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Clarence B. Jones | |
|---|---|
 Jones at SFFILM in 2026 | |
| Born | Clarence Benjamin Jones January 8, 1931 |
| Died | May 22, 2026 (aged 95) Cupertino, California, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Movement | Civil Rights Movement |
| Relatives | Richard Schiff (stepson) |
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Clarence Benjamin Jones (January 8, 1931 – May 22, 2026) was an American lawyer and the personal counsel, advisor, draft speech writer and close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. He was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.[1][2] Jones was a scholar in residence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Institute at Stanford University. He was the author of What Would Martin Say? (HarperCollins, 2008) and Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011).[3] His book Last of the Lions was released on August 1, 2023 (Redhawk Publications). Jones served as chairman of the non-profit Spill the Honey Foundation.
In 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter recommending his lawyer and advisor, Clarence B. Jones, to the New York State Bar, stating: "Ever since I have known Mr. Jones, I have always seen him as a man of sound judgment, deep insights, and great dedication. I am also convinced that he is a man of great integrity."[4]
Early life and education
Jones was born January 8, 1931, to parents who were domestic workers in Philadelphia. He was raised in a foster home and brought up in the Catholic religion; he attended a Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament boarding school in New England, as did his mother.[3] Later he and his family moved to Palmyra, New Jersey; he graduated from Palmyra High School.[5][6]
He earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1953.[7] Following his graduation he was drafted into the United States Army in 1953 and spent nearly two years at Fort Dix when he declined to sign a loyalty oath.[5]
Legal and financial career
In 1956, he began attending Boston University School of Law, obtaining his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1959. He and his wife Anne moved to Altadena, California, where Jones established a practice in entertainment law.
In 1967, at age 36, Jones joined the investment banking and brokerage firm of Carter, Berlind & Weill where he worked alongside future Citigroup Chairman and CEO, Sanford I. Weill and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman, Arthur Levitt. Jones was the first African-American to be named an allied member of the New York Stock Exchange.[8]
Martin Luther King Jr.
Jones joined the team of lawyers defending King in the midst of King's 1960 tax fraud trial; the case was resolved in King's favor in May 1960. Jones and his family relocated to New York to be close to the Harlem office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he joined the firm of Lubell, Lubell, and Jones as a partner. In 1962, Jones became general counsel for the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, SCLC's fundraising arm.
Later 1962, Jones advised King to write President John F. Kennedy on the Cuban Missile Crisis. He urged King to make a statement because "your status as a leader requires that you not be silent about an event and issues so decisive to the world" (Jones, 1 November 1962).[full citation needed]
He accompanied King, Wyatt Tee Walker, Stanley Levison, Jack O'Dell, and others to the SCLC training facility in Dorchester, Georgia, for an early January 1963 strategy meeting to plan the Birmingham Campaign. Following King's 12 April arrest in Birmingham for violating a related injunction against demonstrations, Jones secretly took from jail King's hand-written response to eight Birmingham clergymen who had denounced the protests in the newspaper. It was typed and circulated among the Birmingham clergy and later printed and distributed nationally as "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Jones helped secure bail money for King and the other jailed protesters by flying to New York to meet with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who gave Jones the bail funds directly from his family's vault at Chase Manhattan Bank.[9]
Jones continued to function as King's lawyer and advisor through the remainder of his life, assisting him in drafting the first portion of the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech[4] at Jones's house in Riverdale, Bronx,[10] and preserving King's copyright of the momentous address; acting as part of the successful defense team for the SCLC in New York Times v. Sullivan; serving as part of King's inner circle of advisers, called the "research committee"; representing King at meetings (for example the Baldwin-Kennedy meeting); and contributing with Vincent Harding and Andrew Young to King's "Beyond Vietnam" address at New York's Riverside Church on 4 April 1967.
