Perhaps not, but Frederick Douglass had no Malcolm X, and his success was immense.

And his success was, in very large part, due to his near-infinite capacity for civility: a civility that did not prevent him from condemning atrocities in the strongest of terms, but one that was, indeed, civil.

Times had changed by the 1960s; they have changed more now. Perhaps this is no longer true; perhaps Douglass' tweets would not have drawn followers the way his speeches drew crowds. But perhaps it is true. Perhaps what is wrong with civility is that we have failed to practice it, and it is our ineptness not its ineffectiveness that renders it so apparently impotent.