speaking of MLK

This was my prompt and essay for the SAT. I pride myself on my ability to relate a wide variety of prompts to our TASP seminar topic.

Prompt: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below:

"It is wrong to think of ourselves as indispensable. We would love to think that our contributions are essential, but we are mistaken if we think that any one person has made the world what it is today. The contributions of individual people are seldom as important or as necessary as we think they are."

Do we put too much value on the ideas or actions of individual people? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.


Essay:
When studying history, we tend to look at the leaders of important movements--the individuals who have made a difference in our world. Such a narrow focus, however, undermines the contributions of people working together. Far more important is the effect of various groups or cooperative units uniting to achieve a common goal.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's offers an excellent example of this point. Classrooms tend to emphasize the leaders of this movement--most notably, Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK), Jr. In my high school history class, I would say an average of about half of the time studying the Civil Rights Movement was devoted to MLK and his revolutionary ideas of nonviolent protest. The curious thing is that these ideas were not so revolutionary for the time period, and that focusing on MLK draws attention away from the groups that really created change in the 1960's and the decades before then. Groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People played a far larger role in causing change in the Jim Crow South. These groups organized sit-ints, united African Americans around the country, and were able to put the Civil Rights Movement into legislative action. King's 'March on Washington' speech was not the expression of a single voice against institutionalized racism; it was the expression of the thousands of voices behind the movement. King was, like so many other movement leaders throughout history, far more of a figurehead than an essential individual. The movement could have lived without King.

It could not have lived, however, without the individuals supporting the various groups formed to address racism. These individuals, the ones whose names the world may never know or care to discover, were integral to creating social change in the name of justice. There was not a single person that was absolutely necessary for the success of the Civil Rights Movement, but the collective unity of such individuals was absolutely necessary. Recognizing this leads one to discover a fundamental truth regarding an individual's place in society. One person working alone can accomplish little or nothing in this world; each person is dispensable. However, individuals choosing to work together can make a difference. Thus, the fear that one's place in the world is unimportant and unable to produce change is fundamentally misplaced. Each of us has the power to contribute to our world, to change it and alter it, to motivate others to do the same, but we cannot do it alone. We must unite for a common cause, and work with each other to produce change.