Here is the full transcript of Dr. Martin Luther King’s sermon titled “The Drum Major Instinct” which was preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968.
The sermon discusses the drum-major instinct, using the biblical story of James and John as a starting point. The speaker explores how the desire for recognition and importance is a basic instinct in all humans and can often lead to destructive behavior. The sermon also highlights how the drum-major instinct can cause people to live above their means and engage in activities solely for the purpose of gaining attention. Ultimately, the speaker emphasizes the importance of harnessing this instinct and avoiding exclusivism and snobbish behavior.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
This morning I would like to use as a subject from which to preach: The Drum-Major Instinct… the drum-major instinct.
And our text for the morning is taken from a very, very familiar passage in the tenth chapter, as recorded by Saint Mark. Beginning with the thirty-fifth verse of that chapter, we read these words, “And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came unto Him, saying, ‘Master, we would that Thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire.” And He said unto them, “What would ye that I should do for you?” They said unto Him, “Grant unto us that we may sit, one on Thy right hand, and the other on Thy left hand, in Thy glory.”
But Jesus said unto them, “Ye know not what ye ask. Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” And they said unto Him, “We can.” And Jesus said unto them, “Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of, and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized. But to sit on My right hand, and on my Left hand, is not Mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared.”
And then Jesus goes on toward the end of that passage to say, “But so shall it not be among you, but whosoever will be great among you shall be your servant, and whosoever of you will be the cheapest shall be servant of all.”
The setting is clear. James and John are making a specific request of the Master. They had dreamed, as most of the Hebrews dreamed, of a coming King of Israel who would set Jerusalem free and establish his kingdom on Mount Zion, and in righteousness rule the world. And they thought of Jesus as this kind of King, and they were thinking of that day when Jesus would reign supreme as this new King of Israel.
And they were saying, “Now, when You establish Your kingdom, let one of us sit on the right hand, and the other on the left hand of Your throne.”
Now, very quickly, we would automatically condemn James and John, and we would say they were selfish. Why would they make such a selfish request? But before we condemn them too quickly, let us look calmly and honestly at ourselves, and we will discover that we too have those same basic desires for recognition, for importance, that same desire for attention, that same desire to be first.
Of course, the other disciples got mad with James and John, and you could understand why, but we must understand that we have some of the same James and John qualities. And that 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. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life.
And so before we condemn them, let us see that we all have the drum-major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade.
Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant impulse. Sigmund Freud used to contend that sex was the dominant impulse, and Adler came with a new argument, saying that this quest for recognition, this desire for attention, this desire for distinction is the basic impulse, the basic drive of human life, this drum-major instinct.
You know, we begin early to ask life to put us first. Our first cry as a baby was a bid for attention. And all through childhood, the drum-major impulse or instinct is a major obsession. Children ask life to grant them first place. They are a little bundle of ego. They have innately the drum-major impulse or the drum-major instinct.
Now, in adult life, we still have it, and we really never get by it. We like to do something good, and you know, we like to be praised for it. Now, if you don’t believe that, you just go on living life, and you will discover very soon that you like to be praised.
Everybody likes it as a matter of fact. And somehow this warm glow we feel when we are praised or when our name is in print is something of the vitamin A to our ego. Nobody is unhappy when they are praised, even if they know they don’t deserve it, and even if they don’t believe it. The only unhappy people about praise is when that praise is going too much towards somebody else. But everybody likes to be praised because of this real drum-major instinct.
Now, the presence of the drum-major instinct is why so many people are joiners. You know, there are some people who just join everything, and it’s really a quest for attention and recognition and importance. And they get names that give them that impression.
So you get your groups, and they become the grand patron. And the little fellow who is hen-pecked at home needs a chance to be the most worthy of the most worthy of something.
It is the drum-major impulse and longing that runs the gamut of human life. And so we see it everywhere, this quest for recognition.
And we join things—overjoin, really—that we think that we will find that recognition in. Now, the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion, and they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you in the bind. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey.
In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. In order to be lovely to love, you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you’re just buying that stuff. That’s the way the advertisers do it.
I got a letter the other day, and it was a magazine coming out, and it opened up, opened up, “Dear Dr. King, as you know, you are on many mailing lists, and you are categorized as highly intelligent, progressive, a lover of the arts and the sciences, and I know you will want to read what I have to say.” Of course I did, after you said all of that and explained me so exactly. Of course I wanted to read it.
But very seriously, it goes through life. The drum major instinct is real. And you know what else that happens or causes happen to happen? It often causes us to live above our means. It’s nothing but the drum major instinct.
You ever see people buy cars that they can’t even begin to buy in terms of their income? You’ve seen people riding around in Cadillacs and Chryslers who aren’t enough to have a good T Model 4. But it feeds a repressed ego.
You know, economists tell us that your automobile should not cost more than half of your annual income. So if you make an income of $5,000, your car shouldn’t cost more than about $2,500. That’s just good economics. And if it’s a family of two and both members of the family make $10,000, they would have to make out with one car.
