Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we are officially celebrating today as a federal holiday, spoke about what we need in our leaders during a speech entitled “The Birth of a New Age,” on August 11, 1956, in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott, a campaign against segregation that King led, which ended in success four months later, and sparked the modern civil rights movement. He had traveled to Buffalo, New York for the 50th Anniversary celebration of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity. King was a member of Alpha, and was accepting an award from them. He was 27 years old, and would live 12 more years.
“…we have got to have more dedicated, consecrated, intelligent and sincere leadership. This is a tense period through which we are passing, this period of transition and there is a need all over the nation for leaders to carry on. Leaders who can somehow sympathize with and calm us and at the same time have a positive quality. We have got to have leaders of this sort who will stand by courageously and yet not run off with emotion. We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the pressing urgencies of the great cause of freedom. God give us leaders. A time like this demands great leaders. Leaders whom the fog of life cannot chill, men whom the lust of office cannot buy. Leaders who have honor, leaders who will not lie. Leaders who will stand before a pagan god and damn his treacherous flattery….”
Other relevant King oratory:
“I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism…..We must devote at least as much to our children’s education and the health of the poor as we do to the care of our automobiles and the building of beautiful, impressive hotels.”
from a speech delivered on August 31, 1967
“There is deep down within all of us an instinct. It’s a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first…There comes a time that the drum major instinct can become destructive…If it isn’t harnessed, you will end up day in and day out trying to deal with your ego problem by boasting….[Such people] just boast and boast and boast, and that’s the person who has not harnessed the drum major instinct…And then the final great tragedy of the distorted personality is the fact that when one fails to harness this instinct, he ends up trying to push others down in order to push himself up.”
from the Drum Major instinct speech, delivered on February 4 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”
from a speech delivered at Purdue University, 1958
