Humans crave improvement, humans crave progress, and humans crave identity. For many, these desires are fulfilled through the ideas and actions behind social movements. According to Dictionary.com, the definition of a social movement is “a group of people with a common ideology who seek together to achieve certain general goals” (n.d.). Often these social movements are centered around a singular issue. In his essay titled “In Distrust of Movements,” Wendell Berry (2000) refers to single-issue movements as “hopeless” (p.333). He writes: “I have had… a number of helpful conversations about the need to exit movements – even movements that have seemed necessary and dear to us – when they have fallen into hypocrisy… as movements almost invariably seem to do” (p. 331). Berry is wrong to assume that single-issue movements are ineffective and inevitably fail, and he blatantly ignores history in making this claim. Since the advent of printing, human communication has grown exponentially. The 20th century is certainly no exception to this trend, as we have seen with the advent of radio, television and the Internet. The ease of communication allowed the voice of the masses to be readily heard and proved beneficial to social activists and the causes they supported. These benefits have not gone to waste, as we have seen in movements such as the civil rights movement or fair trade. Even today we hear the cries of “Occupy Wall Street” protesters. The truth is that progressive movements and their political drive are here to stay and, contrary to Berry's (2000) belief, those that grow around a “single issue” are just as successful as their multi-faceted counterparts. The Civil Rights Movement represents a prominent example of a triumphant single-issue cause. Clear and precise, the goal of this lawsuit was to guarantee African Americans the same legal rights afforded to any other American citizen. This effort eventually led to laws such as the American Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“The Civil Rights Movement,” n.d.), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (“Fair Housing Laws,” n.d.). Berry (2000) states that one of the major flaws of movements is that they “almost always fail to be sufficiently radical, ultimately dealing with effects rather than causes” (p.331). But what was the Civil Rights Movement if not a solution to an “effect” rather than a cause??