The Butler
The movie is about a man called Cecil Gaines who grew up on a cotton plantation. The son of the plantation owner, Miss Annabelle, rapes his mother, and then shoots his father. Miss Annabelle feels sorry for the boy and promotes him to be, housenigger. Miss Annabelle teaches him to serve, and how to behave around white people. When he gets older he leaves the plantation, only to find himself homeless and jobless. In a moment of hunger and despair he chooses to brake in to a hotel to steal some food. He ends up being employed at the hotel, and is thought how to be a butler. After a while his boss tells him to go to Washington D.C. where he is to serve in a grand hotel called the excelsior.
He can now provide a nice house for his wife Gloria and their two sons Louis and Charlie. He is eventually spotted by the household master of the white house, where he is offered a position. From here on the story takes hold around historic events in American history. The first one is the Brown case, followed by the incident at a school in Little Rock where soldiers have to protect the colored children so they can go to a school for white children. His son Louis becomes a high school student, and from there he goes to FISK University in Tennessee. There Louis meets a girl named Carol, and they join the civil rights movement together. Their first event is a café provocation, where the young colored kids want to be served at a, white only table. This leads to a sound beating of the kids, and they are sent to jail after the incident.

In 1961 Jack Kennedy is elected to president. In the same year Louis and his freedom riders are attacked by the K.K.K. on their way to Alabama. The bus explodes and Louis is sent to prison for three months. Kennedy gets inspired by those young kids, and stands up for equal rights, and ends up assassinated.

Over the next years Johnson is elected president, riots roam in Selma and the war in Vietnam is launched. Louis becomes a follower of Martin Luther King, a nonviolent civil right protester who later gets killed. The killing of Martin Luther King leads to a nationwide riot, which even affects Cecil. Louis decides that the nonviolent time is over, and joins the Black Panther party.
The youngest child, Charlie, is sent to Vietnam in 1968.

In 1969 the Black Panthers declares war on the police and Louis no longer believes in their politics and quits. On Cecil’s birthday the same year Charlie is killed in Vietnam. Louis does not turn up to the funeral, and Cecil decides to break contact with him. In 1974 Louis finishes school with a candidate degree and tries to visit Cecil in the white house. But with no result, Cecil does not want contact. In 1986 Cecil makes sure that all staff is treated as equals, meaning that the black staff is getting the same salaries as the white staff. He is awarded with an invitation to a state dinner.
In 2008 his wife Gloria dies, Obama wins the election, and Cecil is invited to visit the president in the white house.