In Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” he claims that it is easier to get an individual to change their views on things, rather than getting a group of people to change their looks on a subject. I agree with Dr. King on this statement of people not changing their views on subjects with a group of their peers. People tend to feel pressure to impress their peers, so they would feel unwanted going against what the group agrees on is wrong in their eyes.
Individuals in groups usually will react to something they know is wrong in private. This is because they know that their peers would view them in a negative way and show them disapproval. An example of this is of Anton Schmid during the Holocaust. Schmid was a sergeant in the Nazi army. Schmid did not agree with the mistreatment of the Jew people so he hid them, supplied them with false ID papers, and helped them escape from the Nazi occupation camps in Lithuania. Anton Schmid saved 250 Jews by going alone and doing something he believes in. Anton was later arrested and executed on after his arrest. This is just one German who didn’t believe in the Nazis extermination of the Jewish people. This shows an individual going against what his peers think and believing in what is right, but in the end his opinion gets him killed for thinking different.
Many people, as I stated before, will do things that they would not do in front of their group of friends. This decision of being two-faced against their friends is really the person being themselves. Individuals feel fearful of not being accepted, so instead of standing up and showing to their peers who they really are they will fall back in line and repeat being someone they are not. There is a perfect example of this with my uncle Oscar. Oscar was dating a Caucasian female for a long period of time. My uncle didn’t know that the girl was living in a household with a racist family and her herself claimed to be racist. The girl’s father found them together one day...