Civil rights champion and lawyer Clarence B. Jones died Friday at an assisted living facility in Cupertino, Calif., according to a statement from his son, Clarence Jones Jr. He was 95.
Jones served as publisher for the Amsterdam News from 1971-1974, which he co-owned with Percy Sutton and H. Carl McCall. But it was his counsel to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., that earned him wide recognition, particularly the role he played in King’s famous 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington. His involvement in the speech was publicly disclosed in a C-SPAN interview — a story he later expanded into the book “Behind the Dream,” written with Stuart Connelly.
Few were aware that the speech was largely improvised and delivered first in Detroit, especially after legendary gospel vocalist Mahalia Jackson called out to him to go off script and “tell them about the dream.”
King, Jones recalled in his book, was in the 7th paragraph of his speech that Jones had helped to write, when Jackson motioned for him to talk about the dream. In this split second of silence, Jones said, “something historic and unexpected happened … I had an instant to wonder what was about to take place. Then I watched Martin push the text of his prepared remarks to one side of the lectern … I leaned over and said to the person standing next to me, ‘These people out there today don’t know it yet, but they’re about ready to go to church.’”
But Jones was more than a speechwriter. He was also a strategist who was critical to King’s civil rights campaigns including in Birmingham, Ala., earlier in 1963. While King was jailed there, he took his handwritten response to a number of clergymen who had called protests there “unwise.” The response was turned into a manuscript that later became known as “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a now historic document outlining Black freedom struggles in America. Jones, an astute legal mind who in 1967 was the first African American to be named as an allied member of the New York Stock Exchange. He was also vice president of the Carter, Berlind & Weill brokerage firm.
An extremely talented organizer, he later became a scholar-in-residence and visiting professor at Stanford University. In 2018, Jones co-founded the University of San Francisco Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice with Jonathan D. Greenberg. Much of his work with King was done in collaboration with Stanley Levison, and Jones gives him special praise at the close of his book. In its closing paragraph, Jones wrote, “Change can happen. If you truly take that fact to heart, almost without noticing it, you’ll find you are the one helping make the change.”