MLK Once Said, ‘We Need Leaders Not in Love With Money But in Love With Justice’

For years, internet users have shared a quote about an ideal type of leader, attributing the words to Martin Luther King Jr. The full quote read: “We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice.”

Instances of the quote appeared on social media platforms including X (archived), Instagram (archived), and Reddit (archived).

(Instagram user @drmoniquecouvson)

The quote was genuine and its attribution to the civil rights leader was accurate. King said the phrase verbatim in at least two speeches delivered in 1956 and 1959. King, who was assassinated in 1968, also repeated the sentiment on several other occasions using slightly different wording.

To look for instances of the quote, we consulted The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute (or King Institute for short). Based at Stanford University, the King Institute maintains an online archive of King’s speeches and sermons, as well as other documents, called the King Papers Project. The collection includes the book series “The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.,” an authoritative edition of King’s writings that are physically located in archives and collections across the United States.

According to a search of the King Institute’s online database, the exact phrasing “We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice” first appeared in an Aug. 11, 1956, speech titled “The Birth of a New Age.” King delivered the address in Buffalo, New York, for the 50th anniversary of the historically Black college fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. In context, the quote appeared as follows (emphasis ours):

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.

According to the King Institute’s website and the speech’s entry in Volume 5 of “The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.” book series, the speech “was transcribed for publication in an anniversary booklet published by the fraternity later in 1956.”

King used the same wording in a Sept. 23, 1959, speech titled “Address at Public Meeting of the Southern Christian Ministers Conference of Mississippi.” In that speech, he described the words as a “paraphrase” of American writer Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 1872 poem “Wanted,” which calls for leaders “whom the spoils of office cannot buy.”

A typewritten version of the 1959 speech proves what he said, according  to the King Institute and speech’s entry in Volume 5 of “The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.” We reached out to those sources asking for access to the document ourselves and we’re waiting to hear back. At least one other piece of evidence — a handwritten draft of the speech — exists, too.

King repeated the sentiment in other speeches in the late 1950s, though with slight variations to his wording. One example was a June 1956 speech at a NAACP convention, where he said (emphasis ours):

My friends, if we would put the proper leaders in the backfield to call the signals and run the ball, leaders who love the cause, leaders who are not in love with publicity but in love with humanity, leaders not in love with money but in love with justice, leaders who are willing to subject their personal and particular egos to the greatness of the cause. If we would put the proper leaders in the backfield—and we need them all over the nation—and the proper followers on the line to make the way clear, we will be able to make moves which will both stagger and astound the imagination of the opposition.

And at an April 1957 rally in St. Louis, he said, “Oh, this is a period for leaders; Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with humanity; Leaders not in love with money, but in love with justice.”

Audio recordings of those remarks — his statements at the 1956 NAACP convention and rally the following year — exist according to the King Institute, but they were not publicly available at the time of this writing. If a digitized audio or video recording emerges, we’ll update this story.

Previously, we confirmed another quote by King: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Sources