Argument Against Jim Crow

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When the phrase Jim Crow is uttered, many people feel a rush of inept thoughts and bad memories due to the social taboo against talking of the lowest point in America’s history. Jim Crow was not just a set of laws aimed to oppress the lives of all black people, but a movement by the citizens, black or white, that caused a corrupt mindset in all men and women. Many people tried to stop the social force from continuing in individual spurts of courage, but they were not able to stop Jim Crow as individuals. An individual’s own personal courage cannot fight against Jim Crow, because a single person would not be able to stop an entire movement embedded into the minds of millions of people, not to mention how the social pressure against it was too strong to even fathom fighting against it. One main reason why it was unable for Jim Crow to be fought by a single person is because there was no feasible way in which one person, no matter how powerful, rich, or socially accepted, could have changed the entirety of …show more content…

In that time, there were many heavy social standards and one of those standards was accepting Jim Crow. One example of one person not being able to combat Jim Crow due to the social pressure was in the book To Kill A Mockingbird. One of the characters, Dolphus Raymond, liked hanging out with black people and was friends with them. He knew that there was pressure against it, so he took the cowardly way out by pretending to be drunk as an excuse to hang out with them. The fictional character of Mr. Raymond is a great embodiment of the mental state of the silent few in America that knew that Jim Crow was wrong, but didn’t have the means or willpower to end it. Those people wanted to stop such perverse acts from occurring, but could not, due to the fear of social