contribute in her community, so this means Betty’s power with Mrs. Malloy is intermediate because she can’t do everything she wants. When Lilli’s father was alive she didn’t have any power over her father, he decided everything they were going to do and didn’t accept any questioning of his decisions, but after he was taken to the Gestapo Headquarters, Lilli’s mother didn’t know what to do to keep her family safe so she tried sending Helga – the middle child, to England, so Lilli said that she would go instead of Helga. Like Betty, Lilli has intermediate power with her mom because this idea Lilli had was a very dangerous idea because the only person who had a passport was Helga and the time was short so Lilli couldn’t make her own passport, but the problem is they don’t even look alike.
Betty goes to church daily, every day she is there praying to God, with the hope that racism will stop someday. But of course, as a child, she doesn’t have a choice to go or not to go to church, but she is already used to it and likes going to the church, because every day after she and her two best friends – Phyllis and Suesetta, go to Suesseta’s house to listen to music, read fashion magazines, talk about boys… However, since the first day the war started Lilli lost that right, she doesn’t have the time to think about those things, because she is always too busy trying to contact her family, trying to save her family, she doesn’t think about it because she doesn’t know if her family is safe, if they are dead or alive.
Racial discrimination and antisemitism, have a lot of things in common – at least in Betty Before X and Lilli’s Quest, in those things, some of them are power dynamics and perspective. These two books show the reality of people who were present in the Second World War and the Civil right movement, and how they suffered at that time.
