In April 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, just a few hours by car from my home. I didn’t live through it, and I didn’t read deliberately (that is, outside of school) about Dr. King’s life until I was an adult, but even at 31 years old and 41 years after the event, I find it horrifying and desperately sad. I hope to visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis this spring.

But Even Today…

I see everyday the remnants of segregation, overhear lingering discrimination of all sorts, and live among the great-grandchildren of slaves. As someone known for his stoicism, I may shock you when I say it is still painful after a year. Old habits, it seems, die very very hard; native sons and daughters of The South born and raised in this culture do not see their behavior and understand their prejudices in the same way I do, and as the rest of the nation would.

While I do believe that reconciliation is possible, and that one day these egregious wrongs can be made right, I am still a pessimist; I believe that the only realistic outcome in the longer-near term will be that society moves on to the next great horror and our national guilt is assuaged only in redirection.

The Great Fear

Which brings me to the great fear that is the center of this short article. Reading of the great movements of the 1950s and 1960s I fear we may never see another Dr. King to lead us to next mountaintop. To develop this point briefly, the social movements of the 1960s grew out of a specific soil – the culture and ideas, the history, etc. If full civil rights and citizenship had been instituted after the abolition of slavery, Rosa Parks would never have been asked to move.

The social and media fabric of the time were just two of many necessary ingredients that leavened the bread. The media revolution that has occurred since, and continues even now, may be the new ingredient that spoils the dough.

The Media Revolution

The steady change in media since the 1950s, easily observable in the last 10 years, has been the diversification and fragmentation of media of every sort. TV stations, radio stations, websites, podcasts, newspapers, magazines, blogs and every type of media have multiplied in quantity exponentially since Dr. King was assassinated. It seems this makes it much more difficult for a broad movement to take root in the soil of our time. Because we now have hundreds of channels for the consumption of news, and humans tend to select sources which reinforce existing ideas, getting broad exposure is harder at the same time we are told our attention spans are shortening. Can the next, nationwide Civil Rights movement grip an entire culture in such an environment? Would millions march on Washington when they could just join a Facebook group?

The Hope?

My only hope is that the same revolution that multiplied the available channels (in the broad sense) has also multiplied the power and awareness of individuals and small groups, and has multiplied the diversity of ideas. If the United States is unable to produce another Dr. King, perhaps this new power, used for good, can make each of us in a very small way a Dr. King.