ByBIN
(Source: BIN)
Clarence B. Jones has died.
According to NBC News, Jones — confidant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and one of the architects of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — died on Friday (May 22) at an assisted living facility in Cupertino, California. He was 95.
From 1960 to 1968, Jones served as King’s personal lawyer and strategic adviser, helping draft major speeches — including the opening lines of the “I Have a Dream” address — and guiding key decisions during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
He was also one of the key organizers of the March on Washington, where more than 250,000 people gathered on the National Mall on August 28, 1963.
His fingerprints are on some of the most consequential moments in American history. When King was jailed in Birmingham in April 1963, it was Jones who smuggled notes out of the cell — notes that would become the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King’s landmark declaration that people have a responsibility to follow just laws and a duty to break unjust ones.
Jones was also part of the legal team that won the landmark 1964 press freedom case New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the Supreme Court ruled that public figures must prove “actual malice” to win a defamation case.
In the years after King’s death, Jones became the first Black partner in a Wall Street brokerage on the New York Stock Exchange, later became the principal owner and publisher of the New York Amsterdam News, and went on to teach at both Stanford University and the University of San Francisco, where he co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice.
In 2024, President Joe Biden awarded Jones the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, saying Jones “wielded a pen as a sword and gave words to the movement that generated freedom for millions of people.”
Even at 95, Jones never stopped fighting. Just weeks before his death, he called out President Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps as a direct assault on Black voting power.
“More powerful than the march of mighty armies,” he said, “is an idea whose time has come.”
Rev. Al Sharpton said it plainly: “So many of us owe a great debt to Clarence Jones.