That would be good economics, although it’s often inconvenient. But so often, haven’t you seen people making $5,000 a year and driving a car that costs $6,000, and they wonder why their ends never meet? That’s a fact.
Now the economists also say that your house shouldn’t cost more than twice your income. That’s based on the economy and how you would make ends meet. So if you have an income of $5,000, it’s kind of difficult in this society. But say it’s a family with an income of $10,000, the house shouldn’t cost much more than $20,000.
Well, I’ve seen folk making $10,000 living in $40,000 and $50,000 house. And you know, they just barely make it. They get a check every month somewhere, and they owe all of that out before it comes in. Never have anything to put away for rainy days.
But now the problem is, it is the drum major instinct. And you know, you see people over and over again with the drum major instinct, taking them over, and they just live their lives trying to outdo the gentleman.
They’ve got to get this coat because this particular coat is a little better and a little better looking than Mary’s coat. And I’ve got to drive this car because it’s something about this car that makes my car a little better than my neighbor’s car.
I know a man who used to live in a $35,000 house and other people started building $35,000 houses, so he built a $75,000 house, and then somebody else built a $75,000 house, and he built a $100,000 house, and I don’t know where he’s going to end up if he’s going to live his life trying to keep up with the Johns.
There comes a time that the drum major instinct can become destructive. And that’s why I want to move now. I want to move to the point of saying that if this instinct is not harnessed, it becomes a very dangerous, pernicious instinct. For instance, if it isn’t harnessed, it causes one’s personality to become distorted. I guess that’s the most damaging aspect of it, what it does to the personality.
If it isn’t harnessed, you will end up, day in and day out, trying to deal with your ego problem by boasting. Have you ever heard people that, you know, and I’m sure you’ve met them, that really become sickening because they just sit up all the time talking about themselves. And they just boast and boast and boast, and that’s a person who has not harnessed the drum major instinct.
And then it does other things to the personality. It causes you to lie about who you know sometimes. There are some people who are influence peddlers, and in that attempt to deal with the drum major instinct, they have to try to identify with the so-called big-name people. And if you’re not careful, they will make you think they know somebody that they don’t really know. They know them well, they sip tea with them, and they are this and that. That happens to people.
And the other thing is that it causes one to engage, ultimately, in activities that are merely used to get attention. Criminologists tell us that some people are driven to crime because of this drum major instinct. They don’t feel that they are getting enough attention through the normal channels of social behavior, and so they turn to antisocial behavior in order to get attention, in order to feel important. And so they get that gun, and before they know it, they rob the bank in a quest for recognition, in a quest for importance.
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. And whenever you do that, you engage in some of the most vicious activities. You will spread evil, vicious, lying gossip on people because you are trying to pull them down in order to push yourself up.
And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct. Now, the other problem is, when you don’t harness the drum major instinct, this uncontrolled aspect of it is that it leads to snobbish exclusivism. It leads to snobbish exclusivism. Now, you know, this is the danger of social clubs and fraternities.
I’m in a fraternity, I’m in two or three. For sororities and all of these, I’m not talking against them, I’m saying it’s the danger. The danger is that they can become forces of classism and exclusivism where somehow you get a degree of satisfaction because you are in something exclusive. And that’s fulfilling something, you know, that I’m in this fraternity, and it’s the best fraternity in the world, and everybody can’t get in this fraternity.
So it ends up, you know, a very exclusive kind of thing. And you know, that can happen with the church. I know churches get in that bind sometimes. I’ve been to churches, you know, and they say, we have so many doctors and so many school teachers and so many lawyers and so many businessmen in our church.
And that’s fine, because doctors need to go to church, and lawyers and businessmen, teachers, they ought to be in church. But they say that, even the preacher sometimes will go all through that, they say that as if the other people don’t count. The church is the one place where the doctor ought to forget that he’s a doctor. The church is the one place where the Ph.D. ought to forget that he’s a Ph.D.
The church is the one place that the school teacher ought to forget the degree she has behind her name. The church is the one place where the lawyer ought to forget that he’s a lawyer. And any church that violates the whosoever-will-let-him-come doctrine is a dead-corner church, and nothing but a little show with a fiending of religiosity.
The church is true to its job. It’s a whosoever-will-let-him-come. It’s a whosoever-will-let-him-come. And it does not suppose to satisfy the perverted uses of the drum-major instinct. It’s the one place where everybody should be the same, standing before a common Master and Savior.
And a recognition grows out of this that all men are brothers because they are children of a common Father. And the instinct leads to exclusivist wanting. And the instinct leads one to feel that because he has some training, he’s a little better than that person who doesn’t have it.
Or because he has some economic security, that he’s a little better than that person who doesn’t have it. And that’s the uncontrolled, perverted use of the drum-major instinct.
Now, the other thing is that it leads to tragic, and we’ve seen it happen so often, tragic race prejudice. [This recording is briefly interrupted at this point.]
We see with our own eyes. In fact, not too long ago, a man down in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens’ Council. And so, God being the charter member means that everybody who’s in that has a kind of divinity, a kind of superiority. And think of what has happened in historism as a result of this perverted use of the drum-major instinct.
