And other people started building thirty-five-thousand-dollar houses, so he built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house. And then somebody else built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house, and he built a hundred-thousand-dollar house. There comes a time that the drum major instinct can become destructive. I want to move to the point of saying that if this instinct is not harnessed, it becomes a very dangerous, pernicious instinct. And then it does other things to the personality. It causes you to lie about who you know sometimes.
Amen, Make it plain There are some people who are influence peddlers. And in their attempt to deal with the drum major instinct, they have to try to identify with the so-called big-name people. Amen They know them well, they sip tea with them, and they 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. Yeah And so they get that gun, and before they know it they robbed a 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, Glory to God he ends up trying to push others down in order to push himself up. Amen 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. Make it plain And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct. It leads to snobbish exclusivism. 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. 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. The church is the one place where a Ph. Yes The church is the one place that the school teacher ought to forget the degree she has behind her name.
Yes, sir And a recognition grows out of this—that all men are brothers because they are children Yes of a common father. Many who have written about this problem—Lillian Smith used to say it beautifully in some of her books. And she would say it to the point of getting men and women to see the source of the problem. Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior. A need that some people have to feel that they are first, and to feel that their white skin ordained them to be first.
In fact, not too long ago, a man down in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens Council. And think of what has happened in history as a result of this perverted use of the drum major instinct. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, 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.
You ought to be marching with us. Yes 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 are white. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march. That the poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, Make it plain he is forced to support his oppressors.
And 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 then another one is going to drop. Amen 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 why we are drifting.
And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. And we are criminals in that war. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. 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? One would have thought that Jesus would have condemned them. You are selfish. Why would you raise such a question? You want to be great.
You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first.
But I want you to be first in love. Amen I want you to be first in moral excellence. Yes And you know what else it causes to happen? It often causes us to live above our means. Make it plain But it feeds a repressed ego. You know, economists tell us that your automobile should not cost more than half of your annual income.
And they wonder why their ends never meet. 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 Joneses. Amen I know a man who used to live in a thirty-five-thousand-dollar house.
And other people started building thirty-five-thousand-dollar houses, so he built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house. And then somebody else built a seventy-five-thousand-dollar house, and he built a hundred-thousand-dollar house. There comes a time that the drum major instinct can become destructive. I want to move to the point of saying that if this instinct is not harnessed, it becomes a very dangerous, pernicious instinct. And then it does other things to the personality.
It causes you to lie about who you know sometimes. Amen, Make it plain There are some people who are influence peddlers. And in their attempt to deal with the drum major instinct, they have to try to identify with the so-called big-name people. Amen They know them well, they sip tea with them, and they 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. Yeah And so they get that gun, and before they know it they robbed a 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, Glory to God he ends up trying to push others down in order to push himself up.
Amen 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. Make it plain And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct. It leads to snobbish exclusivism. 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.
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. The church is the one place where a Ph. Yes The church is the one place that the school teacher ought to forget the degree she has behind her name.
Yes, sir And a recognition grows out of this—that all men are brothers because they are children Yes of a common father. Many who have written about this problem—Lillian Smith used to say it beautifully in some of her books.
And she would say it to the point of getting men and women to see the source of the problem. Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior. A need that some people have to feel that they are first, and to feel that their white skin ordained them to be first. In fact, not too long ago, a man down in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens Council.
And think of what has happened in history as a result of this perverted use of the drum major instinct. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, 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.
You ought to be marching with us. Yes 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 are white. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march. That the poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, Make it plain he is forced to support his oppressors. And 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 then another one is going to drop. Amen 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 why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. And we are criminals in that war. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. 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? One would have thought that Jesus would have condemned them.
You are selfish. Why would you raise such a question? You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. Amen 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? 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.
And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, Everybody because everybody can serve. Yet he is also very clear that the oppressors will never willingly give up their power and privilege without the oppressed collectively challenging their power. Where King largely differs from proponents of Black Power is in his emphasis on transforming others. While he believes that whites will not willingly give up power, he also firmly believes that blacks cannot fundamentally change American society without white allies.
Therefore, King demands that black Americans work to transform their white counterparts along the way. According to King, as whites are forced to grapple with the ways they are implicated in structures of injustice, they will take the steps to transform themselves and join collectively with blacks in the struggle for a more just society. One of the biggest shifts was that King increasingly emphasized the need for black Americans to engage in political organizing as a means of collective action.
In the early s, King called on black Americans to engage in creative protests. What King had in mind was mobilizing the masses in the form of a nonviolent protest to draw attention to the plight of the least well-off.
However, by the mids, King began calling on black Americans to develop action programs. Whereas protests focused on mobilization, action programs centered on organizing black Americans in an effort to accumulate and deploy their political and economic power. Even as King began to place a greater emphasis on organization as a form of political service, he never jettisoned political mobilization. King firmly believed that those who are committed to justice need both weapons at their disposal.
In other words, his shift in language signaled not a dichotomy but the continuum between the points of mobilization and organization. In this parable, Jesus tells of a man who is left for dead by a gang of robbers on the side of the very dangerous Jericho road.
Despite the man being on the precipice of death, a priest and a Levite pass him by, pretending not to notice his grave condition. This was, and remains, an important lesson for black and white Americans alike, especially as it challenges us to set aside our fears and our racist beliefs to work to improve the conditions of others. But it must be acknowledged that the goal is to aid someone within a structurally unjust system.
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