Clarence B. Jones, a top civil rights activist and lawyer who helped write part of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, has died. He was 95.
Jones was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered the epic speech and helped push for passage of the Voting Rights Act two years later, which lifted legal barriers preventing African Americans from voting.
Until his death Friday at an assisted living facility in Cupertino, California, Jones remained a keeper of King’s legacy and a vocal critic of attempts to undermine the gains African Americans have made since the civil rights battles in the 1960s.
Just last month, Jones criticized President Donald Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps as an effort to weaken Black voting power.
“The problem is Trump is living in a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” Jones said in an appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
“Sure, you’re going to have some blips,” Jones said. “But more powerful than the march of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come. More powerful than the march of many armies or that d--- head called President Trump.”
Jones was at the festival because he was the subject of a documentary called “The Baddest Speechwriter in the World,” which was directed by Golden State Warriors basketball star Stephen Curry and Oscar-winning filmmaker Ben Proudfoot.
“He was a brilliant strategist, lawyer, author, and philanthropist,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fellow civil rights activist and an MS NOW host, said online. “So many of us owe a great debt to Clarence Jones.”
Born Jan. 8, 1931, in Philadelphia, Jones was the son of a chauffeur and a maid and spent part of his childhood at a Roman Catholic boarding school before he returned to his parents. He was drafted into the Army after he graduated from Columbia College in 1953 and quickly ran into trouble with the military brass after he refused to sign a loyalty oath.
In 1959, Jones earned a law degree from Boston University and headed out west to California, where he set up shop as an entertainment lawyer and rubbed elbows with the likes of Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra.
In 1960, Jones was recruited to be part of the legal team that successfully defended King against tax evasion charges brought by the state of Alabama, which critics said were an attempt to decapitate the Civil Rights Movement by jailing its leader.
From then on, Jones became one of King’s top confidants and a top fundraiser for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
When Alabama authorities arrested King for leading demonstrations in Birmingham, it was Jones who smuggled out the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which King wrote that people had a responsibility to follow just laws and a duty to break unjust ones.
Jones was also on the winning side of the landmark 1964 freedom of the press case New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a public figure must prove a news outlet acted with “actual malice” to win a defamation or libel case.
After King was assassinated in 1968, Jones continued with his legal career, became the first Black partner in a Wall Street brokerage on the New York Stock Exchange and later became the principal owner and publisher of The New York Amsterdam News.
Jones also taught at both Stanford University and the University of San Francisco, where he was a co-founder of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice.
“Through his teaching, he inspired generations of students to engage deeply with Dr. King’s legacy and the enduring power of peaceful protest,” USF President Salvador Aceves said in a statement Monday. “A man who stood at the center of history, Clarence generously shared his wisdom, courage, and moral vision with our university community.”
In 2024, President Joe Biden awarded Jones the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Married and divorced three times, Jones is survived by his five children and his longtime partner, Lin Walters, according to The New York Times.