It has led to the most tragic prejudice, the most tragic expressions of man’s inhumanity to man. The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I’m in jail. And we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, and the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating, and they were showing us where segregation was so right.
And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong. So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking calmly because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point, that was the second or third day, to talk about where they lived and how much they were earning.
And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, ‘Now you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes.’ And I said, ‘You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white and the drum-major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you’re white.
And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march. Now that’s a fact. The poor white has been put into this position where through blindness and prejudice he is forced to support his oppressors.
And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he is superior because his skin is white and can hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.
Now not only does it stop, I mean, not only does this thing go into the racial struggle, it goes into the struggle between nations. And I would submit to you this morning that what is wrong in the world today is that the nations of the world are engaged in a bitter, colossal contest for supremacy. And if something doesn’t happen to stop this trend, I’m sorely afraid that we won’t be here to talk about Jesus Christ and about God and about brotherhood too many more years.
If somebody doesn’t bring an end to this suicidal thrust that we see in the world today, none of us are going to be around, because somebody is going to make the mistake throughout senseless blundering of dropping a nuclear bomb somewhere, and then another one is going to drop. And don’t let anybody fool you. This can happen within a matter of seconds. They have twenty-megaton bombs in Russia right now that can destroy a city as big as New York in three seconds, with everybody wiped away and every building.
And we can do the same thing to Russia and China. But this is where we are drifting, and we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum-made instinct: I must be first, I must be supreme, our nation must rule the world. And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit.
And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken. God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it.
And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. And the God that I worship has a way of saying, don’t play with Me. He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, ‘Don’t play with Me, don’t play with Me, Babylon. Be still and know that I’m God.’
And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power. And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening.
And we have perverted the drum-major instinct. But let me rush on to my conclusion, because I want you to see what Jesus was really saying.
What was the answer that Jesus gave these men? It’s very interesting. One would have thought that Jesus would have condemned them. One would have thought that Jesus would have said, you are out of your place, you are selfish, why would you raise such a question? But that isn’t what Jesus did. He did something altogether different.
He said in substance, oh, I see. You want to be first? You want to be great? You want to be important? You want to be significant? Well, you ought to be. If you want to be My disciple, you must be. But He reordered priorities, and he said, yes, don’t give up this instinct. It’s a good instinct if you use it right. It’s a good instinct if you don’t distort it and pervert it. Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important.
Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do. And He transformed the situation by giving a new definition of greatness. And you know how He said it?
He said, now, brethren, I can’t give you greatness, and really, I can’t make you first. This is what Jesus said to James and John. You must earn it. True greatness comes not by favoritism, but by fitness. And the right hand and the left are not Mine to give. They belong to those who are prepared.
And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important, wonderful. If you want to be recognized, wonderful. If you want to be great, wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness.
This morning, the thing that I like about it, by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t know—you don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.
You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love, and you can be that servant.
I know a man, and I just want to talk about him a minute, and maybe you will discover who I’m talking about as I go down the way, because he was a great one. He just went about serving. He was born in an obscure village, a child of a poor peasant woman.
Then he grew up in still another obscure village, where he worked as a carpenter until he was thirty years old. Then for three years he just got on his feet, and he was an itinerant preacher. And he went about doing some things. He didn’t have much. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never owned a house. He never went to college.
He never visited a big city. He never went two hundred miles from where he was born. He did none of the usual things that the world would associate with greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only a witness when the eye of the public began to look at him. They turned against him. They called him a rabble-rouser. They called him a troublemaker.
They said he was an agitator. He practiced civil disobedience. He broke injunctions. And so he was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. And the irony of it all is that his friends turned him over to them.
One of his closest friends denied him. Another of his friends turned him over to his enemies. And while he was dying, the people who killed him gambled for his clothing, the only possession that he had in the world. When he was dead, he was buried in a borrowed tomb through the pity of a friend.
Nineteen centuries have come and gone. Today he stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the pirates that ever stood, all the caves that ever ran, could not fit the life of men put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life.
His name may be a familiar one, but today I can hear them talking about him. Every now and then somebody says, he’s king of kings. And again I can hear somebody saying, he’s lord of lords. Somewhere else I can hear somebody saying, in Christ there is no east, no west.
And then they go on and talk about in him there’s no north and south, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide world. He didn’t have anything. He just went around serving and doing good. This morning you can be on his right hand and his left hand if you serve. It’s the only way in.
Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator. And that’s something that we call death. We all think about it, and every now and then I think about my own death. And I think about my own funeral, and I don’t think of it in a morbid sense.
And every now and then I ask myself, what is it that I would want said when I leave the word to you this morning? If any of you are around, when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize, that isn’t important.
Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards, that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.
I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the wall question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.
I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were imprisoned. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind.
I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a war song, if I can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.
If I can do my duty as a Christian, or if I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the Master taught, then my living will not be in vain. Yes, Jesus, I want to be on Your right or Your left side, not for any selfish reason. I want to be on Your right or Your left side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition. But I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others so that we can make of this old world a new world.