After King
After King's death, Jones served as one of the negotiators during the 1971 prison riot at Attica, and was editor and part owner of the New York Amsterdam News from 1971 to 1974. In 1982, Jones was convicted of defrauding financial clients and shifted to a full-time business career.[11][12]
In summing up his sentiments on King's life, Jones remarked in a 2007 interview:
In 2018 Jones and Jonathan D. Greenberg co-founded the University of San Francisco (USF) Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice to disseminate the teachings of King and Mahatma Gandhi.[14]
After Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law (in the fall of 2016) a mandate to develop an ethnic studies program for high schools in California, within a few years some experts were upset about the ESMC ("Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum") that had been proposed. Among those experts was Clarence Jones.[15] Jones (in a letter he wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state's Instructional Quality Commission) called the ESMC a "perversion of history" for providing material referring to non-violent Black leaders as "passive" and "docile". Jones decried the "glorification" of violence and Black nationalism as "role models for the students", and rejected the proposed model curriculum as "morally indecent and deeply offensive".[15]
Personal life and death
Jones was married to his first wife Ann, the daughter of William Warder Norton, and they had two sons, Clarence Jr. and Dana, and two daughters, Christine and Alexia.[16] They divorced in 1970.[17] Jones later married Charlotte Schiff, and became the stepfather to actor and director Richard Schiff and producer Paul Schiff.[18][19]
Jones died in Cupertino, California on May 22, 2026, at the age of 95.[20]
Legacy
The Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy was dedicated in his honor in June 2017 at Palmyra High School in New Jersey.[21] In 2024, President Joe Biden awarded Jones the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S.[2][1] In 2026, a playground on the Kidango East Palo Alto child care center was dedicated in Jones's name.[22]
References
- "President Biden Announces Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom". The White House. May 3, 2024. Retrieved May 3, 2024.
- Baker, Peter (May 3, 2024). "Biden to Honor Prominent Democrats With Presidential Medal of Freedom". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 3, 2024.
- "Behind the Dream". Archived from the original on December 21, 2010. Retrieved February 28, 2011.
- "Jones, Clarence Benjamin". Martin Luther King Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle (Stanford University). May 19, 2017. Retrieved December 4, 2019.
- Johnson, Thomas. A. "Man in the News", The New York Times, April 29, 1971. Accessed December 9, 2017. "When Mr. Jones was a boy the family moved to Palmyra, N. J., and he went to Palmyra High School."
- "Clarence B. Jones born". African American Registry. Retrieved November 4, 2015.
- Charkes, Evan (January 2008). "A Wintertime Soldier". Columbia College Today. Retrieved October 7, 2020.
- "Negro Named to High Position in Financial Firm. Jet Magazine, Jul 13, 1967
- Brinkley, Douglas. "The Man Who Kept King's Secrets | Vanity Fair". Vanity Fair | The Complete Archive. Retrieved March 28, 2025.
- "On Martin Luther King Day, remembering the first draft of 'I Have a Dream'". The Washington Post. January 16, 2011. Retrieved February 28, 2011.
- Bell, Gregory S. (2002). In the Black: a history of African Americans on Wall Street. Black enterprise books. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-40392-0.
- "Martin Luther King Jr.'s Confidant Shares His Untold Tale". Vanity Fair. January 19, 2014. Retrieved May 7, 2024.
- "Clinton vs. Obama: Lest We Forget". HuffPost. January 15, 2008.
- "History - Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice". USF. Retrieved March 26, 2022.
- Benedek, Emily (January 28, 2021). "California Is Cleansing Jews From History". Tablet. Archived from the original on January 30, 2022.
QUOTE: Clarence Jones, former legal counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., in a letter he wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state's Instructional Quality Commission, called the ESMC a "perversion of history" for providing material that refers to non-violent Black leaders as "passive" and "docile". Jones, who is co-founder of the University of San Francisco Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, decried the "glorification" of violence and Black nationalism as "role models for the students", and rejected the curriculum as "morally indecent and deeply offensive". [...]
[and, from an Author's note dated 4 days later ("Feb. 1, 2021") this:]
Don't take my word for it. Listen instead to Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King Jr.'s speechwriter, who beseeched Gov. Newsom: "It is morally indecent and deeply offensive to learn that this distorted narrative is being held up by the State of California as a model.... [I]t will inflict great harm on millions of students in our state." - "Ann Norton Jones Dead at 48; Was a Volunteer in Social Work". The New York Times. March 9, 1977. Retrieved May 7, 2024.
- Johnson, Thomas A. (April 9, 1971). "Man in the News". The New York Times. Retrieved June 27, 2024.
- Pressley, Nelson (February 1, 2013). "Richard Schiff returns to Washington to star in the Shakespeare's 'Hughie'". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 6, 2013. Retrieved July 27, 2024.
