The Drum Major Foundation was founded in 1961 by Harry Wachtel, lawyer and advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement. Its name comes from a recurring theme of Dr. King's, best illustrated in a speech delivered by King at the Ebenezer Baptist Church shortly before his death:

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; say that I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter…

I just want to leave a committed life behind.

Like Dr. King himself, the Drum Major Foundation sought to set the beat for the movement for civil rights. The goal of the foundation was to promote our nation's democratic values by eliminating the injustices rooted in ignorance or repression of those values. It provided vital assistance to the movement through fundraising, strategy development, and legal support. The Foundation played a role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Sensing that the silence of good people was again becoming deafening, Harry's son Bill Wachtel and Martin Luther King III came together to launch the Drum Major Institute in 1999. The Institute organized several highly successful forums with prominent Americans on the most important issues facing us today: poverty, educational equity, and the digital divide. DMI produced a series of print advertisements designed to stimulate public discourse around issues of national importance and urgency. In April 2000, to mark the first anniversary of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, the series opened with a provocative ad in USA Today, which asked our nation's leaders and the general public to give us their views on gun buyback programs. The responses received, from the President and the Speaker of the House, to local officials and everyday citizens, necessitated follow-up ads, which ran in subsequent months in USA Today and the New York Times.

Today, the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI) unites its rich legacy with a modern-day approach to impacting public policy: we are taking the movement for social and economic justice into the battle of ideas.