Forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and after the Kerner Commission concluded that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white”—one public opinion poll suggests that the values held by the two racial groups may be converging. According to a recent Pew/ NPR poll, 68 percent of Americans, including 72 percent of whites and 54 percent of blacks, say that the values of blacks and whites have become more similar in the past ten years. By contrast, when asked about the values of middle-class and poor blacks, 61 percent of blacks said they had become more different. Well-educated blacks were more likely than those with less formal education to say that values had grown more different. The survey defined values as “things that people view as important or their general way of thinking.” Source: Pew Research Center, in association with NPR, September-October 2007.