He was steeped in the street politics of the 1960s; one of the first things he says about himself is that after his parents' divorce, his mother married lawyer Clarence B. Jones, whose bio includes working with Martin Luther King and trying to resolve the 1971 riot at Attica.
- Caesar, Ed (February 8, 2007). "Richard Schiff: Life after 'The West Wing'". The Independent. Retrieved June 16, 2022.
His family were highly politicised - his mother was a leader of the Women's Liberation movement, and his stepfather, Clarence Jones, was Martin Luther King's lawyer.
- McFadden, Robert D. (May 25, 2026). "Clarence B. Jones, Who Helped Shape 'I Have a Dream' Speech, Dies at 95". The New York Times. Retrieved May 25, 2026.
- Invitation to Dedication of the Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy Archived 2017-12-10 at the Wayback Machine, Palmyra High School. Accessed December 9, 2017. "Clarence Benjamin Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 8, 1931 and attended Palmyra High School in New Jersey from 1945 to 1949."
- Smith, Hillary (January 12, 2026). "MLK Press Release 2.12.26" (PDF). Retrieved January 19, 2026.
Organizers will honor Dr.Jones by dedicating an outdoor play area to the renowned strategist and legal advisor, who also served as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speechwriter
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Clarence B. Jones, Who Helped Shape ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech, Dies at 95
A confidant and lawyer for Martin Luther King, he was an unseen hand behind major civil rights events, including the 1963 March on Washington.
Clarence B. Jones, a confidant, lawyer and speechwriter for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, who helped plan the March on Washington and drafted part of Dr. King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, died on Friday in Cupertino, Calif. He was 95.
His death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his son, Clarence Jr.
A brilliant organizer and a member of Dr. King’s inner circle, Mr. Jones planned protest campaigns; raised funds for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and coordinated legal strategies to challenge discriminatory laws, defend arrested demonstrators and fight lawsuits against their leaders.
He was one of the lawyers who represented four Black ministers in a seminal case of libel law, New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the United States Supreme Court held that a public official could not win damages for criticism of his official performance without proving that published statements were made with deliberate malice. It was a landmark victory for the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press, and cleared the way for reporting on widespread disorder and civil rights infringements in the South without fear of libel actions.
It was also a clarifying victory for civil rights leaders. “We regarded the suit as an effort to politically discredit the leadership of the direct action civil rights movement of Dr. King,” Mr. Jones told law students at the University of San Francisco in 2012. “The political objective of the lawsuit was to bankrupt and decapitate the civil rights leadership.”
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The many-sided Mr. Jones was at various times a California entertainment lawyer, the first Black partner in a Wall Street brokerage on the New York Stock Exchange, the principal owner and publisher of The New York Amsterdam News, a co-owner of the radio station WLIB-AM in Harlem, a university professor and the author of books on civil rights.
He also investigated the bloodiest prison uprising in the nation’s history — the 1971 inmate revolt at Attica, N.Y., which was crushed by National Guard troops and state police officers on Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s orders. As Mr. Jones and Representative Herman Badillo later said in sworn statements, they were unable to persuade the governor of alternatives to retaking the prison, in an assault that led to the deaths of 29 prisoners and 10 hostages and years of lawsuits and recriminations over responsibility for what a court called an “orgy of violence.”
Mr. Jones was often an unseen hand behind historic events. In 1963, he helped plan demonstrations in racially segregated Birmingham, Ala., that exposed to a shocked nation the brutality of authorities who turned high-pressure fire hoses and snarling dogs on hundreds of children and adult protesters, many of whom, including Dr. King, were hauled off to overflowing city jails.
Later, when Dr. King wrote his classic statement on racism, the “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” it was Mr. Jones who smuggled it out — a “manuscript” scribbled first on scraps of paper and in the margins of newspapers, and later on Mr. Jones’s notepads. The bits and pieces were assembled and edited for publication by the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker.
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That summer, Dr. King, Mr. Jones and others — including Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, John Lewis and the political strategist Stanley Levison — met often at Mr. Jones’s apartment in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx to plan the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and discuss ideas for the speech Dr. King would deliver at the Lincoln Memorial.
There were several versions, written at different times, of what became the “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. King wrote a final draft with Mr. Jones and Mr. Levison. They called it “Normalcy — Never Again.” There was no reference to a dream and little of the stirring rhetoric for which Dr. King is remembered.
