Sociological Response Essay

Carolyn Smithers (a seventy four year old woman) has lived through some of the most difficult time periods in the United States. One of the most important time periods is the civil rights movement. I got a chance to sit down with her to talk about this difficult time period and how race and integration was like in a small town of St. Albans, West Virginia. She took many different stances on things involving race and segregation for the time period. She told me what society was like and how people acted. Through Carolyn’s words I have detected many different sociological connections. When I first started talking to her I jumped and asked first how were blacks treated differently? She responded by telling me how they were segregated from …show more content…
With her initial answer she began to basically describe social integration. She described how people somewhat began to accept that blacks should be considered equal, but she explains how it took such a long time for some people. While Listening I made the connection to Emile Durkheim who describes this perfectly in some of his theories and experiments. She also says how it was not a big deal in the town and neighborhood she came from because there were few blacks in the first place. After hearing this I realized why it took some people so long to conform to the new norms of society. It was because it was a sense of resocialization from what these people were initially taught. They were forced to accept new values. Carolyn then started talking about different groups of whites. She described one group as people who were for equality, one group that was for it but did not really care either way because it was not a problem, and the last group as totally against equality. Although, she was in the middle group she explained each one in depth and how she had friends in each. I considered these secondary friends. All of the groups Carolyn talks about gets me thinking about a pluralistic society. She was inferring that society at the time was a pluralistic one just like it is today filled with many groups with many different backgrounds and values. Carolyn talked about this as a whole, but also in

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