Clarence B Jones, who helped MLK write ‘I have a dream’ speech, dies at 95

Clarence B Jones, a former speechwriter and confidante of Martin Luther King who helped pen his famous “I have a dream” speech, has died. He was 95.

Jones died on Friday at a senior living community in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Cupertino, according to a statement released by family members, who were at his side.

“Our father lived a life of conscience,” the Jones family said. “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 writing many up until King’s assassination in 1968.

He 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 US militarism in general. He argued that the US’s participation in the war exacerbated poverty across the country

Born on 8 January 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, New Jersey. 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 US 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. 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, Alabama.

After King’s death, Jones worked 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.