“The logistical preparations for the march were so burdensome that the speech was not a priority for us,” Mr. Jones recalled in a memoir, “Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation” (2011, with Stuart Connelly).
On Aug. 28, 1963, 250,000 people crowded onto the National Mall. The day was a show of support for civil rights legislation proposed by President John F. Kennedy, and the speakers had agreed to avoid incendiary remarks that might derail it.
Dr. King’s speech began quietly, with an analogy about America defaulting on a promissory note to its minority citizens, and Mr. Jones, standing nearby, recognized it as one of his contributions. Then, partway into the speech, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.”
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Dr. King paused. “Martin clutched the speaker’s lectern and seemed to reset,” Mr. Jones recalled. Then Dr. King put his text aside, dropped his assessment of current injustices and launched into a soaring, improvised peroration on his vision of America as a land of freedom and equality rising from slavery and hatreds.
“I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
“I have a dream,” he continued, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”
Mr. Jones later obtained, and signed over to Dr. King, the registered copyright for one of the most heralded speeches of the century.
Clarence Benjamin Jones was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 8, 1931, to Goldsborough and Mary (Toliver) Jones. His father was a gardener and chauffeur, and his mother was a maid.
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To give him a better life, his parents placed him in a foster home in Palmyra, N.J., when he was 6. He attended a boarding school in Cornwells Heights, Pa., and graduated from Palmyra High School in 1949, and from Columbia University in 1953. The Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy was dedicated in his honor in 2017 at Palmyra High School.
Drafted by the Army, he refused to sign a loyalty oath, spent 21 months at Fort Dix, N.J., and received an “undesirable” discharge in 1955. But he sued and won an honorable discharge.
In 1956, he married Anne Norton, whose parents had founded the book publisher W.W. Norton & Company. They had four children, Christine, Alexia, Clarence Jr. (known as Ben) and Dana, and divorced in 1970. Anne Jones died in 1977.
A 1976 marriage to Charlotte Schiff ended in divorce in 1984. In 1990, he married Jennifer Poznanski; they had one daughter, Felicia, and were divorced in 2000. He is survived by his five children and his longtime partner, Lin Walters.
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He received a law degree from Boston University in 1959, moved to Altadena, Calif., and practiced entertainment law. In 1960 he helped defend Dr. King in an Alabama tax perjury case, returned to New York and became a fund-raiser and lawyer for Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
His most notable case was the libel suit that arose after The Times published an advertisement in 1960 soliciting funds for Dr. King’s defense in the tax perjury case. Dr. King was cleared, but the suit continued. The ad cited racial conditions in the South. While it named no public officials, L.B. Sullivan, a public safety commissioner in Montgomery, Ala., accused The Times and four Black ministers who had signed the ad of defaming him. Many lawyers worked on the case, and Mr. Jones joined the ministers’ defense team.
After an Alabama jury awarded Mr. Sullivan $500,000, The Times and the ministers — the Revs. Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, S.S. Seay Sr. and Joseph E. Lowery — appealed, and the Supreme Court held in 1964 that public officials must prove “actual malice,” showing that a publisher knew a statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. The ruling undercut some $300 million in libel actions pending in the South against news organizations.
In 1967, Mr. Jones became a vice president of the Carter, Berlind & Weill brokerage and the first Black partner of a stock exchange member. After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, he turned increasingly to business. In 1971, he and Percy E. Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, led Black groups that bought The New York Amsterdam News, the nation’s largest Black community-based newspaper, and WLIB, which served largely Black audiences. Mr. Jones was the newspaper’s publisher for three years.
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When inmates seized hostages and cellblocks in the state prison at Attica in 1971, Governor Rockefeller named Mr. Jones and Mr. Badillo as on-the-scene observers. But both took on larger roles during and after the crisis. They tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Mr. Rockefeller from ordering the assault that retook the prison. Mr. Jones, later appointed chairman of an investigative panel to protect the inmates’ constitutional rights, quoted witnesses as saying that some were beaten and others killed while trying to surrender.
In sworn statements in 1989 in support of an Attica prisoners’ lawsuit, Mr. Jones and Mr. Badillo said that the governor, who spoke to them by phone, had been indifferent to their warnings of likely mass killings if the police moved in, to alternatives they suggested to retaking the prison by force, and even to the fate of the inmates and hostages.
