Humans crave improvement, humans crave progress, and humans crave identity. For many, these desires are satisfied in the ideas and actions that underpin social movements. According to Dictionary.com, the definition of a social movement is “a group of people with a common ideology who together attempt to achieve certain general goals” (n.d.). Often, these social movements focus on a singular issue. In his essay “In Distrust of Movements,” Wendell Berry (2000) calls single-issue movements “hopeless” (p. 333). He writes: “I have had… a number of useful conversations about the need to exit movements – even movements that have seemed necessary and dear to us – when they have descended into complacency… as movements almost invariably seem do it” (p.331). Berry is wrong to believe that single-issue movements are ineffective and inevitably fail, and he is blatantly ignoring history in making such a claim. Since the advent of the printing press, 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 easily heard and proved advantageous to social activists and the causes they championed. Such benefits have not been in vain, as we have seen in movements like 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 influence are here to stay and contrary to Berry's (2000) belief, those that thrive around a “single issue” are just as successful as their multifaceted counterparts. The civil rights movement stands as a prominent example of a triumphant cause on a single theme. Clear and precise, the goal of this cause was to grant 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) argues that one of the major flaws of movements is that “they almost always fail to be sufficiently radical, ultimately attacking effects rather than causes” (p. 331). But what was the civil rights movement if not a solution to an “effect” rather than a cause ??