The Courthouse Ring by Malcolm Gladwell

I thought that the Courthouse Ring was an amazing insight on the thoughts surrounding racism represented in the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In this essay Malcolm Gladwell talks about how before the famous Brown vs. Board of Education trial, the southern half of the U.S., especially Alabama was effected by moderate politicians such as Jim Folsom, governor of Alabama. Malcolm explains how Lee represented the moderate Folsom in her famous book through the portrayal of Addicus Finch. The main idea behind Folsomism and Jim Crow politics of the time was the frase "Separate but Equal," or segregation of blacks and whites. Jim Folsom was a man that was known for his moderate appeasement of both blacks and whites, and how he would throw lavish parties for blacks in Alabama, yet did nothing really to try and integrate the south. Now a lot have said that this is just as good as racism, because you are still keeping the black population separate from the white, and in this act one would say that it is impossible for them to truly be equal, and I would agree with this. What I don't agree with is people saying the "big Jim" was a bad man for doing this. What one has to keep in mind is that Folsom had grown up during the twenties and thirties, during some of the most racist times in America, and in Alabama of all places. One must see that Jim could never have been able to fathom integration of blacks and whites, because before he was around there was never an inkling of a thought to this. Jim did simply the best he could understand doing, and that is treating the negro as best he could, even better than the white in most cases. Therefore, while Jim and Addicus were neither radical nor liberal in their racial standings, it was not truly their fault, because they could not fathom true integration of blacks into white society in the time and place that they grew up and were living in.