The governor, Mr. Jones said, “clearly accepted the inevitability of a massacre.” A federal appeals court dismissed the prisoners’ suit against the Rockefeller estate, saying the governor’s actions were not unlawful. But the state later paid millions to settle damage claims by inmates and their families.
Mr. Jones wrote “What Would Martin Say?” (2008, with Joel Engel), and “Uprising: Understanding Attica, Revolution and the Incarceration State” (2011, with Stuart Connelly).
In recent years, Mr. Jones had lectured widely, taught at the University of San Francisco and was a resident scholar at Stanford University in Palo Alto. In 2018, Mr. Jones and Jonathan D. Greenberg co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco to foster the teachings of Dr. King and Mohandas K. Gandhi. In 2024, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
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In an interview with The Free Press that year, Mr. Jones recalled telling Dr. King about what made him a talented speechwriter.
“I hear your voice in my head,” Mr. Jones said. “I hear your voice in perfect pitch.”
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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Clarence B. Jones, who helped MLK write ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, dies at 95
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- Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King Jr.’s trusted lawyer, adviser and key “I Have a Dream” speechwriter, has died at 95 in Cupertino, leaving a towering civil rights legacy.
- As King’s personal attorney, Jones smuggled out the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” helped craft the antiwar “Beyond Vietnam” address and worked on the landmark press-freedom case New York Times v. Sullivan.
- After King’s assassination, Jones broke barriers on Wall Street, shaped generations in academia and, decades later, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and became subject of an award-winning documentary.
CUPERTINO, Calif. — Clarence B. Jones, a former speechwriter and confidante of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who helped pen his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, has died. He was 95.
Jones died Friday at a senior living community in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Cupertino, according to a statement released by the family, who was at his side.
“Our father lived a life of conscience,” the Jones family said Tuesday. “He believed, until his final days, that an idea” is “more powerful than the march of any army. We are grateful beyond words for the love, the prayers, and the friendships that sustained him, and us, across this long and remarkable life.”
As King’s personal attorney, Jones was heavily involved in some of the key moments of the Civil Rights Movement. He is credited with smuggling pages of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out of his cell and helping write many of his speeches until the assassination of the civil rights icon in 1968.
Jones helped craft King’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” address given at Riverside Church in New York exactly a year before King’s death. It was considered a hallmark speech for King’s condemnation of the Vietnam War and U.S. militarism in general. He argued that U.S participation in the war exacerbated poverty across the country.
Born on Jan. 8, 1931 in Philadelphia, Jones had parents who were domestic workers for a wealthy Quaker family several miles away in New Jersey, according to the Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy. Jones was class valedictorian of an integrated high school in Palmyra, N.J. His knack for speechwriting became apparent in 1949, when he gave a graduation speech about breaking down racial barriers.
Jones went on to graduate from Columbia University in New York. He then was drafted by the Army but was honorably discharged almost two years later. He went on to earn a law degree from Boston University.
In 1960, in what would be the start of a seminal friendship, Jones was approached by King to be on his legal team in a tax evasion case brought by the state of Alabama. Jones pivoted from a career in entertainment law in California and moved his family to New York City. There he could be closer to King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and serve as a full-time adviser, attorney and speechwriter for him.
He was a member of the legal team on the 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan. The nation’s highest court overturned a libel case against the newspaper, which had run an ad condemning police treatment of civil rights demonstrators in Montgomery, Ala.
After King’s death, Jones went on to work for a Wall Street investment banking firm and became the first Black American with the designation of allied member of the New York Stock Exchange.
He later ventured into academia. In 2012, he joined the faculty at the University of San Francisco, where he taught law students as well as undergraduates in courses such as “From Slavery to Obama.” In 2018, he co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the school. Around the same time, he also became a scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.
Jones published a book about those years with King in 2023 titled “Last of the Lions: An African American Journey in Memoir.”
The following year he received the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Biden. A few weeks later, a tearful Jones appeared at a San Francisco Giants baseball game with Golden State Warriors basketball star Stephen Curry to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Curry produced and co-directed a short documentary on Jones.
“The Baddest Speechwriter of All” won an award at the Sundance Film Festival in January and will stream on Netflix this year.
Jones is survived by five children and longtime partner Lin Walters.
Plans for funeral services and a public celebration of life still are being finalized.
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