Attitude Changes Over the Years Imagine walking down the street one day, only to be smiled at and greeted happily by every single person you passed. Life in the 1930s was just like that. The towns were small and everyone knew each other. Now imagine walking down a crowded, traffic-filled street, only to be pushed aside, ignored, or ridiculed. Life in the 80s, and today, is like this. Towering skyscrapers and large homes cover the land and no one seems to care about another person. In Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, the drastic change in people's lifestyles and attitudes between the 1930s and 1980s is clearly depicted. Racism was an attitude that greatly affected people's lives during the 1930s. Although slavery had been abolished more than fifty years earlier, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan still existed, leading people to believe that African Americans were a bad race. African Americans were despised by anyone of light skin color, including lighter skinned African Americans themselves. Clarissa, Jasper's peaches and cream daughter, was so pale she could ride the main white elevator while downtown. Her parents would be very angry if they found out that "although she was encouraged to only socialize with lighter-skinned people, passing as white was an unforgivable sin" (296). Clarissa's parents didn't want her to pass herself off as white, because she didn't have to hide the fact that she was black, and at the same time they didn't want her to be seen among darker-skinned African Americans, because it was believed that the darker the color of the skin, the worse the person was. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was one of the strongest leaders in changing the racism that had existed for many years. In the 1980s, people of all skin colors were much more accepted. Interracial dating and marriage began to grow, there were no rules about where an African American could sit, walk, or eat, and the racism that existed in the 1930s had all but disappeared. Racist attitudes, which affected the lives of so many people in the 1930s, no longer hit people so hard today. Another negative attitude people had in the 1930s was towards homosexuality. Back then the thought of a man having an affair with another man, or a woman having an affair with another woman, never even occurred to me..